GNOME, and GNU/Linux, will forever be a niche desktop/OS until it is substantially better than Windows and OSX. Being free (either as in beer or freedom) is, evidently, not enough.
What is the road to such superiority? History has shown that technical superiority is no guarantee of market superiority. History has shown that marketing can help.
What is marketing? I have been thinking about that a lot lately. Here's a starter for 10:
Marketing can be encapsulated by a pair of principles. They are:
(1) Make good products / give good service / co-create good value; and
(2) Respect your customers (both current and potential)
That is all.
So, kudos to the Evolution team for including a way for customers to give feedback when they are having trouble (Help -> Report a problem). But simply punting that information to community forums or pointing to a FAQ is a waste of incredibly useful information. If someone asks a question with a known or "obvious" answer, you have a UI design problem. And usability is bug number 1 is most software these days.
But developer time is limited. Where should priorities lie? Adding more functionality or making simple things simple? Bling or ease of use? And why do I have to drop to a terminal and go "sudo chown me /dev/raw1394" in order to see video from my handycam? Every time?
Sigh.
In other news, thanks to all the Free software developers for making an OS and Desktop that is, in the main, at least as good as the major non-free alternatives. You guys and girls rock. Hard.
May all sentient beings achieve nirvana,
John.
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I have given some serious thought to the matter over the last few days, and there are two points I think aren't commonly brought up. One of them is perhaps commonly mentioned, but at least for some of us it's a dealbreaker: use of free software is a matter of freedom. In some respects, I prefer the experience of using (say) OS X to GNOME. But I don't care; I would use a Free desktop however badly it sucked, because it's a matter of my own personal freedom. To hear some people talk, you would think that this is a point which makes sense only to programmers and anarchists.
Secondly, a point that I don't think I've ever heard mentioned: we are asking people to change from Windows to a Free operating system. Suppose they make the decision; in practice, this means reformatting or repartitioning their hard disk. This is not only beyond the capabilities of most casual users, but it's also a large step to take for anyone. Some steps have been taken in this direction with Knoppix, the Ubuntu Live CD, and so on, but I think those have always been seen as temporary measures.
What I would like to see is a Free operating system on some sort of bootable medium, perhaps a USB key or a CD, which can be inserted in a Windows system and then executed to bring up, say, bochs, running a Free operating system, so that the user can become comfortable with its use; later, they could boot from that device and it would mount their Windows hard disk and put it on their desktop; nowhere would they have to take a step they couldn't go back on.
I am sure you have filed a bug report, right? Because the first thing to do is complain to the people that know how to fix it. :)
I have to say as a maintainer that people often don't file bugs and the only thing I see is a post on some obscure forum about my software not working on their machine. Well, I don't own their machine and I'm not perfect, so it would be nice if they came to me.
another pretty horrible example of "linux not ready for the desktop":
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/86583
yes, it's a corner case but... it could and it should work fine... IMHO.
Oh, don't give me that "Linux not ready for the desktop" bullshit. Have you ever had to use a Windows system? A Windows box can and often does have mysterious crashes, stuff randomly flaking out, programs not running, mysterious slowdowns, not being able to boot, goodness knows what, and people will just say, "Oh, that's how computers are". If a Free OS has a problem it's, "Oh, Linux isn't ready for the desktop". Nobody ever seems to ask whether Windows is ready for the desktop.
Every time I read or hear about desktop issues in Free OS I start to wonder why people use exactly the same logic "oh, it's not working", "I don't want to type in the console".
I really think that these people who complain about these "problems" haven't
realized how things work.
Lets say you have a house problem, you can solve it by yourself or persuade
someone to solve it for you. I said persuade, because paying is not the only
choice. For huge amount of things it has become a habit to just pay
to someone to do your job and it's no brainer, but when we talk about "free"
(freedom) software it's unbelievable that you have to pay!
The thing which is valuable here is the time, you can pay money for the time of
someone else to do what you want or spend your time for solving the problem.
The free software is what it is because people made what they want, what they
feel would help them and they that because it's fun and pleasure. It's true that
for that who develop that software GUI issue and end desktop user's problems are
not main priority, if any at all.
You have to understand that in order to get you have to give. That's how all
this have been build.
You have to understand that people who develop Free Software are not some rats
in a basement, they have needs just as you do. They want to have a car, a
peaceful life and family. The sad reality is that YOU DON'T make these things
happen to them, because you don't pay their bills.
Lets face it, I haven't pay any money for the software I have used all these
years and in my country no one pays for the software, no one ever consider
paying, it's become a habit. I haven't chosen GNU/Linux because of it's prize,
the both OS was free to me. I have chosen it, because of the freedom it gives me
and the community behind it.
This is what is worth for me, but maybe it's not for you!
* Because English in not my native this could sound offensive. It's not my
* intention. I just wanted to stress you with another point of view.
@marnanel - You may want to consider a vmware image for your enduser intro without reinstalling.
@anonymous: I did mention bochs to that end. (vmware isn't Free.)
VMWare might not be Free, but it is the best. Most solid virtualization, flexible, awesome gui, remote administration features are available and the whole product family scales nearly to infinity. (Administrative tools, rolling out templates, hot-swapping hardware units, .. The support is just the best on VMWare).
Vague philosophies don't make users happy. Good overall polished and finished products that are usable do. That is what also fills the wallet.
anonymous: I know VMWare is currently the best thing out there. That doesn't mean it makes sense to use nonfree software to spread freedom, at least in my understanding (and you did say "You might want to consider"); see my comments about OS X, above.
Dropping to a prompt for a fsck isn't as bad as the hoops I've been forced to jump through on a broken windows boxes, say when a corrupt registry prevents Windows XP from starting.
Neither should happen, but having to run "fsck -y /dev/sda6" is a walk in the park compared to booting off a rescue CD, manually backing up the registry file by file, copying in an empty one from a repair directory, rebooting as administrator, configuring explorer to show hiden files, manually copying uncorrupt registry files from a prior snapshot, rebooting to the recovery console again, copying the recovered registry files again, rebooting again, then using the recovery tool to recover to a savepoint.
Neither should happen, but at least the Linux issue is a simple fix. Why on earth Microsoft didn't add an option to boot to a empty registry for repair is beyond me. Or why the system tool is too stupid to be able to locate restore points without the path stored in the registry.
vmware isn't free, but virtualbox is.
What is all of this about 'marketing' and so forth? Part of the reason why I love Linux is that, for the moment at least, it is mostly devoid of marketing and the politics that go along with it...
It's not a 'bad' thing that less computer users use Linux - It's only natural since Linux is geared towards the 'experienced' computer user while Windows was always aimed towards the newbie and apathetic user.
I use Linux because it works for me, allows me to play with my system (which not everyone has an interest in doing) and gives me so much choices that sometimes I get a migraine :)
We're not in competition with MS here.. in my view Windows and Linux are two unrelated systems - aimed at completely different types of users and we should leave it at that.
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