Interscription

After installing Ubuntu 8.10 on a whim and based on my love for fearless goats, I wrote up some of my initial impressions to sound off with Dragonwyntir.  Among the things I liked a lot, the networking has been improved, the install is pain free, driver management (at least on my m1330 laptop) was smooth and automatic, and the hot-swappable user accounts made diving into “root” a lot easier.

The things I didn’t like, on the other hand, came down to the still ever-present need to dive into the command prompt if you want to install anything not in the repositories or do any of a number of other things, and the lack of Linux versions of some of my favorite programs (digsby and feedDemon come to mind)

So I was toying around last night with getting Cairo-Dock installed in Ubuntu.  The guides on the internet to do this involved opening a terminal window to get to your “sources.list” file, in order to add the Cairo install files to the repository.

I was having trouble actually getting the files to add to the repository, so I followed the url to: http://repository.cairo-dock.org/ubuntu/dists/intrepid/cairo-dock/binary-i386/ to get to the install file manually.   Then, I downloaded it.  Then I right-clicked on it in and chose the option to install it.  That’s it, I was done. No terminal necessary, no repositories necessary.

This highlighted something for me.  The problem with Linux really isn’t that you have to be a super geek to use it and install slick programs.  There are so many easy ways to install software and make your way around.  The problem is more systemic.  The community around Linux is still stuck in the mind frame that there’s a certain base of knowledge shared by all Linux users.  It is infinitely easier to download the install file and install it, then it is to add it to the repository in a command line, and then use another command line to get and install it.  I also would have never found out that I could install something just like I can in windows, unless I’d toyed around with it the way I did.

Ubuntu 8.10 really has made some amazing strides towards being a viable everyday replacement for the average Joe.  After my noob discovery that I can shortcut a lot of nonsense and just install programs like I can on windows – even more than I thought.  With the huge growth in the low-cost net book market, and the fact that most of those tiny pc’s are running some form of Linux, people are flocking to the open source OS in drover.  But, the community simply has to consider the impact that success will have.  It truly is possible to do almost anything you could want in Ubuntu without ever seeing a terminal window, but you’d never know it from the web.  Just like Microsoft’s Mojave experiment, I think it’s time for the Linux community to hardily consider reintroducing their best and brightest.