Linux - Why It Fails As A Desktop Operating System?

I think i'm using linux for about 4 years & active with Ubuntu Linux distribution. I have few observations,i think it has few issues:

1.It's not suitable for Offline usage as most of the software is distributed online.
2.Technical support & media is less distributed on globe.
There are other issues as well....But i think software distributions on wide scale and good technical support on local base can help the desktop users....
What's your take....

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@lefehe: Why hello there L. (Where's Kira?) I happen to disagree with you completely when it comes to the exponentiating number of distros. I think there should be 10x the number that are there right now. Heck, a distro worked on by ~20 people seems like a nice idea to me. I honestly think there's too many people working on certain distros.

I am SO not pointing my finger at Debian and the thousand arguments embroiled in it. So not.

People have different tastes. I like KDE. I prefer my toolbar to go all the way across the screen. I hate 3d desktops with a passion. I have one of those Azalia sound cards that seems to drive certain *cough*Mepis*cough* developers mad. I like OSS, firebird, and swiftfox as defaults. I beat gcc with a hammer until it unrolls loops and maxes out performance without giving me a program with a seg. fault.

Now how many combinations have I rejected in favor of one so far? Easily several thousand. Sure, I could take a clean install of Ubuntu and mess around with config files and apt-get's until I get that particular combination. And I have. It took me only 40 minutes and half a gigabyte of stuff to download from the interwebs. Sure most of that's KDE, but suppose we did this for every package. That would take forever. Thankfully, most people only use so many packages and most stuff either doesn't need configuration or autoconf's (haha. linux joke...) However, at the same time, I could just take a clean kernel, hack it for a few hours, go slackware and pile .tar.gz's until I got a working system. I know people who do that. The problem with all this is space-time invested. It takes time that could be spent elsewhere to rework systems. Distros were made to be hyperspecialized configurations around the kernel that saved people from having to do that as much. Having hyperspecialized distros just means we're filling more niches.

Plus having a lot more distros means that there's not enough people to work on system support separately. That's a good thing. Universal development of drivers and kernel modifications is an awesome thing to have. Arguing over two options? Throw both in the repository! Let the distro choose the config's and the people choose the distro. Personally I think it's bogus that Mepis has no proper fix for Azalia chips though Ubuntu (its base for a while) does, Sabayon - the wireless god - can't access some wireless networks that the magic of mepis can, and that Gentoo and Debian aren't interchrootable because of libc conflicts.

More distros. = diversity = good.
Sure there'll always be main distros and lots of code mishaps. But it's part of the fun.
And red shirts properly belong on the backs of Garibaldi's men. I agree with you there.

-"Light"

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IMHO, Linux does not fail as a Desktop OS. It works perfectly well.

Of course that for a Windows user Linux may always seem to be messy and unfriendly. Windows users have been educated to think that way. Microsoft (and their hardware and software fellow companies) have done a good marketing job to make their products dependable. But you can see not only people, but companies, governments, etc., using Linux variants as their main desktop production environment. And almost all of them are quite happy with it (if they weren't, they would definitely go back to to Billy's OS).

And I agree that nowadays there are many Linux distros. Probably *too* many. A lot of them have no specific purpose, and those can be discarded when choosin which distro to install in a new box or working environment. But there are some that have been put together to fulfill very specific requirements, and that do their job flawlessly.

Linux might be seen as a geek toy, but it is more than that. Still, it is not an appropiate OS for everybody, just as red color shirts don't see well when they are worn by different people. It's just matter of testing it and see if it works for each individual purpose.

Best regards,

-L.

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I prefer mac to linux, I prefer linux to windows. It's a chain for me. I don't think Linux fails asa desktop OS. I will admit, yes there are stacks of distros.

and on the not of recompiling programs, do you update when it's brand spanking new, straight out or wait a while. Take Mac OS for a while, alot of users have waited to upgrade to the new leopard operating system because of compatibility.

Pro tools which is the industry standard for audio recording has not been updated for leopard, don't update too soon and there shouldn't be too many compatibility issues.

