Linux Desktop Pain Points
David Nielsen has written an interesting post describing what users he has spoken to dislike about Fedora. I tried to leave this entry as a comment on his blog but whilst his blog claimed to have sent me an email with a password it never arrived.
David’s post talks about Fedora’s pain points relative to say Ubuntu. As a user who has helped a number of other users inside a large organisation switch to a Fedora desktop, the pain points I normally encounter are ones relative to Windows (or OS X).
The problems I encounter are basically the following:
- I have this piece of hardware and no linux drivers…: Often we can find drivers but it’s a pain e.g. compiling an out-of-tree module each time a kernel update happens. I guess this wll cure itself as
linux gains more acceptance on the desktop - Networking is hard (i.e. you need to hand edit config files): (We use WPA2 at work and need to have a DNS search path). Roll on NetworkManager 0.7
- Multiscreen/projector issues: Roll on XRandR 1.2
- I want to use Samba/AFS/VPN and I’m not sure which ports to open or how: We could really do with a nice GUI for iptables driven by DBUS that says “Can program xy act as a server on ports…” a la Window’s ZoneAlarm (or CPIF or whatever it’s called this week).
I think the pain points for a home user would be somewhat different but this what I encounter in a large enterprise (that uses Notes/Sametime which have linux versions so I don’t meet “how do I interface with Exchange” etc.)
I’ll have a look at the registration stuff, I was trying to add OpenID support but it seems to have killed something.
I generally agree on the points you lay out and the prognosis – we will fix the majority or improve them greatly in F7. NetworkManager and XRandR 1.2 will be in and the DeviceScape wifi stack plus a number of new drivers was imported into F7 just a week ago.
The outgoing firewall idea might be good for a number of users, I know Mandriva has something like that – we might be able to borrow that code. I wouldn’t really like it in a default install because observing Windows users they tend to adopt a “just click yes” approach to security which will lessen overall security of the system, but for certain users this would be a great tool.