How good is Linux as a tool for the uninitiated, really?
When journalists review Linux, they usually concentrate
on the initial installation experience. Given their
deadlines, that's logical: they don't often have time to
spend months on using it, so installation is all they have
time for.
I wanted to know how good Linux, or more specifically
Debian with GNOME, is for the uninitiated, or more specifically,
for someone who has been using Windows for a number of years,
and switches to Linux. I'm specifically uninterested in
the installation experience.
To see what it is like, I recruited a friend of mine,
and gave her my old laptop with Linux pre-installed and
pre-configured. She has agreed to try switching all her
computer use to Linux, and tell me about any problems
she has. We'll do this for several months, to make it
realistic. Anyone can suffer through a week in a new
computer environment.
She's now used Linux for a bit over a week. The initial
session, when she tried out the new computer at my home,
went pretty well, with only a couple of real problems.
Here's an edited version of the notes I made:
Bringing up the network (the laptop is configured
to use NetworkManager): She found the networking
subfolder of the computer folder in GNOME: "Why
does it say 'Windows Network'? And why is that empty?".
Later: "Why does 'Network tools' not configure the
network?".
She doesn't know if configuring network in Windows
would be as bewildering, never having done it. She
can't find anything useful about network configuration
in the GNOME help system. Eventually I point out the
Network Manager icon in the notification area.
She selects a wireless network to connect to
and enters the WPA password I give her. She then gets
the GNOME Keyring dialog and doesn't understand what
it is, wondering why she needs to give the WPA password
a second time.
She then proceeds to open some windows. "Minimization
works, good." She is happy that there is a task bar
at the bottom of the screen, and happens to find the
"Show desktop" button there as well: "Oh, you can
hide all the windows here if you have many."
She finds mplayer and thinks it looks OK. She
comments that she doesn't really care what player
she uses, she uses several under Windows, too, and
all of them have quirks.
XChat has too many networks to choose from at
startup. She's never had to choose an IRC network
before, IRCnet being the default for Mirc (or the
Mirc installation she has, anyway). She wonders why
XChat didn't ask for a server to connect to after
selecting the right network (XChat has a lot of
servers configured for each network and chose one of
them).
She continues to configure XChat: "Oh Lord,
NO spell checking." She finds the
color selector in XChat (the GNOME or GTK+ default
one) to be very confusing. The "Nicks not to
highlight on" setting is bewildering, does it mean
that XChat highlights by default all nicknames, even
for other users?
She'd like "shut up completely" setting for XChat
sounds. Giving ops from a popup is intuitive. XChat
in general seems intuitive to her.
Next, Bittorrent, using the GNOME torrent
downloader. The .torrent file is saved directly to
the desktop, which is good. The downloaded file goes
there too, which is good, too. Seems intuitive
enough, but doesn't seem to have very many settings:
it would be nice to be able to prioritize different
parts of a multi-file download. She also can't get
it to continue a download after restarting the
client (possibly related to multi-file torrents).
Next, OpenOffice.org. The Windows version doesn't
split up into Base, Writer, Impress, etc, but
finding the interesting one (Writer) is no problem.
That Abiword was installed, too, was a bit
confusing.
Totem: space doesn't play/pause (except in full
screen mode). Sound volume control is a bit
confusing, since it has to be done using multiple
slidebars (master, pcm, etc) in the GNOME sound
control dialog, and also in Totem.
After maximizing Totem, quitting it, restarting
it, the window is now as big as the whole desktop
(minus top and bottom panels), so maximizing and
un-maximizing doesn't seem to have much effect,
which is weird.
Other problems have surfaced since. The big one was that
I had configured a simple firewall for her that didn't let
anyone connect to her laptop, meaning that torrenting was
not working very well. I use the same firewall settings on my
own laptop, but since I mostly torrent for Debian's ISO
images, and those have really fast seeders, I've never noticed
that I don't torrent outward. Ah well.
She also doesn't like the GNOME torrent client very much.
It lacks ways of monitoring and controlling the torrenting
process that she cares about: seeder and peer counts
especially, or (but less importantly) changing the order in
which parts of a multi-file torrent are downloaded. We tried
installing Azureus, but the version in Debian etch at the
time seems quite broken.
Firefox seems to occasionally also work very badly for
her, taking tens of seconds to load pages, but this seems to
be a known bug that will be fixed in the next upstream
version. We'll upgrade when we can, and hope that fixes it.
Firefox's default font size was too small. Same for the
default window size. And sometimes, maximizing the window
still doesn't make the contents become bigger (but it works
under the Windows version of Firefox). I haven't seen this
myself yet, but if I do and can replicate it, I'll file
bugs.
Another problem that was due to my bad installation: I
had forgotten to install acpid, so every time she booted,
she got an error message saying "Can't access ACPI events in
var/run/acpid.socket". Her exact words when reporting this
were: "I don't want to know. Really, I don't. But, just in
case you do."
That's it for now. I may write an updated report later,
if there's any interest.
(For the curious, I'm intentionally not naming her, to
let her try the experiment in peace, rather than getting her
mailbox full of well-intentioned advice on things to try or
do.)
![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
other 
icons for different user types). I also probably should not hotlink to the .gifs on the livejournal servers.
In any event, I’ve never bought a CPU fan before, so I just picked out a random one that seemed better than what I had. Little did I know what I was getting. When I took the new fan and heatsink out of the box, I was reminded of Crocodile Dundee: 
I realize for all you case-modder/overclocker/slashdot/gamer types, this is probably a puny cooling apparatus, but for me it was pretty exciting. Now my hands are apparently permanently covered with blue thermal grease, and my CPU is running at a cool 40 degrees.
Oh, well, here is the top view:
Of course, no one ever sees that, except the person installing it.