Blogging Ottinger (tim)

I was reading a post on a news group about which distribution to choose for “Grandma Millie”. I figure I’m probably 20 years older than the poster, so his grandma might be my aunt. Aunt Millie, in my imagination, is a lady who is fairly modern (heh: thoroughly modern?). She probably plays music and surfs the web. She does email and word processing, might keep a list or two in spreadsheets. She likely plays solitaire and some puzzle games (though perhaps when nobody is looking she breaks out Doom). She doesn’t program, isn’t a sysadmin, wouldn’t know what to make of any of the files in /etc/ let alone those in /var/log. She doesn’t know how to combat virii and spyware. She wants things to “just work”.

A few years ago, Aunt Millie would be better off either using a pre-packaged distro with online support, or else not bothering. This year, she’s probably best off with OS X still, but there are distros that might work. I’m trying to decide why she wouldn’t like mine.

I run XUbuntu (Edgy Eft), which is XFCE4 over Ubuntu. It is as trouble-free a distribution as any I’ve used. If I had let it take over my whole disk and do as it pleased, I would have skipped some troubles, and generally I am the cause of most of my problems. I think it’s pretty close to being great for Aunt Millie.

There is a panel and a menu and nice themes. I don’t think that Millie needs to live under an illusion that she’s running MS Windows. She’s not an idiot and she would just be frustrated with an “almost windows” that failed her in little details. Making Linux look like Linux isn’t an embarrassment. Gnome, KDE, XFCE are all very nice looking. She won’t die because they’re not just like Windows. Frankly, the idea that

XFCE4 is good stuff. I love its stability and small size. It leaves me a lot of CPU and RAM. Aunt Millie’s computer is a little old and a little underpowered, and could in no way run Vista, but XUbuntu would probably run very happily. After her Windows experience, she will probably be happy with a system that can run more than 7 applications at a time without slowing to a crawl or crashing. After her virus experience, just running virus-free will feel incredibly fast.

If I go over to Millie’s house and set her up, I think she would be able to do most tasks. Automatic hardware detection does almost everything you need these days. She might need some help with the printer setup and maybe wireless. But I’ve gotten better with those, as they’ve gotten easier. I couldn’t do either by hand (I am not good at knowing which drivers to use, and you *dont* want me modding your kernel) but the Linux world has come along. OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, and other native linux apps will handle the bulk of her day-to-day needs. There are great multimedia apps, podcatchers,

However, Microsoft’s ubiquity is a problem because too many companies have been convinced that they should only target Microsoft users. Millie will want her shockwave web sites, but there is no shockwave for Linux. Millie might want to keep her printer, but it may be a WinPrinter (manufactured purely for Windows use), as well as her modem (Millie needs cable). Millie’s digital camera or camcorder (when she buys it) will come with a support CD for Windows only, or maybe windows and Mac. It will probably work just fine with Linux right out of the box, but she’ll have to try it to find out; the manufacturer won’t tell her. And then there are those fun web sites that are only compatible with Windows and IE. Actually, they might work fine with Firefox under Linux but the people who wrote the web site decided to check for that browser and that OS and refuse any non-MS systems. And then it is a little harder to do Windows Desktop Sharing and the like from Linux.

Aunt Millie will try to download software willy-nilly from web sites. That’s how she got all those viruses to begin with. She will click a link in an email with 14 “fwd”s. And when that software comes down in an msi or exe and won’t install, poor Aunt Millie may have un-lady-like words to say. She can easily learn to use Synaptic to install any of several thousand software packages available to her, but those stupid web pages will still have their allure.

Finally there is the problem that Auntie is employed, and sometimes needs to bring home work. She can get by fine with OpenOffice, but how does she handle QuickBooks? What if she’s the one collared to run Dreamweaver and fix up the company web pages, or maybe they’ve dictated that she needs to use (gah!) FrontPage or Publisher. There are far better html editing environments in the open source world, but you can’t beat a company mandate. Should Millie have a separate Windows machine just for working from home?

When wine is brain-dead easy to use, maybe Millie will have a chance. If she has to buy a separate copy of Windows and run Xen or Parallels, it’s unlikely she’ll be happy. There’s a much smaller advantage to open source if you also have to have a full copy of a closed-source operating system and tools in order to use it. Millie needs the rest of the world to embrace the idea that it’s not a one-horse race. Its not, you know.