And a point one of my lecturers keeps making,

Why update it if it works how you want it to?

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There are idiots and then there are novices. I consider myself a novice with Linux. Let's keep that in check, shall we?

You are very right on proprietary drivers for such hardware... as I've pointed out in my post. (Maybe I was wrong in failing to put emphasis on proprietary hardware as opposed to generalizing hardware, as I can see how it was misinterpreted in my post.) Right now, I'm very short of just wiping Ubuntu off of this damn machine since I can't have it all with my HP zd8000.

I got the mouse and keyboard to work, but lo and behold, the ATI drivers STOPPED working. (Yes, I worded that correctly, and I will explain to avoid further misunderstanding.) After a full 203MB upgrade and a restart, I could actually install the proprietary drivers for all three devices I mentioned without a hitch: the video card, the modem card (which doesn't even count, since it worked anyway), and the network card. However, this still left my mouse and keyboard out of the equation, as I couldn't get BOTH working (only JUST the keyboard worked, but if I unplugged my USB receiver, the keyboard would die and the mouse would work with the 1-second lack of responsiveness every few seconds). Going back to the solutions that I researched an HOUR ago, I edited the xorg.conf file to accomodate for my keyboard and mouse combo as per the directions given for a working solution. (If you want to review this guy's work to make sure he's not an idiot either, feel free.)

After saving, I restarted with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

To my dismay, the screen became a disorted image of my desktop... then blacked out... then went back to the disorted image... then blacked out... then went back to the disorted image and sat there. After giving the machine a chance to finish whatever the hell it was doing and noticing that there wasn't any hard drive activity after a few minutes, in frustration I turned the darn thing off, waited 15, then turned it back on again.

While letting it go to Grub and automatically selecting Ubuntu to boot (as I am dual-booting with Windows XP), I went back to my tablet PC, which is what I'm typing on right now. Not even a minute later, I hear the sound of my computer turning itself off. I was confused as to what happened exactly and why my computer would just turn itself off when attempting to boot Ubuntu, but I just turned on the machine again and it actually booted fine into Ubuntu, with the exception of being prompted and having to choose a generic graphics solution to get into the GUI with a 800x600 resolution (instead of my usual 1400x900).

But wait! The keyboard AND the mouse works! YAY!

Going back to a Windows habit, I uninstalled and then reinstalled the proprietary drivers for my video card using the Restricted Drivers Manager, hoping that it would work. And with a full system restart, it did.

And now my mouse and keyboard don't work with each other anymore. (The mouse is unresponsive.)

I'm not trying to bash Linux... it's just that my luck with it has resulted in hours and hours of frustration. (I'm lucky to have it running okay on this PC... the only things I had to and eventually did fix with more hours of searching and effort were to get the stylus working and the video card - yes, NVIDIA - to be used to its full potential.) It doesn't even seem to be worth the effort to me personally. Just tonight, I've wasted four and a half hours wanting to shoot someone just because I can't even get my mouse and keyboard or video card working the way they should be working.

Linux is a gigantic proof of effort that many people can come together to create a great operating system... for the users by the users. No one owes anyone any answers or effort to help each other, yet people are willing to spend their time to help a great operating system to be utilized and even enjoyed by others. I just have had the short end of the stick... and frankly, I'm fed up with having to jump through so many hoops to get something to work only to find out hours later that it can't be done.

I hope that NVIDIA and ATI (not to mention any other companies) find the heart to actually provide open-source drivers for Linux users so that the graphic developers you mentioned don't have to go through all the crap that they have to do to get things running the way they should, if not better, not to mention piss the living hell out of people like me. (I notice that ATI does have open-source drivers for my video card, but thankfully I didn't need to even deal with it after the upgrade. Beforehand - and this is where my unfamiliarity with Linux shows - I failed to realize that the driver package, even though Ubuntu is a Debian derivative or something of that sort, it couldn't open up the package that ATI so graciously provided, as it was a file extention Ubuntu didn't recognize and the fact that it wasn't for X.org 11.)

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