This is why people don't use Linux

[Freddie]

I thought I would share some of my thoughts and experiences I had with Ubuntu which I tried out as I was keen to see what Linux was like for myself and how easy it was to live with.

After downloading and burning the .iso to a disc I turned of my PC and installed an older hard drive, once this had been done I turned the PC back on changed the hard drive priority so the blank one would boot first and inserted the disc and proceeded to install Ubuntu. The installation isn't all that different from Windows - it allowed me to choose which drive I wanted to install to and it's a very clever little installer as well as it scanned my other hard drive and detected Windows and asked if I wanted to copy all my documents (music, words docs, videos etc) so they were ready to play on Ubuntu from the outset. So far so good, I was very impressed with it so far and I hadn't even finished installing it but if this was a pre courser for things to come then all would be good.

Every thing looked to be working well when Ubuntu loaded for the first time as just with Vista and 7 there's a good chunk of drivers to get you started. The Ethernet port was working and the screen resolution was set my screen native resolution of 1920x1200 however not surprisingly there was no audio so it was of to Creative Labs to download the latest drives for my X-Fi GamerXstream but this is were the Linux experience starts to go down hill rapidly. On this occasion it wasn't anything Creative had done they have in fact by a miracle of feat have proper Linux drivers on there site along with instruction on how to install them and I thought 'Great just what I need since I have never installed drivers on a Linux platform before.' The instructions read as follows (and still do) -

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

1) Go to Source directory
2) Execute make command as root
make
make install

As this stage of the proceedings I have to say the infamous web acronym 'WTF?' ceases to be adequate for this situation. What in Gods name was I meant to do that? Why can't I just have a .exe saved to the desktop that I can click on and it does everything for me - Windows felt like a long time ago and one I wanted to return to fast however for those who know me know I wouldn't let myself get defeated by this so after some extensive web browsing and forum stalking I found that in order to 'Goto source directory' I had to open up something called the 'Terminal' which is like Windows command prompt, type in 'sudo -s -H' and hit enter.

Core blimey governor how stupid am I? That's so intuitive how the hell didn't I think to do all that first time around? Next job was to open the directory which was done by typing 'cd', followed by the name of the folder. Once there, the term 'make' will compile the code for the driver and the command 'make install' will finish the job. Piece of cake.

Although my first experience with the Terminal of death was frustrating as I had to figure all this junk out for myself it did feel satisfy and wasn't dissimilar to Dosbox in as much as learning what all the different functions and commands do. Next job was to install the latest CCC drivers for my video card.

Now I've read comments by some people saying that ATI's Linux driver support is bad but to give them dues that had an updated version of the latest CCC on their website for me to download but then I read a message on ATI's very own page -

ideally, you should use a distro-specific process for a less painful experience

Given that comes from Daamit themselves that hardly filled me with confidence and to make matters worse the driver came in the form of a .Run file which again was alien to me but thankfully the Ubuntu community is very helpful and I was soon on my way but did require me to use the Terminal again.

Next I wanted to see if I could play some games on Linux, now I'm aware from reading Sim's posts that in order to play many Windows games you need to uses Wine as many game are now tied to DirectX. I won't go into much detail here but in order to play game on Linux you need to learn how to compile drivers and applications and learn how Wine works but this is something I didn't do first time around and dived straight in and installed Counter Strike: Source which low and behold didn't work properly but thank god for Google and I found this guide which shows how to installed CSS from scratch. To be frank the list of steps you have to take is ridiculous with extensive use of program intuition forgot - Terminal. It took me over an hour to work my way through the guide but everything did work smoothly and the game run just fine.

