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It is with both sadness and relief that I bid farewell to Linux.  No operating system have I used more than this.  My time of use per operating system, barring a very short time with Mac OS, is about seven years for Linux, and six years for Windows (versions 3.1 through 98).  The switch over from Windows to Linux was primarily prompted by the instability of Windows.  The official moment of being over Windows came in 1999 when downloading a video game demo of about 30mb on dial-up to 99%, only to have the OS freeze and lose the entire download (hours of time).  Seven fairly successful and enjoyable years of Linux usage followed, ending in the Fall of 2006.  The reason for the end of my Linux usage is that I’m tired of living as a second class citizen, and the OS is not progressive enough.  For more on my experience and my explanation of why Linux fails, continue reading below the fold.

Now, I’d like to give credit where it is due.  It was very refreshing to have an operating system that actually got better in the areas of speed, optimization, and stability, instead of the next incarnation requiring twice as much RAM, three times as much CPU, etc.  In Linux, the requirement would continuously go down, not up.  So, I really did enjoy the snapiness/speed/optimization of Linux, the usefulness of the shell, how customizable everything was, and the security.  I mean, the OS just felt like a solid rock to use.  When I had everything configured right and running well, I was really loving it.  So what was the problem?

Second Class Citizen

The second class citizen syndrome was always a problem when using Linux, at some times more than others. The majority of companies out there simply do not feel compelled to support Linux. With a 3% desktop market, it is not a high value. Though Apple seems to have about the same amount of market share as Linux, Apple does not suffer from lack of unification, and also has money to throw at people when they want support (more about unification later). So by most companies, the Linux desktop user is either thought of last, or not at all. Personal experience in this was mild for the majority of my usage. Hobbyist programmers to the rescue with drivers for my Diamond Rio MP3 player of 2000, etc. The thing is that when you are shopping for new hardware, you can’t just buy what you want. You have to eye what you want, then go find out if it is supported in Linux or not, very annoying.

Getting stuff configured could be a serious bitch. It’s not the nice official company drivers. It’s open source drivers that work… sort of… most of the time. And in order to get these configured (for example, my HP all-in-one printer/scanner/copier) to work completely, took many hours of messing around. And it still never printed blacks quite black, but more grey, had to manually switch to black and white to get it to look properly black for papers.  If you’re on Linux, your official drivers often have half-assed support, if you’re lucky.  In most cases, if you have a problem, there is NO support, it’s up to you to solve it. It can take many hours to get some hardware to work with software.  No matter, as that is the nature of Linux to start with. The real problems came in early 2006. Up until this point I was able to run whatever I wanted equivalent of Windows, and frequently at better quality software-wise (not counting drivers).

The problem came in two: iPod and Flash. I’m sorry, I just like iPod. I think it’s the sexiest mp3 player and that’s the one I want to use. Support in Linux falls primarily to gtkpod, meaning you (up until just last month I think) were not going to get album art on your iPod from your id3 tags.  If you want album art support, you have to create a folder.jpg for every single folder you have, and/or assign a file to every single mp3 individually in Gtkpod - just totally unacceptable.  Whoever is seriously going to spend hundreds of hours doing that is a moron. The interface is ugly, dragging songs to the iPod requires extreme precision, and of major note also is the lack of access to the iTunes Store. Some people want to buy music from there (my girlfriend, for example), and they just couldn’t do it in Linux. If you want to rip a cd to your music library, in Linux you have to use a different program for that. If you want to burn a cd, you must use a different program still. If you want to enjoy podcats, yet another different program. In order to get just iTunes-similar features (and still without the Music Store ability), you have to run 4 separate programs, and hope that you get them all to work, instead of having it all nice and sleek looking and simple in one program. The choice is obvious.

And then we have that problem of Flash player. Flash player always had fine Linux support… which curiously stopped at Flash 7. Meanwhile, Windows and Apple, essentially the rest of the desktop users of the world, moved up to Flash 8, and then 9, and then suddenly on Linux you could no longer view a lot of web content because the Flash player was out of date. Why did this happen? Much blame was thrown at Adobe, who finally did release a Flash Player 9, but so far only beta, that seems to crash on my system when making a YouTube movie large size. This is what it’s like to live as a second class citizen.

On top of these complaints, it is quite disappointing that emerging (yes Gentoo) the latest stable versions of everything reveals many bugs. These are stupid, obvious bugs that still appear in released non-beta versions of programs. I’m not talking about KOffice from a couple years back in which it was near impossible to insert footnotes, or the KDE cd ripper being extremely confused if you selected a genre consisting of two words. One of the simplest KDE programs, KWrite, has these dots that appear at the end of words for a split second every time you type a character. What an upgrade. Why is my sound when using ALSA so delayed in KDE? A popup window appears and two seconds later the corresponding alert sound plays… on a fairly modern system?? What kind of hoops do I have to jump through to get the extra button on my mouse to cause a “Back” command to be executed not only in Konqueror, but also in Firefox! Cause in windows all I have to do is plug it in. Why does KWeather now think I have selected no weather station when the same one that I’ve used for years is still selected?  Unfortunately, most programs are not up to the beauty that is K3b or The Gimp.  Programs for Linux are frequently buggy.

Anarchy = Bad

Linux has not progressed enough. When I started using it in 1999, the desktop marketshare was something like 3%.  Now, at the end of my usage it is… something like… 3%. It’s funny to go back and read some articles in 2000 predicting 25, 40, even 60% desktop marketshare “within the next five years”. I know the reason why marketshare has not increased. Yes the software is buggy, but software on the whole on Linux has gotten slowly better (quality and quantity). It’s not even that Linux is too difficult to use…

The problem of Linux is it’s lack of unification/control. Even when vendors and companies want to support Linux, they are turned off because they now not only have to decide which distribution to support, but also whether to release their program in GNOME or KDE format, also known as GTK vs. QT programming. The two don’t work together well. They don’t look the same.  It’s just weird. People are turned off by it. Had somebody stepped up or the community decided that it is for the best that they choose one desktop environment, I believe Linux would be far, far ahead of where it is, possibly teetering on domination. Of course, by the nature of Linux there is nobody that has authority to step up and decide one or the other.  It has to be decided together by the entire community, and this just won’t happen. People are far too committed and defensive about their choice of desktop, GNOME vs KDE, and often times extremely angry at the other side. A choice of one will be the equivalent of saying to programmers of the other that they’ve wasted years of their lives. Something as basic as what a desktop looks like, or which programming toolkit to use should be solidified if you want your OS to really be successful. It’s just ridiculous the way it is right now. An operating system that fights with itself and can’t even unify, can never seriously fight with another and win.

This is the nature of Linux. It was created as an alternative to Microsoft for those who are technically inclined - computer geeks. It is very successful in this area, though many of them are upset about things like Flash. Flash and iTunes are just the problems right now. They, at least Flash, will be solved. Something new, however, will come along and replace these problems, always treating the Linux user as a second class citizen.

I whole heartedly applaud the Linux programmers, because it is really amazing that all that software is completely free and written out of love and hobby. It’s just really too bad that despite all this great work, Linux can’t unify under GNOME or KDE. As long as these two are competing, Linux as a whole will not be competing. It doesn’t feel good anymore to use an operating system in which I feel more and more like a second class citizen instead of cutting-edge, dealing with bugs that shouldn’t be there, spending hours configuring stuff, and not feeling like the OS is really progressing anywhere. I haven’t had a blue screen or freeze in Windows XP yet (been a few weeks now). Microsoft has solved their notorious problems, can Linux?