Since yesterday’s Android article I have been thinking about Linux a bit more and what it needs to do in order to gain more ground in the Operating Systems space. The major problems still existing are mostly in three areas. These are packaging, polish/ease of use and poor distribution.
First, not just Linux but the whole Open Source movement needs to solve the packaging problem. This is the largest problem for Open Source and it has been the biggest problem that it has faced for at least 5 years now and it has been pointed out time and time again. Well I am going to reiterate the problem since it is not getting solved but actually getting worse. Now we have Google’s Android which isn’t a proper Linux stack (just what we need more splintering) but also it doesn’t use proper Java (1). But how does this have to do with packaging right? Well think about it. With a different Java and Linux stack that means that Android has ANOTHER packaging style! Just what we need another package format. RPM, Deb, ebuild and pkgsrc are not enough we need another (btw that is only the most common ones). Of course recently the Open Source community has come together to work on PackageKit which is supposed to make all of these package types be handled from one application. Great idea but not what we need (biggest problem is ONLY Fedora uses PackageKit). We need to stick to one package style and most companies see RPM as the one package type with deb being rather common as well. If it was just these two we could probably live but it seems every year a new comes up with a new packaging style for their distribution meaning they will get completely ignored package wise. What does this really mean though? Well Android should not called Linux in any way and I hope it doesn’t go onto netbooks because it will not be able to use any currently programmed programs from what I have seen so far on the net. How does that help people being so limited? Sure its fast but if you cannot do anything useful with all that speed what is the point? Overall Android will hurt Linux’s image do to its choices in packaging.
Second, Linux needs more ease of use and polish. This is one area I see progress in with Ubuntu attempting to make a more polished distribution. The only problem is they are doing things that could backfire for them like PackageKit could backfire for Fedora. They are creating a way to make notifications look nicer. Unfortunately instead of working with other distributions to do this Ubuntu made a system and then gives it to the upstream saying “here adopt this its better” of course upstream will probably not all accept it (if any do) and it will end up becoming a series of Ubuntu only patches (more division). This is the problem! The Open Source community needs to come together to work on adding this polish not doing it individually. This is the big problem with the Open Source community it fails to work together many times at some very important aspects. Of course we could also look at the other problems related to polish where things like the X server are slow and need to be fixed in order to be faster though X related problems are being worked out in the correct way with DRI2 being added. I just hope that the distributions will in the near future learn that they need to begin working together to make a polished distributions cause last i checked the standard Gnome icons look kinda old these days and every distribution does icons completely different the only thing consistent is KDEs icons.
Third, poor distribution. Now this does not mean that distributions themselves are bad. Here I am talking about the way that Linux is introduced to new users. Yes, word of mouth has gotten Linux around and gotten a very faithful user base but it does not get mainstream desktop acceptance. If the Linux community wants to grow bigger (which I really don’t think is that important) then the community needs to find a way to prevent crap from being released. Now from this I mean things like the chopped down versions of Linux on many netbooks the best example is on the Acer Aspire One. While it looks like Linpus Linux is good enough that is just the problem. Dell I think is the only company really doing Linux on the netbook right by utilizing a strong distribution (Ubuntu) in order to provide the best user experience (and most applications) possible. But instead of a good distribution people get stuck with limited versions like Xandros (not too bad and would be fine if external repos were always enabled) and Linpus (horrible since you cannot easily modify the applications without knowing what you are doing). Overall I hope future netbooks will come with better versions of Linux based off modern Linux distributions (Linpus is based on a out of date version of Fedora) and hopefully will have a more full application experience.
Overall Linux has been moving a bit in the right direction but things like Android have an opportunity to weaken what Linux has done perception wise. Of course the perception war can only be won with hard work and lots of team work between many different communities. This is something the Open Source has both been good and bad at in the past hopefully they can come together to create a great desktop experience and win this perception war though since I would hate to see Linux get weaker.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_mobile_phone_platform
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