Ono the face of it it Linux can do everything Windows can do for free, many distro's come pre loaded with lots of useful software for organising your photos, burning discs, web browsing, open office however I can't see at any point in the future Linux ever taking of into the mainstream until it fixes some fundamental issues with user interface and accessibility. Now I'm 29 so the days of Ms-Dos type OS's aren't unknown to me so working with apps like Terminal isn't overwhelming for someone like me however I'm looking at some of the other Basement regulars here who a teenagers and to them MS-Dos and Terminal looks like someone had just turned off lights. Whilst you can learn to work with Terminal in this day and age you shouldn't have to learn it, people want convenience and speed and don't want to spend an hours installing drivers and compiling games using massive guides. For the gamer Wine is compatiable with some 4000 games (I've played Mass Effect, Half Life and The Witcher all on it) however just like with everything else with Linux, getting things up and running is a pain in the kernel.

[Top-Tier-Tech]

I couldn't get drivers for my 8600GTS to work with Ubuntu no matter what a did. I've considered building a Ubuntu PC for the experience with the cheapest parts I can find, but it would a waste of money if I couldn't get video drivers to work again.

[erasmus777]

I couldn't get drivers for my 8600GTS to work with Ubuntu no matter what a did. I've considered building a Ubuntu PC for the experience with the cheapest parts I can find, but it would a waste of money if I couldn't get video drivers to work again.

For what you want, you'd probably better better of downloading VirtualBox and running Ubuntu as a virtual pc.

[Simetrical]

My sound card is a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer.

What version of Ubuntu did you use? This post suggests it should work out of the box on 9.10 or later. This and this suggest that it might not work perfectly yet, though. Maybe in 10.04 this particular card will work more reliably. If you boot to this (without necessarily installing anything), does sound work?

So does it search online as well or just the libraries on the hard drive? If its just the drivers that are included on the installation then that's ok for getting you started but like any good enthusiast installing the latest stable driver is a must to maintain the best compatibility and stability. What your describing sounds almost like a carbon copy of the way Windows installs software for new components.

It searches online, in Ubuntu's repositories. So it doesn't get the bleeding-edge version, no. The version Ubuntu offers will typically be several months out of date. Usually there's no real need to have a bleeding-edge driver, though, even if you're a gamer (which is inadvisable on Linux anyway).

But in any event, as I said: if the ATI driver is harder to install on Ubuntu than on Windows, that's because ATI decided to make it harder to install. They could have made it just as easy to install as on Windows, or easier. Since the driver is closed-source, it's not something Ubuntu can do much about. Most people don't have to worry about this problem, because most people don't need a bleeding-edge video driver (or a non-default one at all).

Also having to add extra lines to some text file to get all the mouse buttons to work wasnt the most convenient of experiences.

..also fullscreen flash on firefox, kind of missed that.

I think both of these have been fixed in the last year or two. Scrolling, forward, and back all seem to work fine out of the box on my mice. ("Back" broke on my old mouse, but I think that was the mouse's fault; it works on my current one.) Fullscreen Flash has definitely worked for a year or two. As I said, the improvement in the last couple of years is perceptible.

[Strelok]

Interesting write-up. A few things I may contest to, though:

Why can't I just have a .exe saved to the desktop that I can click on and it does everything for me

This is more Creative's fault. OS's like Ubuntu can fully use package installers to do the same thing like the automated process of an *.exe or an *.msi

Core blimey governor how stupid am I? That's so intuitive how the hell didn't I think to do all that first time around? Next job was to open the directory which was done by typing 'cd', followed by the name of the folder. Once there, the term 'make' will compile the code for the driver and the command 'make install' will finish the job. Piece of cake

Could have been done automatically if Creative included something like, for example, a debian package installer. Ubuntu supports features that are like the automated *.exe install process, though a lot of software developers may not include it.

I won't go into much detail here but in order to play game on Linux you need to learn how to compile drivers and applications and learn how Wine work

You download the repositories from the server but you have to know to place them in specific directories, since Ubuntu doesn't have a registry. You don't compile anything yourself manually. The most you may do is make a few simple edits, for example that CS:S guide are just a few basic edits to improve FPS.

until it fixes some fundamental issues with user interface and accessibility

They do support automated features and other user-friendly features like the ones you noted weren't available for specific software, though. The creators of the Linux distributions don't actually have to do much to adapt to user-friendlyness, as distributions of Ubuntu already have such available. Using Bash (err, called Terminal in OS's like Ubuntu) to manually place files is one way to do things, sure, but it's not like these OS's are devoid of support for automated install processes.

