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Ubuntu Linux – So Close to the Masses but Massively Far

Ubuntu Linux

So close to the masses but massively far

Ubuntu Linux is one of the best open source solutions that the world has ever seen. It is a free and powerful operating system that includes, by default, most of the tools that people need to get work done on a computer. What tools it lacks have free and open source alternatives that, in many of cases, can do equivalent or better work than their commercial counterparts.

This particular distribution of Linux is unique in that its client version is offered as an option, at the moment, on some HP and Dell computers. It is financially supported by Canonical- a company solely dedicated to promoting open source software.

For the purposes of this paper I have installed Ubuntu in a virtual machine. The first screen you are presented with when you boot the computer off the Ubuntu DVD is the option to “start or install” Ubuntu.

This allows the new user to try Ubuntu on their system without risking damage to the host system’s hard disk. You can boot Ubuntu up and see how it looks and feels, consider its compatibility, and if you choose, install the OS right from the live Ubuntu system.

This did not work correctly in the virtual machine. This is not entirely Ubuntu’s fault but is an example of how it does not support standard VGA devices correctly. However, it’s true that Ubuntu would support a wider variety of older systems.

If the graphical interface has failed then you can fall back to a text-based installer that has a great deal more complexity. It is not really made for everyone to use but unfortunately there are plenty of people who lack compatible hardware out there and get forced to use the text-based installer.

This is very unfortunate that hardware support is not as broad as it should be. To Ubuntu’s credit it would be difficult to support all hardware by default. Windows seems to do better with their installers though so it should not be impossible.

Currently Apple is the only operating system manufacturer with perfect hardware support. The reason behind this is that Apple will forego backwards compatibility in order to have great hardware support. They were the first company to drop the floppy drive, the first to drop serial and parallel ports, and rumored to be the first to drop the integrated DVD drive in a laptop. Ubuntu could not possibly have this kind of control over the hardware it must support because it is designed to operate on any x86 CPU. It is designed to augment or replace Windows, which supports more hardware than any modern OS. One of the major problems with Windows is that it is extremely slow to stop supporting legacy devices.

Ubuntu has a somewhat comprehensive list of hardware that it supports in a wiki format. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport contains a list of specific devices that are supported by Ubuntu and also contains a list of premade hardware that Ubuntu can support. This includes specific laptops and desktops from many major manufacturers. An interesting thing to note is that Ubuntu probably supports more Apple computers than leopard- Apple’s latest revision of its OS.

Installing Ubuntu on a virtual machine is extremely slow. Upwards of two hours in my particular case. Installing it on a system natively is very quick. You can be up and running with Ubuntu in well under an hour. This assumes that you know exactly how to answer every question the installer has for you and you know precisely what to do if something goes wrong. To an inexperienced user it could be extremely daunting because the chance of data corruption or loss is very high.

When Ubuntu is first loaded you are presented with a very beautiful login screen. On each login Ubuntu will check for updates to the software installed.

Each piece of software that is installed on a Linux system is called a package. By default Linux distributions try to include all the software needed to perform all normal day to day tasks. On Ubuntu they do this quite well and give you software to write documents, make spreadsheets, listen to music, watch DVDs, browse the internet, and check email. Ubuntu has a system called Synaptic to install whatever packages you may be missing. The range of software freely available with Synaptic is extremely broad. From amateur radio to tools to help visualize biological macromolecules you can get a free package that will help you. While it has a lot of packages there is something extremely important missing- games.

Linux and games are two things that don’t really go together. This is the same story with Apple computers too. Unfortunately most games are developed for Direct X a programming interface that is exclusive to Windows. For Apple and Linux the games must be programmed with OpenGL. There are some major developers who develop games on OpenGL and only a few of them provide Apple binaries and even less provides Linux binaries. The answer is, unfortunately, emulating the win32 subsystem. This allows games to think they are running on Windows and can, on the fly, translate Direct X calls to OpenGL. It works ok but the best solution is Cedega and it’s not free.

Some pleasant surprises about Ubuntu are the similarities to other operating systems. For example using Mozilla Firefox on Ubuntu is a very familiar experience. It performs and works exactly as you would expect. Microsoft Office doesn’t have a Linux version but there is a free replacement called OpenOffice. It can open, read, and save to the standard Microsoft Office formats. OpenOffice includes a word processor, a spreadsheet application, a presentation application, and a database application.

There is an application that resembles iTunes and, in a lot of ways, is superior. With Rhythmbox you can listen to podcasts, mp3s, burn cds, sync your iPod, sync your other mp3 player, and listen to internet radio. This is much improved over Linux of the past where mp3 support did not exist it is a propriety audio codec.

