Before I start, I just want to clarify a few things (in order to avoid a flamewar):
1. I’m not anti-Linux, nor am I anti-Windows. I like Linux a lot but simply believe it’s not for everybody (yet)
2. I don’t believe in the Linux/Windows war. Both have pros and cons. No OS or platform is perfect.
3. I’ve been using Windows a lot more than Linux for various reasons including doing a lot of Windows software development (C# in particular)
4. I want freedom of OS choice just as much as any Linux user out there! 
In fact, I’ve been looking at those Mac Minis a lot lately. I might buy one just to read my e-mails and browse the web!
Perhaps I’ve been talking to too many geeks in the recent weeks… some little voice told me to install Linux on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop! I heard many great things about
Ubuntu, but the “wow factor” wasn’t there… brown UI are not for me, sorry!
A distro that I always found facinating is Suse. Novell recently released OpenSuse 10 which is based on the “real” Suse, but only includes open-source components. In my opinion, Suse has a great GUI and enough community support to make it an obvious choice. Instead of downloading the 5 OpenSuse CDs (yes, 5!), I only downloaded the Internet Install CD which downloads the required package during the installation process.
For the most part, the installation went fine detecting my hardware correctly (which was pretty surprising and impressive!) However, it could only start after complaining about not knowing where to find the installation files. Luckily, I know what a FTP server is so I’ve been able to provide a valid IP and path to the installer. Why doesn’t the installer “know” where to get its files from? My mom doesn’t know anything about FTPs, IPs or paths and would have been unable to install Suse. That’s one strike for Linux right there.
Once installed, I was very pleased with KDE (that’s the GUI). Firefox and OpenOffice were already installed so I’ve been able to play with my new OS a little bit without installing anything else. How nice!
When I decided to unplug the ethernet cable from the notebook to go Wi-Fi, things got a little nastier. Suse didn’t connect to my Wi-Fi network even though my wireless adapter was properly detected during setup. When I tried to edit the Wi-Fi settings, YaST (the Suse control panel) complained about a missing package, which I had to find on the Internet, download and install. Again, my mom cannot do this, nor can yours. Why couldn’t Suse install this package in the first place if it knew it was required?
Once installed, I was able to configure the Wi-Fi adapter to connect to my network. Then again, no connection to the wireless network! kWiFiManager says there’s no wireless signal, but XP connects to it just fine. I’m currently waiting for an answer about this on LinuxQuestions.org. 2nd strike for Linux: People just expect it to work. Nobosy wants to manually edit config files, manually install packages or post questions on online forums!
Suse also ignored my mouse wheel. Windows would have detected it during the installation and it would have worked “out of the box”, but Suse couldn’t. I thought it would be easy enough to get this thing to work, but it wasn’t. I first fired YaST and went under Hardware and Mouse. I turned on the “Enable Mouse Wheel” option and changed the mouse type so something more representative of what I had. The choices were very few and were only things I had never heard of before. My (standard and widely used) Logitech Wheel Mouse wasn’t there, so I chose a generic wheel mouse instead. After answering a couple of odd questions (that only Linux geeks knowing all the acronyms would understand), I restarted X to find out if what it made the trick. It didn’t. In fact, that’s where things got really ugly! Moving my mouse up and down made the pages scroll, and the mouse buttons stopped working! 3rd strike, Penguin. You can’t even get a Logitech mouse to work!
Don’t get me wrong, Linux is a wonderful platform and the fact that it’s free makes it even better. I use Linux servers almost daily for things like Asterisk and web/FTP hosting. However, if a guy like me with almost 20 years of coding experience can’t get tiny little things like a mouse wheel to work under Linux, I don’t expect any mere mortal to be. Moreover, the installer might be good looking and all that, but again, mere mortals will find it too complicated. Having to type a long ftp path is certainly not something that makes our life easier. And having to go through a long list of packages with weird names is just as bad.
I sure hope Linux eventually becomes great on the desktop; it would benefit the consumer a lot. Linux has a lot of potential but it is so complicated that people just don’t bother. Windows and OSX are user friendly and intuitive, Linux is not.
Here are basic recommendations for “the next great distro”:
1. Keep it simple, stupid. People don’t need to know which package are installed, and which build of this or that needs to be installed in order for this other package or device to work. WAY TOO COMPLICATED. Moreover, having to compile some applications or device drivers ourselves is really annoying (and complicated). In Windows, we just run the .exe and it works. Make it this easy.
2. Stop imitating Windows. Linux is just trying to act and look like Windows. Innovation is good, look at what OSX is doing!
3. Use names people can understand. YaST might look and sound elite, but it doesn’t say what its purpose is. Windows’ Control Panel, on the other hand, means something to the end user.
4. Have better support for hardware. From my reading of various Linux forums, it seems that there’s always some hardware left undetected or not working after an install. This is bad, very bad.
5. Have mom and dads work test your Linux distro, shut up and listen. Computer-illiterate people can be more useful that you think! See what they do, what they expect and how they expect certain things to work. From there, make it work for them, based on their assumptions. Windows was successful because it is easy for newbies and my mom. If newbies can “figure it out”, you have a winner.
6. Team up! Why so many distros? Team up and beat Microsoft, it’s not that hard! At most, there should be: 1 server distro, 1 desktop distro and 1 hacker distro. I don’t see where more distros could fit in.
Comments? Complaints? Let me know!
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