I couldn't get drivers for my 8600GTS to work with Ubuntu no matter what a did.

The Synaptic Package Manager (in user-friendly OS's like Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS) or even the basic Updater Manager can install the display drivers for you. Not the latest ones, though.

Though it's interesting that people even find Ubuntu to be annoying to use. I'd like them to use specific distributions something like DSL or Puppy, though those both have fancy GUI's with context menus and sub-automated processes. So maybe I might even just point to Unix pre-A.

[Top-Tier-Tech]

The Synaptic Package Manager (in user-friendly OS's like Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS) or even the basic Updater Manager can install the display drivers for you. Not the latest ones, though.

That's what I tried first, upon rebooting it would give me a generic error message which didn't help me troubleshoot the problem.

[Strelok]

That's what I tried first, upon rebooting it would give me a generic error message which didn't help me troubleshoot the problem.

The most common error should be reporting that x-server failed to start. Actually quite a beneficial report for some people, though. I would usually boot into Linux with no GUI, uninstall the display drivers, restart x-server to initialize the generic drivers and look over the instructions again.

[Top-Tier-Tech]

The most common error should be reporting that x-server failed to start. Actually quite a beneficial report for some people, though.

I mean generic as in "an unknown error occurred" type of generic

Googling the exact error message gave me nothing to work with.

[Simetrical]

The Ethernet port was working and the screen resolution was set my screen native resolution of 1920x1200 however not surprisingly there was no audio so it was of to Creative Labs to download the latest drives for my X-Fi GamerXstream

This was your error. On Windows, you're expected to download drivers for your hardware. On Linux, the general rule is, never download third-party drivers. In virtually all cases, if there are any good drivers at all, they come installed by default. Even if they're closed-source, you can usually get them without touching a third-party website. Third-party Linux drivers are usually poorly written, hard to install, and hard to uninstall.

In all likelihood, the problem wasn't sound drivers. Sound has been a constant problem for Linux for years. I've never been able to get sound recording to work on my desktop. It's not an issue that will likely be solved by installing third-party drivers. You might try a tutorial like this.

(Or did it actually make your sound work in the end? I'd be somewhat surprised if so. It might have been that you were actually just missing drivers, or that the driver installer replaced or reconfigured some subsystem and thereby incidentally made sound work.)

By the way, what version is this? 9.10?

but this is were the Linux experience starts to go down hill rapidly. On this occasion it wasn't anything Creative had done they have in fact by a miracle of feat have proper Linux drivers on there site along with instruction on how to install them and I thought 'Great just what I need since I have never installed drivers on a Linux platform before.' The instructions read as follows (and still do) -



As this stage of the proceedings I have to say the infamous web acronym 'WTF?' ceases to be adequate for this situation. What in Gods name was I meant to do that?

This isn't the fault of Linux, exactly, it's the fault of Creative. They assume that if you're using Linux and installing a driver, you know how to use a command line. They could have packaged it in an easy-to-install format, they just chose not to. This is one reason to use only drivers from your distribution: you can install them without this sort of hassle.

Now I've read comments by some people saying that ATI's Linux driver support is bad but to give them dues that had an updated version of the latest CCC on their website for me to download but then I read a message on ATI's very own page -



Given that comes from Daamit themselves that hardly filled me with confidence and to make matters worse the driver came in the form of a .Run file which again was alien to me but thankfully the Ubuntu community is very helpful and I was soon on my way but did require me to use the Terminal again.

As they said, you shouldn't be getting drivers from them. This page describes how to install closed-source ATI drivers if you don't want to use the open-source ones that are installed by default. You can do it by just going to System → Administration → Hardware Drivers. It will give you a list of proprietary drivers you can install. These are packaged by Ubuntu itself and are likely to be easier to work with.

