The hard truth about installing Linux

Stan Beer
Monday, 23 April 2007 16:29

Opinion and Analysis

I know many Ubuntu users are going to be jumping up and down right now ready to flame me and tell me how they got Ubuntu to work with their hardware, peripherals and wireless network the very first time. However, I've been to your forum and seen how many haven't. And these are computer users who take the time out to visit a forum.

I also have no doubt that many Windows XP users who have attempted to upgrade to Vista using the boxed software are having similar problems. The Wall Street Journal technology writer Walter Mossberg confessed to being amazed at how many makers of Windows software and hardware have failed to update their products to work smoothly, or to work at all, with Vista.

Where I am going with this is that the key to the success of Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution in the consumer market is getting mainstream hardware manufacturers to release pre-installed plug and play versions of the operating system. Dell has already committed to making this happen and other hardware makers will be watching to see how it goes.

Like many computer users, I want to be able to walk in to a computer store and walk out with a working Linux computer, whether it be a Dell, HP, Acer or a white box. I want to take that computer home and be able to connect it to my printer, scanner and digital camera and have them recognised. If it's a laptop, I want to take that computer into a wireless hotspot, click on a view available networks icon and, provided I have the WEP key, be able to connect to the Internet.

I know all of that is a lot to ask but to be honest if Linux and its most popular distributions, like Ubuntu and Suse, is to gain more than a couple of percent market share on the desktop then that is what is necessary. Perhaps in order to make it happen, the funders of the most popular distributions should be spending as much of their budgets on selling the benefits of Linux to consumers and hardware vendors as on development. Microsoft certainly does.