A Man and his Penguin

I love the way that Mac apps are installed. Very simple for the user (especially “for all ordinary dumbusers”), no real mysteries, and you can easily see what you have. I can only hope that Linux will be so transparent one day. I can never tell what I’m doing in Linux, it’s all so cryptic. There are vast repositories of packages which, I can’t search. I have to rely on word of mouth to find out what is there. It’s awful. Linux may be free, but it is very stressful. Apple usually “just works”, like they say. It may come as a surprise to many of you out there, but some of us were not born with a complete, encyclopedic knowledge of Linux, we “dumbusers” must struggle along and try to learn, under the derisive gaze of the most learned gurus of Linux. Pardon, us for breathing.

Perfect example: After two weeks of research and trial and error, I still can’t see flash video on my Ubuntu machine. Even though it is common on the internet. Why is that? Why is it so darn hard to make this work? Is it because I’m a “dumbuser“, genetically inferior to the uber gurus?

Why can’t you search the packages? Go into Synaptic Package Manager, Edit menu, and go down to Search. Change the Look In popup menu to “Description and Name”, type in some search terms (”Bittorrent client”, for instance) and hit Search.

If you’d done this and typed in “flash”, you’d find Flashplugin-nonfree, which gives you Flash playback.

It doesn’t require you to be an “uber-guru”, it just requires some common sense. You already know where packages are installed from, so just use the search function to search for a description of what you want! Easy! Much easier than doing a web search online for everything. Easier even than finding what you want, opening your Applications folder, dragging the new thing in, opening the new folder and dragging the executable to your Dock.

If Linux is not desktop-ready because people can’t use their own common sense and initiative, then by golly, the world is doomed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Worst reasons why Linux isn't "desktop-ready". You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.