Overall, if you want to run Windows programs on Linux, then yes, it's going to be a lot harder than running Windows programs on Windows. That's no surprise. It would be more interesting to me to hear what you thought of Linux programs running on Linux out of the box, without trying to do weird things like install third-party drivers.

Using Bash (err, called Terminal in OS's like Ubuntu)

Terminal is a program that gives you a terminal. This terminal might be bash, csh, tcsh, ksh, esh, dash, or whatever other shell you like: they're not all the same. bash is the default shell for users on pretty much all Linux distributions, but there are lots of others to choose from.

[Freddie]

I'll take your word for it that Ubuntu supports .exe type files but this is Creative Labs were talking about and you should count your blessings that they do in fact support Linux even if the driver package extremely un-user friendly.

[Strelok]

I'll take your word for it that Ubuntu supports .exe type files

Well, I meant a process that is similar in terms of the process being automated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deb_%28file_format%29

[C-Rob]

Yeah I downloaded 9.4.0 I think and it's sitting untouched on a partition on my drive. I couldn't even get Java addon to install onto firefox.

Oh and I couldn't get it to connect to the internet at school.

[Freddie]

Your reply Sim is the perfect metaphor for everything that's holding Linux back - 'read this tutorial, click this link, check the guide'. Also I don't see where I'm in error I did in fact get the audio working following replies in the Ubuntu forums but as I said it was an awkward and convoluted method to install drivers and was a world away from simple installation you find in Windows.

The biggest differance between me and you Sim is your a software enthusiast and I'm a hardware enthusiast so when it comes to running Linux someone like me has there work cut out trying to get the most out of their hardware hence why I will most likely be using Windows for the foreseeable future.

At the end of day facts are facts and Linux market share isn't growing quickly and is firmly a minority OS with a market share in single figures. All I wanted to do with this experiment was to see what was holding Linux back and whether or not possible to ditch Windows and use Linux instead if your a gaming and hardware enthusiast.

[Simetrical]

Your reply Sim is the perfect metaphor for everything that's holding Linux back - 'read this tutorial, click this link, check the guide'.

On most systems, sound playback works on Linux out of the box, and no guides are needed. This is not yet true on all systems. It will become more true as Linux gains more funding and popularity. When Linux works well (which it does often, but not always), it works with less setup than Windows. You invariably need to install some drivers on Windows, but usually you don't on Linux.

Running Windows programs is a separate issue. That you can do that at all is a miracle; Windows certainly can't run binaries compiled for Mac or Linux.

None of this is to say that I would say Linux is a better operating system for most people than Windows. I don't, and never have. It's particularly terrible for gaming. It's worth trying from time to time if you're curious. If you don't like it, try it again in a year or two, because it's progressing very rapidly.

Also I don't see where I'm in error I did in fact get the audio working following replies in the Ubuntu forums but as I said it was an awkward and convoluted method to install drivers and was a world away from simple installation you find in Windows.

Because the driver vendor doesn't put as much effort into it, because Linux is smaller. If Linux catches on, this situation will improve. It's not a fundamental problem with Linux, and it's not something the Linux community can really fix without more support from hardware vendors. Drivers are usually easier to install on Linux than Windows, because usually you don't have to install any. (Unless you want high-performance graphics: then you need one, and it's still easier on Ubuntu than on Windows if you install via the System menu instead of trying to download from ATI's website when that website explicitly tells you not to.)

As I said, from what I've seen, your experience with sound is atypical. Sound usually works out of the box these days. Not as often as Windows, but then, sound card vendors tend to test a lot more on Windows than Linux.

Of course, the user doesn't care why his sound doesn't work, and it's no consolation that it's his sound card vendor's fault instead of Linux's fault. But statements like "I can't see at any point in the future Linux ever taking of into the mainstream until it fixes some fundamental issues with user interface and accessibility" miss the point on this score.

