Tell them, my song.

If you have a heart for animals, please help those creatures either by adopting one or at least by donating some of your money:

http://www.streunerhilfe-nordgriechenland.de

I’m mostly spending my one-week vacation on sleeping and reading. I’ve finished Matthey Reilly’s Ice Station, Hell Island and Area 7 and Scarecrow is next as soon as I’m done with The Golden City by John Twelve Hawks. Yes, those are the complete “Scarecrow” novels by Matt and the third part of The Fourth Realm Trilogy by John. Nice reads. The Scarecrow books are Die Hard gone written fiction, and The Fourth Realm is a bit like 1984 gone Fantasy in today’s world — a nice and interesting mix.

Anyway. Didn’t I want to say something about my latest adventures in Penguin land?

I have to use Linux a lot at my current job – mostly Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS 64-Bit, but also a few other flavors which run on our packet shapers. I’m getting to know Ubuntu Server quite well, so I thought it couldn’t hurt to give the current beta of the 64-Bit Ubuntu 9.10 desktop edition a look.   

The base installation was rather unexciting. The default installer managed to get the system on my (dedicated) hard disk without any problem and I could boot into the Gnome desktop. So far, so good.

Wireless didn’t work and only one of my monitors ran with the default graphics drivers.

So I used my notebook to download the proprietary (Heresy!) nVidia drivers and the sources of the Broadcom wireless chipset drivers, copied that to a USB stick and went back to my Mac Pro.

Killing GDM helped installing the nVidia drivers (which must be done in pure console mode). After a reboot, I finally had both screens running and could enjoy the Wobble and-what-not-else effects of Gnome. Very nice too look at, but otherwise not good for anything else.

I compiled the Broadcom drivers and copied the resulting wl.ko file to /lib/modules/…….. and so on.

Then I had to unload and blacklist a couple of modules (ssb, b43 and a bunch of related ones), modified /etc/modules to load lib80211 during boot time and also added a line to rcS.local: insmod /lib/modules…./net/wireless/wl.ko

After the next reboot, the Mac’s wireless card worked and connected to my wireless router.

The next couple of hours I spent with downloading, compiling and installing a bunch of other software to make the system at least half-way useful.

I wasn’t able to get a working version of VLC or Handbrake compiled or installed, but at least I managed to get all the evil video codecs for Totem installed.

Firefox also has a working Flash plugin and I took a look at some – unimpressive – blogging software.

What astonishes me, however, is how hard it is to get 32-Bit software running on a 64-Bit Linux. I gave up on REALbasic rather quickly, and compiling the BlitzMax MaxGUI modules also failed.

After hours of compiling and configuring Ubuntu, I browsed about to the Ubuntu Software Center (or whatever it is called) and downloaded and installed some of the stuff.

And this is the part where you quickly learn about the shortcomings of Linux as a desktop platform. The thing is, for me, the applications on Linux have to compete with Aperture, Photoshop Extended, Propellerhead Reason, Soundtrack Pro, Logic, ecto, Scrivener and the like. And not only with their power, but also with their usability. Most commercial apps simply don’t exist in a Linux flavor, and whatever there is in the Open Source repositories usually cannot compete with their commercial counterparts.

So when you go back to actually doing something with your computer, and not for your computer, you’ll quickly have to face the fact that Linux is a platform for programmers and network administrators, but not for people who need tools to get something done that has not directly anything to do with IT.

To rephrase this: Linux is nice when you want to write a new web application or when you want to host some websites or need a public DNS server or a database server. It’s also okay if you need a Firefox-based surf board and when you spend most of your time on the Internet or consuming music or movies.

In all likelihood, Linux will extremely disappoint you when your computer is a tool for you that you use to write on your next novel or screenplay (which are things that you do not want to do with a regular word processor like OpenOffice’s Writer), do professional graphics or photo design (read: Adobe or Apple), do professional sound or video editing (read: Adobe, Steinberg, Propellerhead, Ableton or Apple) or simply need it to run your business software which only runs on Windows anyway.

So after a few hours of playing in a software Legoland, I once again got this feeling of emptiness that I have when I spent a lot of time on something that is essentially useless for me. At home, I only need Windows to run a few old games that I either don’t have for my Xbox or that only exist for Windows. But other than that, Windows produces the same empty feeling in me when I start it on my Mac. I don’t have a use for it anymore.

And I get the same feeling when I use Linux at home. What does this thing do for me? Nothing. My website runs on a Linux server in a data center in Cologne. Fine. That’s a SERVER job that Linux is good for. But at home on my desktop? Or on my notebook? There’s zippo that it can do at least half as good as the evil proprietary commercial platforms, as the Linux zealots would call them.

The sad thing about this is that it’s now 2009 and I’ve been having this very same impression of Linux for more than 15 years now – or whenever the 0.9x kernel releases were. There has always been some hardware that didn’t work – today that would be my Canon 4400f scanner – and there has always been a lack of useful software for my needs.

And the damn thing is still a royal pain in the ass to install and configure. It only went so smooth on my side because I’m a damn IT guy who usually gets paid for this kind of horror job, and I only managed to do it in such a short time because I have been struggling with Linux full time for the better part of the last six months. Now I wonder how far some non-IT person would get. Probably not very far.

Still, I see a small business opportunity in a certain market niche here: Pre-configured low-end netbooks and notebooks or low-end desktops for people who spend most of their time online and who do not have any other special demands. Basically, the same person who is happy with an ah-so-cool MacBook Air would also be happy with a Linux-based Dell Mini or something similar. After all, those folks spend more than 90% of their time in their web browsers anyway. And those people couldn’t care less about the underlying platform, because they don’t need any special software.

I don’t think that Linux will ever become a serious desktop alternative for power users, but I see a niche for Linux (or FreeBSD for that matter) in server appliances and low-cost surf boards.