Linux Frustrations

The thing that frustrates me the most regarding Linux (I use this term very broadly, meaning the kernel, but more importantly, the programs that run on top of the kernel) is that the programs that have any complexity at all do not work as advertised.
I have a portable media player that I use all of the time. It is the Archos 404. The device itself is a Linux computer. I like to synchronize my music and video files between it and my desktop PC. I also like to listen to podcasts and vidcasts on it as well. This process is seamless using Windows Media Player. It also works equally well with Rhapsody, or other media software. This process also works equally seamlessly using Apple’s iTunes and my iPod Shuffle.
So, in my quest to find an alternative to Windows, the latest incarnation of Linux that I installed on my computer was OpenSuse.
OpenSuse comes with probably more programs than one would ever need. The first one I tried with my Archos 404 was Rhythmbox. It did not see my Archos as a portable device. The Archos has three USB settings — Windows Media mode, PC hard drive mode, and charge-only mode. Since Rhythmbox is not Windows Media, I first tried PC hard drive mode. OpenSuse did detect this and mounted the drive on my desktop, but Rhythmbox would not recognize it even after I told it where it was mounted. So in my frustration, I tried Amarok.
Amarok appears to be a very versatile program. It keeps one’s media organized, will download podcasts, will play streaming media and supposedly sync with media players. Again, it would not see the Archos. I tried it first in PC hard drive mode, then Windows Media mode and got the same results—it would not see it. I manually tried to configure it and still had no luck. The best that I could do was to copy the files over manually using Konqueror. I know I could use rsync to keep everything on the same page, but this is not intuitive.
My computer is a very standard computer. It is a Dell Dimension 8300. It has an Intel Pentium IV 2.8 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, 2 hard drives and 2 DVD/RW drives. It also has a very standard ATI Radeon 9800 Pro card that supports 3D acceleration and has 128MB of RAM on the video card. The reason I give you the specifications on it is not to impress but to state that this is a very standard personal computer. Also installed in the computer is a Hauppage PVR-150 cable television card. This card has a built-in MPEG2 encoder and is considered by many to be the paradigm of TV capture cards. Every modern Linux distribution I have installed sees this card. Most install the drivers for it. And in none of them has it ever worked. The best that I could ever do was to get a TV window open via mplayer. Under Windows, this card works beautifully.
I realize that Hauppage makes the drivers and some applications for the card for the Windows platform, and that the ivtv project does the development for the Linux side of it.
The reason I go into such detail is this:
Many Linux fans state every year that Linux is ready for the desktop — that Linux can go step for step with Microsoft and win, — that Linux will someday replace Windows as the desktop of choice for most people. This will not happen. Why?—because people want their computers to work. The vast majority do not want to fool around with configuration files that are best modified as “root” in a terminal window via vi. They want their computer to do what they want it to do, when they want it to do it. That is why, I believe, that the Mac is gaining market share daily on the desktop, while Windows is slowly loosing its iron grip on desktop computing.
I’ve had an IBM-compatible computer ever since 1988 with my Zenith eaZy PC. Before that I had an Atari 130 XE computer. Never until this year have I owned a Mac. Wanting to see what all of the fuss was about; I went onto eBay and bought a G4 Power Mac. Once I installed OS 10.4 (Tiger) I realized what all of the excitement was about. It just works! Plug my iPod in and iTunes comes up, downloads my new podcasts and automatically syncs with the iPod. Safari and Camino work well for browsing the Internets. Quicktime does a good job of playing whatever media is thrown at it. Installing a program is as simple as mounting the .dmg file and then dragging the icon into the Applications folder. Want to see your widgets? Just click on the icon in the finder bar (I think that is what that bar is called) and there are your widgets. Click it again and they go away. It is a thing of beauty. I have never thought of any operating system as a thing of beauty before this.
This is the lesson that people who write software need to learn. Most people want their computer to be an appliance that is versatile and easy to use. They do not want to muck around under the hood. They don’t want to compile their own kernel, or even want to know what a kernel is or what it does. The people who developed UNIX got this concept back in the day with having simple programs that did one, maybe two, things very well. If more was needed, the output from one program could serve as the input of another program for further processing. This same simplicity and ease of use needs to conveyed into all programs that end users will use. Until those that develop software for Linux distributions learn this, the fruit of their efforts will always be flawed.
~~Of course, that’s just my opinion—then again, I could be wrong.~~