At the end of day facts are facts and Linux market share isn't growing quickly and is firmly a minority OS with a market share in single figures.

Linux is the dominant OS in servers, embedded systems, and supercomputers, and it has a lot of backing from many different companies as a result. It still has no more than a toehold in the desktop market, but it's improving rapidly. No, it's not gaining a lot of market share yet, because it still has a lot of problems, but many of those problems are being solved. I've used Linux on my desktop for about three years, and the improvement on a lot of basic issues is really perceptible.

A couple of years ago, it was routine for fiddling with my graphics card to dump me to a command line; now it falls back to a low-resolution screen in the worst case. It used to be a real pain to install proprietary graphics drivers; now it's a snap (if you use the method you're supposed to instead of assuming you're supposed to download it from the manufacturer's website like on Windows, which you're not). Sound playback used to break all the time; now I haven't had a problem with it for a year or more (though recording still doesn't work). Not to mention Linux has gotten perceptibly faster and had nice new features added. Seven or eight months from now, NVIDIA cards are even slated to get out-of-the-box 3D support, however rudimentary, via the open-source Nouveau driver. That's progress, even if it's not on par with Windows yet.

Go back ten years, and the difference is even more striking. Ten years ago, on Linux you didn't just have trouble installing drivers, you routinely ran into hardware where you had to write the drivers, because no one else had. That Creative and ATI both distribute working Linux drivers at all speaks to Linux's recent success.

What you're doing is looking at a single snapshot, seeing that Linux is still worse than Windows, and leaving with a negative impression of it. If you looked at a historical comparison, you'd see that Microsoft has more and more to worry about from Linux with each passing year. Its desktop market share is around 1% now, and that's probably an order of magnitude higher than five years ago. It will get a lot further than it is now, you can bet on that.

All I wanted to do with this experiment was to see what was holding Linux back and whether or not possible to ditch Windows and use Linux instead if your a gaming and hardware enthusiast.

Linux will never compete with Windows for gaming as long as game developers only write games for Windows. As I say, it's a miracle that the games work at all. They were written for a totally different operating system. If Linux does take off, of course, more game developers will consider writing games for it, but that's several years away at least. Windows is necessary for gaming for the foreseeable future unless you're masochistic.

[Freddie]

Supercomputers, embedded systems etc are all niche areas in market which is dominated by mainstream desktops and laptops, until Linux can evolve to a point where it's usability is comparable to Windows it will always remain a minority OS. I don't accept your point that my experience with the sound driver was 'atypical' anyone with an X-Fi sound card would experience the same problem as I did and would have to do the same thing that I did to get it working and remember it wasn't just the sound drivers the video drivers needed to be updated as well otherwise I would have experienced even more problems.

It's a shame that developers have all but abandoned OpenGL and now write exclusively on DirectX (I believe ID Software still uses OpenGl) as I believe that would help make Linux more accessible for more causal users but unless the OpenGl fourm gets some marketing guru on-board I'm not all the confidant about it's future.

[Simetrical]

Supercomputers, embedded systems etc are all niche areas

Supercomputers is niche, but embedded systems is not. Linux runs TiVo, TomTom, and zillions of similar things. It's been used on wristwatches. You probably own some consumer appliance that secretly runs Linux somewhere. It's a very different market from home desktops, of course.

I don't accept your point that my experience with the sound driver was 'atypical' anyone with an X-Fi sound card would experience the same problem as I did and would have to do the same thing that I did to get it working

Anyone with your exact sound card model, maybe. (What is it, by the way? I'd like to search for info on it.) The fact is that sound on Linux usually works without installing any drivers, on a large majority of hardware, so your experience is indeed atypical. I've installed Linux on several different computers and never needed to install any driver on any of them, except to get 3D acceleration.

and remember it wasn't just the sound drivers the video drivers needed to be updated as well otherwise I would have experienced even more problems.

