When Windows was released, it united a vast but rather fragmented society around a single philosophy. On the one side, you had end users. They had to get work done, and they needed applications to do that. On the other side, you had application developers, who needed a platform conducive to making useful applications to sell to the end users. This is, of course, gross oversimplification of historical events. The point is that geeks and end users alike wound up rallying around Windows.
These days, it would seem that Apple is looking to do the same thing. They’ve lured in end users by enabling them to work with media in new, fun and interesting ways while still allowing them to get work done. Meanwhile, they’ve also attracted the technical crowd because under the covers OS X is really UNIX. In short, Apple has done what Linux has needed to do for a decade now but couldn’t get organized enough to do: they made what amounts to a distribution of BSD that’s so easy to use that the end user never knows what’s under the hood unless they’re curious enough to go and learn about it.
The ability to organize around the idea that a system should be easy to use *first*, and gratifying to geeks *second* has been the gordian knot of the Linux community. While Apple has pasted a bunch of slick “ooh aah” features onto the desktop, and provided a platform for developers to extend the environment (note I said “extend” and not “fork”), Linux is busy, for the most part, doing things with a mind toward “the community” instead of “the customer”.
The Linux community is making sure that the end user has at least 10 different mp3 players, 5 different desktop environments, 6 different photo management applications, and 20 different scripting languages built in and ready to go. They’re fighting over licensing, attribution, inclusion, exclusion, who’ll take over this project, who’s forking that project, what should this project be called today, what package format will be used, which package manager will be used and does it work with this format, and what’s the best way to support 32-bit programs on 64-bit hardware while still allowing the end user the freedom to build software from source in an environment that looks something like sanity?
I certainly understand that all of those arguments are in some way important. There needs to be this community of concerned technologists who provide so many important things to the technological landscape as it were. The community is a proving ground for ideas, a training ground to develop skill sets, a forum for the discussion on the directions different technologies might go in, and a united force against inane legislation.
However, as important as these arguments are, you have to admit two things:
- They don’t make getting things done any faster, and
- Apple has already proven that these things can get done quickly if you get organized.
Apple has hit a nice sweet spot in terms of what it delivers to the end user. It doesn’t come ready to do… um… well, nothing – like Windows. On the other hand, it also doesn’t come with 5 ways to perform a single task. Just this small amount of streamlining greatly reduces the amount of work involved in delivering the product, because energy that might otherwise be expended in testing all of the different ways you can set up your printer can now be redirected to solving a problem that doesn’t have a particularly great solution, or (gasp!) writing documentation!!!
What I’m hoping for Ubuntu is that they evolve into a project that can do two things, both of which I think the project is capable of:
- Accomplish on the Linux platform what Apple has accomplished on the BSD platform.
- Take the word “Linux” out of the larger desktop platform discussion.
Item 1 would involve making some difficult decisions about the applications that will not be included in the distribution, and employing some amount of diplomacy to try to unite developers to get them to work together on solving problems instead of forking every time someone gets their feelings hurt.
Item 2 is *going* to be done by some distribution at some point in time. It won’t be Red Hat, and it won’t be Novell. They’re not interested in you and me. They’re interest is in the “enterprise”. They’re smart to go that route. It’s a large market, and it’s a market that isn’t likely to care if there are no mp3 libraries or commercial NVIDIA drivers installed by default. But this doesn’t help us home users.
It’s also not going to be Debian, because their interest is in “keeping it real”, where “real” equals “open”, not “easy to use for non-geeks” or “bleeding edge”. It won’t be Mandriva because, as much as I love Mandriva, they don’t seem to know where to put their energies from one day to the next. Someone needs to get the discussion about the desktop to include the name of their distribution instead of this nebulous “Linux” thing.
Linux is a kernel. The distribution is what makes Linux useful to normal people. We sure as heck don’t talk about “win32” on the desktop, now do we? We talk about Windows. Likewise, we should be talking about “Ubuntu vs. Windows” or “Ubuntu vs OS X” and not “Linux vs Whatever”. People aren’t going to understand comparisons between a kernel and an operating environment. They’re not going to understand a comparison between Windows and an entire movement. There needs to be something identifiable to put up there, and right now, at least in the desktop space, that’s Ubuntu.
So, flame away. Here are a couple of replies up front:
- I’m not saying it has to be Ubuntu, I’m just saying that right now, it *is* Ubuntu. Read the article.
- Debian religion aside, you have to admit that you’re not likely to hand a Debian netinstall CD to your mom and wish her the best of luck now are you?
- Yes, MEPIS, KDE, Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, Fedora, {K,Edu,X}ubuntu are also very nice. That’s not the point of the article, though, so please move along.
- Yes, choice is good, but anyone who has ever worked in food service is no doubt familiar with people who sit there staring at the menu saying “there’s soooo many choooiiices” and not knowing which way to go. People on the by and large are indecisive. Having one tool to perform a task instead of five, just by itself, will do wonders for the perception of usability on a platform, as evidenced by Windows and OS X.
I’ll reply to the rest as they come in 🙂
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