Why zealots are extremely harmful for Desktop Linux
Like most other software, there are serious number of zealots who obsessively love Linux. So far ok, the obsession is something personal and does not affect no one directly. However, these people are often considered as good users and most people judge Linux experience by looking at how they use it.
Consider a typical zealot and his/her friends. (Are any female Linux zealot anyway ?) I will write some cases and they do happen somewhere in the world.
Our command prompt obsessive zealot comes to a friend’s home and asks for wireless network parameters. Once he gets, he runs series of iwconfig, wpa_supplicant and ifconfig commands to connect. He writes a profile for this network by hand and tests it. It takes about 10-15 minutes. He does not use simple network connection applets of Gnome/Kde. He does this because he is obsessed with running minimal applications on a 4GB laptop. Do you know what his friends think about now ? “It takes running some cryptic commands and 15 minute just to connect to a network using Linux”. This is the only experience they have ever seen. They will judge Linux by this from now on..
A friend of our zealot is curious about Linux and wants to try. As a trusted and renown friend, our zealot is happy to get a chance to win another user. They met at home at night, order some pizza and our zealot starts installing Gentoo or Slackware. (Or some other enduser disoriented distribution)
- Hey, what’s that Slackware/Gentoo thing ? I always hear about Ubuntu, why do not we just install it ?
- This is the one I use. By using this, you will have the absolute control on your system. You will make sure that it runs only what you want and they will be compiled for the best performance
- Cool
Now our zealot runs cfdisk and some other text based tools to organize disk. He carefully setups partitions and language configurations. He selects every package individually and 3 hours has already passed. Now the new user thinks that he can never do this by himself. Our lovely zealot has prevented his friend to experience nice and short gui installers of Ubuntu or Fedora based distributions.
Now the system has been installed and our zealot carefully checks for hardware components. He grabs the latest vanilla kernel and select modules one by one. It takes another 3 hour to make a fitting kernel image for that computer. He assures that this will give the best performance and he does not tell what will happen if the user tries to connect a different hardware. He gains may be 3-5% in performance but he loses flexibility of having thousands of hardware drivers which are ready to plug and play.
When it is 3 A.M, the system is ready to run, at last. Thanks to our zealot. Now the users asks for some applications. Our zealot grabs source files and compiles by setting configure flags according to his own taste. He quickly mentions about the compilers, source files etc to his friend, who has absolutely no idea what a programming language is..Our zealot thinks he can install better software although there are tens of thousands of testers and developers who create one-click-install packages which are tuned and tested.
Our unlucky user tries to use Linux for a week. He can not change display properties because most of them were handwritten to xorg.conf although it is not required in most cases. He barely remembers how to compile a program and fails trying to install something. At last, he does not access his external disks easily because our zealot does not let hal and udev run because he thinks they are not necessary..
This is completely harmful to free software society. These kind of people should stop and think about what they are doing. If you want to help, do not try to consider end users like yourself. Consider them as babies and give what they want. Give them a system which can use most of the connected hardware, easily play media, and watch videos on YouTube. Ordinary users do not need to run tiny window managers. They do not need to know about source code or build system.
Just show them installing the system by clicking next. Then explain that backing up is as easy as archiving home directory. Lastly, instruct to use package manager to search, install and uninstall applications by clicking their name.
If you will not do this, just let those users use other operating systems. Creating a negative image of desktop Linux experience is the last thing we want. Right ?