As I said, you can install proprietary video drivers on Ubuntu very easily:

• Click "System".
• Go to "Administration".
• Click "Hardware Drivers".
• A window comes up saying "Searching for available drivers..."
• A list of drivers is given in a window. I have two options: NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 173), and NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 185) [Recommended]. All I have to do is click "Activate" and it will install itself, then I reboot.

Considerably easier than Windows. I don't even have to know what brand of graphics card I'm using.

That said, most people do not need to use the proprietary drivers. You only need them for 3D acceleration, e.g., gaming. Typical desktop users can stick with the open-source drivers, so they don't even need to go through this process.

It's a shame that developers have all but abandoned OpenGL and now write exclusively on DirectX (I believe ID Software still uses OpenGl) as I believe that would help make Linux more accessible for more causal users but unless the OpenGl fourm gets some marketing guru on-board I'm not all the confidant about it's future.

OpenGL is used everywhere but Windows, and games aren't the only OpenGL users, so it will continue to exist indefinitely. Windows games don't use it because all the drivers are optimized for DirectX, from what I've heard.

But OpenGL games won't run on Linux without Wine either. DirectX is only a small part of the Windows API. For instance, to create a file on Linux or OS X or any other Unix, you do

int fd;
fd = open("myfile.txt", O_CREAT|O_WRONLY|O_TRUNC);

On Windows, you do

HANDLE hfile;
hfile = CreateFile("myfile.txt", GENERIC_WRITE, 0, NULL, CREATE_NEW, FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL, NULL);

or something like that. So even on the source code level, the program won't run natively on Linux if it's written for Windows, even if it does only very basic operations. You need to use Wine to translate CreateFile() into native function calls like open(). There are many thousands of such functions with very complicated behavior, which has to be replicated in full detail, without using code from Windows ("black-box" reimplementation). Even Microsoft messes this up sometimes, which is why old programs break on new versions of Windows: MS changed how some function worked a little.

Using OpenGL just means you don't have to translate the graphics calls from Direct3D. You still have to translate everything else. It will never be as reliable or easy to run a Windows program on Linux (or Mac) as to have it written to support Linux from the start, even if everyone used OpenGL.

If Linux takes off (and I suspect it will be a lot less niche in five years), it will start with non-gamers. Game developers will begin to widely write games for Linux only after it's widely used by non-gamers. A few notable games do have native Linux support already, like most things by id, and Neverwinter Nights, but most developers don't think it's worth it.

[Jaketh]

nothing beats windows 7

[Freddie]

My sound card is a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer.

As I said, you can install proprietary video drivers on Ubuntu very easily:

* Click "System".
* Go to "Administration".
* Click "Hardware Drivers".
* A window comes up saying "Searching for available drivers..."
* A list of drivers is given in a window. I have two options: NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 173), and NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 185) [Recommended]. All I have to do is click "Activate" and it will install itself, then I reboot.

Considerably easier than Windows. I don't even have to know what brand of graphics card I'm using.

So does it search online as well or just the libraries on the hard drive? If its just the drivers that are included on the installation then that's ok for getting you started but like any good enthusiast installing the latest stable driver is a must to maintain the best compatibility and stability. What your describing sounds almost like a carbon copy of the way Windows installs software for new components.

[Spiff]

I tried Ubuntu a few years ago - Obviously the benefits it offers arent really relevant to me besides the fact that it is ultimately a completely free OS. If I had a netbook Id be perfectly happy to run something like Ubuntu on it, but anything more powerful Id miss the application support for games and such.. I know things like WINE exist but meh, hassle, and less support for troubleshooting. Also having to add extra lines to some text file to get all the mouse buttons to work wasnt the most convenient of experiences.

..also fullscreen flash on firefox, kind of missed that.

[Freddie]

I used 9.10 (which has been out for some time now I believe so this must be the version I used), I'll give it another go when 9.11 or whatever then next stable version is called is released.