Comments about Linux/Ubuntu from a former MS-programmer

[Eric Dunbar]

On 09/04/06, Lee Revell <rlrevell at joe-job.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-04-09 at 20:46 +0200, Magnus Runesson wrote:
> > I found this blogg by a former MS-programmer that had used Ubuntu for a
> > year. He worked for MS in 10 years.
> >
> > http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=24
> >
> > Its a lot of good comments, well worth reading. I includes both praise
> > (most) and criticism.
>
> "Multimedia often skips or doesn't display properly in the browser"
>
> IMHO this is the #1 problem facing the Linux desktop.
>
> The solution should be within reach - a properly tuned Linux system can
> outperform Windows and even OSX for high end multimedia.  Unfortunately
> much of the problem is application design - inability to run browser
> plugins in a separate thread/process being the biggest.

I must beg to differ.

It's nice to have multimedia on the desktop but it's not a make or
break feature since it doesn't stop you from doing _real_ work or
interfere with your ability to do _real_ work (unless you're doing
multimedia development in which case you'd be on Mac OS X or Windows
anyway ;-).

Bugs and flaws are ultimately Linux's achilles heal. They do keep
people from completing their work and enjoying the experience.

What keeps me from using Ubuntu on the desktop (other than a play toy)
is not the lack of Flash, MP3 or WMV playback, but the fact that
OpenOffice.org is as slow as molasses in January (or July if you're at
the bottom of the world ;-), that Nautilus doesn't play nicely with
the network, that there are numerous user interface flaws and that
apps don't play nice with each other.

Though, I disagree with an assertion on that page (don't remember if
he wrote it or one of the respondees did) that Linux is popular as a
server because it provides the tools that the other OSes don't -- it's
popular because it's free ($$$, not source) and the guys (usually)
running the servers are by-and-large the computer geeks who wrote the
damn thing in the first place ;-).

There are obviously people who can argue that Linux is ready for the
prime time and works perfectly for them on all fronts until they're
blue in the face, but, just like in a religious debate, whether or not
you believe isn't going to make something real!

The commentary in the response to this person's blog was largely
meaningless Linux chauvinism -- rather than defending their precious
Linux from blasphemy these individuals would better serve the
community by looking at his criticisms and responding to them
constructively (as opposed to defensively). Windows may be evil, it
may be pervasive, but, damn it's good (and, this coming from a person
who has _never_ owned a Windows running computer in his life and only
runs Windows under emulation to run _one_ program).

Anyway, this is certainly worth a read in terms of making sure Linux
works _before_ worrying about the fluff of multi-media:

"Gnome can detect and mount my NTFS partition and it actually
understands the complicated NTFS format, but a permissions issue
forces me to jump to the command line to view my files. All of these
problems can usually be worked around by a Linux guru but they
shouldn't exist and in many cases are just tiny bugs breaking a
scenario from being easy.

My diagnosis is that the problem with Linux is that it doesn't have
anyone pushing to get the newbie bugs fixed first. At Microsoft, we
had Program Managers and one of their responsibilities was to be
customer advocates to prioritize the bugs for the devs to fix. In many
open source groups,
****
it sometimes appears that bugs get fixed when the dev decides to work
on it, not because an important user scenario is broken. The Wi-Fi
tool was broken in Gnome for many months, but the bugs just sat there
languishing in the database. Microsoft or Apple would not have shipped
a Wi-Fi UI that was completely broken in that way.