There are even free applications that can be used to edit photos or draw vector artwork. They are the free equivalents of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. The GIMP is the free Photoshop equivalent and it’s quite good. I’m not much of an artist and I was able to generate pleasant looking text rendering quickly.

Why doesn’t Ubuntu have a larger audience? The largest reason I’d say is the “grandma factor.” If you were to give your grandma a computer that was running Ubuntu would she be able to use it effectively on a daily basis? What happens if something goes wrong? She wouldn’t be able to take it to a local computer store or ask any of her friends at bingo. Ubuntu and Linux as a whole isn’t used by enough people for the support that is needed to exist. It is something of a chicken and the egg problem. If nobody starts using Ubuntu then there won’t be people to support others. Additionally, if something goes wrong it often goes seriously wrong. The entire graphical interface could break. This is a catastrophe for any amateur computer user. They may never be able to fix the computer on their own and will require support, which might not exist. While it is true that Ubuntu has a community of lots of very knowledgeable and friendly people willing to help users in need- it doesn’t do anything for the “grandma factor.”

Linux based operating systems are gaining support by major computer manufacturers for many purposes. Very low priced computers often include Linux as opposed to Windows to save costs on the Windows License. Additionally computers made for children or for emerging countries use specialized version of Linux.

It is a matter of time before Linux becomes more widely used but I’m afraid that it is just not yet. Computer users demand to play games and almost all games are made for Windows. Businesses require usage of Windows only software and often cannot afford to train employees on new computer systems. Grandmas of the world would still be in a state of confusion with Linux systems.

Ubuntu, the forefront Linux distribution, has most support from amateur and professional developers. It has the momentum to become the de-facto operating system for some. Ubuntu just needs more time to mature for the majority.

Thanks for reading. The remainder of the images made for this paper is located: http://picasaweb.google.com/MikeHMayer/UbuntuScreenshots

Posted at:

http://www.blog.mikehmayer.com/?p=144

All copyrighted things in this belong to their rightful owners. This was written for an educational purpose only. I do not consider myself a Ubuntu user or master or anything of that matter. My opinion is that Ubuntu, all other Linux distros, Windows, Apple OSX should all get along.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 4:45 pm and is filed under stuff. 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.

  • For what it's worth (and this is a great blog entry) I am an Ubuntu user full time but my prior history is with XP (and every OS under the sun.)

    Recently I coaxed my parents into getting a PC, an ex-corporate from work. I install Ubuntu 7.04 on it and that was it. They've never used a computer, except my mum who used my Commodore 64 in the eighties! And that was mostly playing Pacman.

    After an hour's tuition on the bare basics, like clicking, double clicking, windows etc. they got the basics nailed and today I received a printed photo and a letter; and that's pretty remarkable. I'm not saying they couldn't have done this with Windows; just that it's also possible for absolute newbies (who don't even know that they're not running Windows!) to reliably get work done on their PC with Ubuntu and they don't even know enough to start fiddling with screen resolutions; so their own ignorance saves them!

    Otherwise your this post is astute and maturely observed, great stuff, I do enjoy balanced well written articles.

    Vicky
  • Very nice review! Though there are also several other distributions that have some less problems with restricted drivers/codecs, I agree Ubuntu is one of the best!
  • Thanks for reading!
  • starnix-admin
    "Installing Ubuntu on a virtual machine is extremely slow."
    If you used MS Virtual PC solution then that is what MS has intended :)

    Try virtualbox or vmware, much better. Personally I use VMware Workstation (my work supports and pays for it :) and even then, I do a bare command-line only system, install the available updates, then the vmware tools, then proceed to "sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" to get gnome and all the desktop packages. Reminds me of the saying "If it is worth doing at all, it is worth doing right the first time".
  • > If you were to give your grandma a computer that was running Ubuntu would she be able to use it effectively on a daily basis?

    My grandmothers passed away, but my neighbor is a grandmother. When she bought her current computer (an Acer laptop), I immediately replaced Windows XP with Ubuntu and she's been quite happily using it for over a year now :)

    > What happens if something goes wrong?

    When she bought her first computer a few years ago, a used Windows 98 machine, I ended up doing tech support for her after she got some nasty popups in IE. That snowballed until I was practically babysitting the machine; virus scans, malware scans, manual checking for updates for those, applying patches on Patch Tuesday, upgrading Firefox as necessary, etc. After she bought the laptop that I put Ubuntu on, my workload decreased substantially: I told her that when she sees the orange box with the star in it (upgrade notification) to click it and say OK. Generally I only need to intervene every 6 months or so to put on the new version or if she did something she didn't know how to fix (like when she accidentally dragged the gnome panel to the side :) Which reminds me, its time to put Gutsy on that machine...

