Ever since Linux was first released to the public on September 17th 1991, a lot of progress has been made in Linux. Unfortunately, it is not enough. Linux is still struggling to get on end user's desktop / laptop despite being free to download and use. Even MacOS has better share and has a very high "Coolness Index" associated with it. Windows is the ubiquitous user friendly OS around here. On juxtaposing these two facts, an observer may draw inference that Linux is neither "cool" nor easy to use. While I can refute this inference with some degree of confidence using my experience and interaction with Linux, a normal user would be inclined to believe this analysis and shy away from migrating to Linux. Of course lack of applications on Linux has also hurt a lot, but that's a different story.

What is most dissappointing in this entire story is that Windows was not dominant when Linux was first released. Microsoft apparently was just experimenting with the Windows interface. So the Linux community had a great opportunity to prevent Windows monopoly. Linux was and is maintained and used by geeky-types which again helps to strengthen the barrier or mental block of general user population that Linux is too technical for them to understand and too geeky to be of any use. While this may be true to some degree for Linux distributions so far, I think we will be seeing some paradigm shift in the way Linux is presented to the world. But is it going to be a case of too little too late? Only time will tell but I think on the whole, the community is progressing in the right direction.

The "freeness" of Linux is both a boon and a bane. Being free it afforded a lot of people with the opportunity to experiment with the code and come up with a most usable and secure OS Bundle. It would have been great but for the fact that there were too many isolated efforts to do just that till the time, Redhat came along and created a standard Linux distribution. There were many different flavours of Linux that came out. Most of them withered down for lack of support or funds or both, a small base of Linux distributions came out as survivors. But again these distributions were based on different bases for example Redhat based or Debian based. Even then Linux was just too much technical for normal user's preferences. You had to edit configuration files, write commands on terminal windows, change file ownerships and permissions to work etc. Nobody would want to do that. All they want to do is to power up their computer and start working, playing, browsing or whatever else they wanted to do. It was not the case till recently a certain Mark Shuttleworth came up with an idea of user friendly Linux and called it Ubuntu. So far Ubuntu is the closest to what I would call a perfect operating system (Though I am a follower of Fedora). It is easy to install, configure and use. And unless you want to do advanced tasks, you don't have to fire up the terminal. Out of the box, it does not install any of extraneous things that Linux is known to install like sendmail or apache server. Granted that they are very good products, but why would I need it on my computer? I am not going to run a mail server or web server on it.

I still feel that Linux has a long way to go and lot of ground to cover. For one thing, I can't fathom the reason why the Linux graphics designers are obsessed with Dark themes? Look at any Linux distribution. All the themes so far are dark. On the contrary look at MacOS or Windows. The themes are very rich, bright and refreshing. In fact it feels very depressing if you work with a Dark theme. I once changed my theme on Windows XP to a very dark theme and it was very depressing. In contrast Windows Vista (with all it's faults and shortcomings) is excellent on the eye. It feels very refreshing. And it's not just about the shiny look. It is the colour combination and contrast of the images and screens. Black and Dark Brown or Black and Dark Blue do NOT make a good combination.

I talked about the extraneous software getting installed earlier. Why would I need all these servers on my desktop? Just give me what I need to use my computer and I will be very happy to use it. I think the Free Software Group should split Linux in the middle with one distribution for the end users and the other for geeks. The spin for the end users will contain all the productivity software like OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, games, etc preloaded and no other unnecessary stuff. The geeky version will be the spin which exists as is today. Plus the graphics needs to be improved with regard to colour combination, fonts, shinyness, curves etc.

Add to this long list of tirades another one that is the frequency of new releases. Of course newer releases are good but if you are bent on release a new version of OS every six months and discontinue support of an OS after 2 releases and one month, it is going to take a lot to convince enterprises to evaluate Linux as an option. Geeks may want 2 new releases every month, but what end user's want is stability and support for a long time. I think instead of releasing newer version of the OS every so often, it is better to release a version and then sit down and gauge the response and requirements from the market and then design the next version on those requirements. There has be some aggressive efforts to accelerate the adoption rate of Linux and releasing newer versions is not one of them. Look, it's not a bad thing to release just one version of Linux every two years. In fact it might turn out be a good thing in the end.

These thoughts were there for a long time in my mind but never articulated. One email in the Fedora-Marketing group gave a lot of food for my thought and inspired me to post this. The email goes like this.

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Hi

Do we have a overtly technical image? What we need to do to change it?

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20071217#news

The positive:

"Fedora was perhaps the most pleasant surprise of the year. Its two
releases (versions 7 and 8) were well-received by reviewers and end
users alike as it continued on its well-established, but highly
innovative development path. Its new artwork team in particular deserves
high marks for its work, but the effort spent merging the "core" and
"extras" repositories before Fedora 7 and the growth of the volunteer
developer community were equally impressive"

Critique

"But despite all these positives, the distribution still fails to
attract first-time Linux users who sometimes complain about the lack of
a central configuration utility or the overly technical nature of the
operating system."

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