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The frustration and productivity of Linux

Tue 6 Mar 07 14:53 | Tags: Unix/Linux

A nice article was posted at HardOCP Consumer yesterday entitled 30 Days with Linux. As you can probably guess, the author, Brian Boyko, installed Linux on his computer (two computers, actually), used it for a month, and wrote about his experiences. The distribution of Linux in this case was Ubuntu, a distribution which prides itself on its user friendliness. To sum up his conclusions, he found most aspects of system configuration simple, but a few others were painfully difficult. Nonetheless, once everything is set up and it's time to actually use the computer, it's quite possible to be quite productive on a Linux machine.

I came to the same conclusions when I built my own Linux box a few months ago. Perhaps ironically, though, I was unable to get Ubuntu to work properly on my hardware; the X Window System, the basic software which enables most graphical interfaces on Unix and Linux machines, was not configured correctly, though I didn't know that at that point. So I tried installing the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD instead, which worked quite well. (The differences between the Linux and Unix-based FreeBSD operating systems are beyond the scope of this article; suffice it to say that they are both free operating systems and can run much the same software.) I wrote about my experiences on a tech message board; you can read these messages if you so desire, but please be aware that, being informal posts on an informal message board, the quality of writing is not quite up to the level of my articles here. (Also, I never did figure out how to make the fans quieter.)

For a couple of months, between when my 12" PowerBook G4 died and I got the 15" MacBook Pro I'm currently typing this on, I used this hand-built system as my main machine. And I was productive; I'd say that a bit over half of the coding for SigFeeder was done on this machine. I also had few problems doing things like managing music on my beloved iPod, playing DVDs, or managing my digital photos. On the other hand, I never did manage to get my printer to work; apparently, most models of Canon printers are just not supported by open-source software.

Also, I often still felt held back by the non Mac-like interface; KDE, the "desktop environment" for PC-BSD, is influenced way too much by Windows, and its common competitor GNOME is no better. For example, clicking in the empty space in a document beneath the last line of text would move the cursor to the position in the last line directly above the pointer, as it does in Windows, instead of at the end of the last line, as has always been the case on the Macintosh. Or if you want to copy a file from one folder into another, you drag the file while holding down the Control key, as in Windows, instead of the Option key, as on the Mac. And so on and so forth; little things that one probably wouldn't think of that make the experience of using Unix/Linux just a bit more strange and unwelcoming for us Mac fans than it would for those coming from the world of Windows.

And yet, at the same time, Mac OS X is perhaps the best thing to happen to Unix/Linux; as Mac OS X is, itself, a Unix-based system which can run much the same software as Linux can, the dreams of widespread Linux acceptance on the desktop that Ubuntu's evangelists dream of has, in a way, already happened. With OS X, you get the solid hardware support, ease of configuration, and paid software options of a commercial operating system together with the access to the wide array of free open-source software available to Linux users. For example, most of the images that appear on this blog were tweaked in GIMP, a free, open-source image editor. Perhaps those who are seriously considering switching from Windows to Linux should take another look at OS X.

(Yes, I realize that having to buy a whole new computer to run OS X is a bit more expensive than downloading Linux for free and installing it over or beside Windows on a PC you already own, but you're going to buy a new computer eventually, aren't you? Also, the first neckbeard to post in the comments commplaining that I'm calling it "Linux" instead of its "proper" name of "GNU/Linux" gets slapped.)

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