    > She wouldn’t be able to take it to a local computer store or ask any of her friends at bingo. Ubuntu and Linux as a whole isn’t used by enough people for the support that is needed to exist.

    A suggestion for 'grandma's computer': If her computing needs are light enough (e.g. e-mail, web, solitaire and other simple games) that she generally won't run into too much trouble, then generally she won't need too much help. Just remind her to click the orange update notification and say ok whenever she sees it. Ubuntu has an 18-month (minimum) support cycle; if you see grandma every year for Christmas, why not make a point of putting on the new version then?

    > It is something of a chicken and the egg problem. If nobody starts using Ubuntu then there won’t be people to support others.

    Sure. Firefox faced the same thing a couple years back. But usage of Ubuntu, like Firefox, is increasing, so that's a moot point.

    > Additionally, if something goes wrong it often goes seriously wrong. The entire graphical interface could break.

    Off the top of my head, other than the one time a bad patch was issued, I can't think of how 'grandma' would break the GUI through regular use.

    > This is a catastrophe for any amateur computer user. They may never be able to fix the computer on their own and will require support, which might not exist. While it is true that Ubuntu has a community of lots of very knowledgeable and friendly people willing to help users in need- it doesn’t do anything for the “grandma factor.”

    Unlike Windows, Ubuntu comes with a Live CD; it would be sub-optimal (as it won't have her settings), but if the computer is setup to check for bootable CDs in the drive at boot, then she could be told to take the disk out of the drawer and put it into the drive and boot from it until help can arrive.

    Basically, I would argue that if grandma has light usage needs and you have to do a little bit of tech support for grandma anyway, Ubuntu is a better OS for her than Windows and *far* cheaper than Mac OS and its hardware.
  • http://www.blog.mikehmayer.com/?p=144

    > If the graphical interface has failed then you can fall back to a text-based installer that has a great deal more complexity. It is not really made for everyone to use but unfortunately there are plenty of people who lack compatible hardware out there and get forced to use the text-based installer.

    I would argue that installation programs are, by and large, not designed for technically unskilled users. I have found Ubuntu as easy to install as Windows, if not easier. And unlike Windows it will "play nice" with others (unlike Vista, which does not apparently like to share the machine)


    > This is very unfortunate that hardware support is not as broad as it should be. To Ubuntu’s credit it would be difficult to support all hardware by default. Windows seems to do better with their installers though so it should not be impossible.

    That applies doubly to Vista. And you must also remember that Microsoft has a massive advantage when it comes to drivers.

    Every machine that I have installed Ubuntu on had sound, video, printer, and network functioning at the end of the install (except for one machine that had no sound), with no need to go through the hunt-for-driver/download-driver/install-driver/reboot scenario that we have come to expect from Windows.


    > Computer users demand to play games and almost all games are made for Windows.

    That's what dual-boot is for. There are games for Linux, but again Microsoft has the advantage here. If you want the cool, hip, crackalackin' experience, then by all means go for Windows. I would counter that Linux is for those who want to do stuff.


    > Businesses require usage of Windows only software and often cannot afford to train employees on new computer systems.

    Tell that to the cities and nations whose Governments have migrated to Linux and no longer pay the Microsoft tax.


    >Grandmas of the world would still be in a state of confusion with Linux systems.

    I disagree. Windows is the standard because.... Windows is the standard. For someone who is not already in a Windows world, the learning curve is about the same.

    I am not a Linux fanboy. I use both. Each has their advantages and disadvantages. My advice to you is to put a spare hard drive in that machine and try a full HD install and stop faffing about with Virtual machines.

    All in all, a good read. Thanks!
  • AJ
    Hey folks look,...another Ubuntu distro all decked out in hidious elephant poop brown,..just like the last one, and the one before, and before, and before,...
    Is this an ethnic thing? a "PC" P

    Ever heard of blue or grey. or red, and green maybe?

    LOL
  • I've been using Ubuntu on my laptop now for some time... I have to say- its been great!
  • This is the sober-est review of Ubuntu I've ever read. You said everything but "Ubuntu is not Windows and it's hard to properly compare an apple to an orange". You acknowledged that all three of the more well-known systems (Windows, Mac and Linux) have advantages and disadvantages - quite impartially at that.

    I say, rock on. Truly amazing post.
  • Thank you. I tried to stay impartial when I wrote that. :)
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