Criticism of desktop Linux is a history of comment on the perceived shortcomings of the Linux operating system when installed on desktop computers. These criticisms have questioned the plethora of choice, their usefulness as desktop systems and also for multi-media playback and audio development.
While the Linux based Android operating system dominates the smartphone market in many countries, and Linux is used on the New York Stock Exchange and most supercomputers, it is used in relatively few desktop and laptop computers.
Video Criticism of desktop Linux
Viability of Linux as a desktop system
Linus Torvalds has expressed that he intended the Linux kernel to be used in desktop operating systems. He argues that Android is widely used because it comes pre-installed on new phones, and that Linux distributions would need to be bundled on new computers to gain market share.
Linux has been criticized for a number of reasons, including lack of user-friendliness and having a steep learning curve, being inadequate for desktop use, lacking support for exotic hardware, having a relatively small games library and lacking native versions of widely used applications.
Some critics do not believe Linux will ever gain a large share in the desktop market. In May 2009 Preston Gralla, contributing editor to Computerworld.com, believed that Linux will never be important to desktop/notebook users, even though he felt it was simple and straightforward to use, but that its low usage is indicative of its low importance in the desktop market.
In his essay Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story, Eric S. Raymond stated that the lack of usability in many open-source and Linux tools is not from lack of manuals but from a lack of thought about the users' experience.
James Donald from the Princeton University analyzed shared library concepts of several operation systems. In his 2003 paper titled Improved Portability of Shared Libraries, he worried about the lack of a Windows Application Compatibility Group equivalent.
Missed opportunities
Desktop Linux was criticized in late 2010 for having missed its opportunity to become a significant force in desktop computing. PC World Executive Editor Robert Strohmeyer commented that although Linux has exceptional security and stability, as well as great performance and usability, the time for desktop Linux to succeed has been missed. Nick Farrell, writing for TechEye felt that the release of Windows Vista was a missed opportunity to grab significant market share.
Both critics indicated that Linux did not fail on the desktop due to being "too geeky," "too hard to use," or "too obscure". Both had praise for distributions, Strohmeyer saying "the best-known distribution, Ubuntu, has received high marks for usability from every major player in the technology press". Both laid the blame for this failure on the open-source community. Strohmeyer named the "fierce ideology of the open-source community at large" as being responsible, while Farrell stated "The biggest killer of putting penguin software on the desktop was the Linux community. If you think the Apple fanboys are completely barking, they are role models of sanity to the loudmouthed Open Sauce religious loonies who are out there. Like many fundamentalists they are totally inflexible - waving a GNU as if it were handed down by God to Richard Stallman".
The accusation of over-zealous advocacy has been dealt with previously, in 2006 Dominic Humphries stated that the aims of the Linux community are not desktop market-share or popularity, but in Linux being the best operating system that can be made for the community.
Maps Criticism of desktop Linux
Criticisms
Choice
The choice of applications that free software development offers has led people to criticize Linux as confusing for new users in the past as well as the large number of choices in Linux desktop operating systems, although it has been argued that choice is one of the key strengths of Linux.
Third-party application installation support
Tony Mobily, editor of Free Software Magazine, identified problems in the server roots of Linux in his article 2009: software installation in GNU/Linux is still broken - and a path to fixing it:
Every GNU/Linux distribution at the moment (including Ubuntu) confuses system software with end user software, whereas they are two very different beasts which should be treated very, very differently.
In August 2014 on the DebConf in Portland also Linus Torvalds voiced his unhappiness with the binary application packaging for the Linux distro ecosystem:
One of the things, none of the distributions have ever done right is application packaging [...] making binaries for linux desktop applications is a major fucking pain in the ass.
Audio development
The lack of strong API standards for multimedia has been criticised. For example the Adobe Systems development blog penguin.SWF discusses the complicated Linux audio infrastructure in the analysis Welcome to the jungle. The nearly one dozen actively supported systems are called an audio jungle. PulseAudio main developer Lennart Poettering stated that it is very difficult for programmers to know which audio API to use for which purpose.
Driver support
Linux has in the past been criticized for a lack of driver support, however this was largely due to manufacturers not supporting the Linux system. It wasn't until 2004 that ATI started development of Linux drivers. Major adoption of Linux in servers and Android has encouraged driver development for Linux.
Wireless support
Wireless driver support has been a problem area for Linux. At one time many drivers were missing and users were required to use solutions such as ndiswrapper, which utilizes drivers made for the Windows operating system. Broadcom was particularly criticized for not releasing drivers. This issue was also worked around by extracting proprietary firmware for use on Linux. Broadcom has since released free and open-source drivers for the Linux kernel eliminating the issues for modern Broadcom chipsets.
The problem has been largely fixed in recent years and there are now a fairly large number of drivers, adding support to most wireless cards available today. However, many features are still missing from these drivers, mostly due to manufacturers not providing specifications and documentation, and thus forcing developers to reverse engineer cards.
See also
- Criticism of Linux
- Linux on the desktop
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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