Blogging Ottinger (tim)

I found myself totally frustrated by an article on Linux, and not just because it’s not flattering. I have non-flattering things to say about linux from time to time, mind you. It’s just that this one says some things that seem really stupid.

The main offensive and stupid point is this:

Going hand-in-hand with gaming is software support. Walk around any store selling software and see how much Linux-compatible software you can find.

No, they don’t sell a lot of free games in the local software store. Duh. OTOH, there are thousands and thousands of software packages (over 15K in Debian alone, which includes no commercial offerings) but nobody can make money by stocking the shelves with boxes and giving the contents away for free. Shelf space costs money, mister. If you are waiting for Best Buy to tell you that there are dozens and dozens of free software development tools for Linux, you will be waiting a very long time.

Try this new thing called “the internet”. There’s a radical feature called “google”. You’ll like it. And then install debian and try this crazy thing called “Synaptic”. This is how linux people “shop” for software. All the aisles are packed, and the prices are very reasonable.

The point about games is granted. There are a lot of linux games, but not the popular network-effect games that you find on other platforms. A number of my friends keep a version of windows just so they can play the hot networked games. Something will need to be done here. There are Linux games, it’s not a total wasteland, and some of them seem like fun to me (a non-gamer guy).

• LinuxGames
• Linux Game Tome at HappyPenguin
• Tux Games
• L Games
• Games4Linux

Finally is this little tidbit:

Hardware support
The one area of Linux ownership and use where it becomes apparent that there’s an assumption that everyone who uses Linux is an expert is hardware support. Your average user doesn’t have the time, the energy or the inclination to deal with uncertainty. Also, they usually only have the one PC to play with. Hardware just has to work. There’s a very good reason why Microsoft spends a lot of time on hardware compatibility - it’s what people want.

I agree and disagree. The first disagreement is that Linux supports less hardware than M$. Actually, Linux supports vastly more software than M$ ever dreamed, but as a friend pointed out M$ supports more Intel PC-based hardware than Linux.

But even that is not true. The vendors make their devices work for windows (not M$). They feel that not working with windows means not being sellable on the market, and they’re 80% right. Close enough for me. Because some vendors don’t write versions for Linux and refuse to release specs so that linux programmers can support the devices, we end up waiting for some techie to finally reverse-engineer enough of the device to write a driver for it. It’s painful. But the trick is that microsoft isn’t making those devices compatible, the vendors do that. Microsoft’s deep entrenchment makes vendor compatibility necessary in a way that Linux can not.

If you try Ubuntu, you will likely see all of your hardware supported. Distributions like Debian and the derivatives like Ubuntu and Freespire and many others work very hard to produce good hardware detection and to gather the best drivers from the free software projects. Some of the commercial vendors (Ubuntu, etc) will even bundle proprietary drivers to make your hardware work. I don’t see the problems that I used to see.

But that is a semantic issue. The fact is that your off-the-shelf (or off-the-website) PC may have some components (like WinModems, WinPrinters, some PDA or cell phone sync functions) that don’t work with Linux. Such things you may have to tinker with, or replace with a supported device. This is still a problem.

Otherwise, you would be surprised who is really ready for linux. There’s more of them than you would imagine, and probably several people on the street where you live who use Linux or some variant of BSD (including OS X) full-time. The world isn’t so non-ready as you’d expect.