the future of Linux (was Re: mlb.com)

[Adam Myrow]

Linux has reached a very critical point in its history IMHO.  People are
starting to get sick of Microsoft's buggy code and invasive tactics and
they want an alternative.  The word about Linux has started to spread.
Yet, Linux is a much more complicated OS than Windows.  Most home users
don't want to have to type a username and password just to access their
computer.  They don't want to be told that they don't have permission to
install a software package and thus, have to remember a second password to
install it.  Yet, this is how Linux and the Unix systems that inspired it
work.  We who use Linux see the advantage of this.  It keeps us on our
toes and forces us to think before we delete that big bunch of files and
makes us decide just how badly we want that new software before we hastily
install it.

So, we have two types of users interested in Linux.  We have the old Unix
veterans and DOS users where a command-line is second-nature.  We have the
new generation of computer users who don't even know what the command
prompt in Windows is for and never use the "run" command.  How can we
please both?  Well, there is the saying that you can't please everybody,
but I think we could come close.  I'd like to see a home edition of Linux
which bypassed the login procedure and dropped the user into some kind of
GUI.  It would still require the root password to do certain things like
install and remove software, but most things would be done as a normal
user.  This hypothetical Linux would have very good hardware detection and
be able to load modules for pretty much any hardware you throw at it.
Redhat and its derivatives are handling much of the hardware detection
already, but they aren't quite up to Windows yet.  To make the home user
want to use them, they need to be as good (and preferably better) than
Windows at picking up hardware and setting it up.  Redhat has never
detected my modem, for example.

For people like myself who like to fiddle with our systems and like the
way Unix works, there should continue to be the traditional Linux.
Another approach is to make it the same OS, but give the user a choice of
whether they want it set up for home use or multi-user mode at install
time, or first boot in the case of a computer shipping with Linux.  The
various versions of Linux out now are a mixed blessing.  On the good side,
they give choice as to how they want their system to feel.  I like the "do
it yourself" attitude of Slackware while others like Redhat's automation.
On the bad side, many software vendors have picked Redhat as the only
Linux distribution they support.  I fear that Redhat will become the
Microsoft of Linux and kill off competition.  I want software to use an
install/uninstall procedure that isn't distribution-specific.

Well, I guess that's enough rambling.  The bottom line is that the next
few years are absolutely critical and I think it will be quite obvious
whether Linux will succeed as a home-user OS or remain a niche OS within
the next 5 years.  I think that no matter what, Microsoft is starting to
really get in trouble and users finally realize that the computer randomly
locking up or their word processor crashing in the middle of writing that
important document isn't normal and should not be treated as such.