After hearing and reading about how freakin awesome Ubuntu is from friends and all the fanboys on various tech sites I decided to give it a try. I have an older laptop that I thought would be a perfect candidate for exploring the world of Ubuntu. According to everything I have read Ubuntu is easy to use and is a perfect Linux distro to displace the Windows dominance in the desktop market. I figure I have nothing to lose so I decide to jump right in and load the OS to my laptop. Everything went well and I was up and running with Ubuntu. Nice. That’s when the anger and frustration set in.

Issue #1: Wireless

The first thing I attempted to do was get the wireless working. My previous experience with Windows made me believe this would be simple. Oh how wrong I was. I had to dive into the terminal and grab NDIS Wrapper and then run some commands to get this to work. With all of that done I tried again but I was still unable to connect to my wireless router. At this point I was ready to throw the laptop out the window. Off to the forums. After reading a number of forums I tried a few different solutions and finally found the one that worked. I lost count of how many hours I spent on this but I was finally able to download the correct files and after running some more commands in the terminal my wireless connection was up and running. Wooo-hoooo!

Issue #2: Connecting to a Windows Network

This one is still not resolved but apparently it is due to a bug in the Gnome Desktop Environment that is apparently not worth anyone’s time. I set up my Windows machine as a server and it was all set to share selected folders as well as the printer. So I go to my Ubuntu machine and attempt to access it. Of course it is not that simple so I had to download a number of packages and once again run commands in the terminal. With all of the steps completed I was able to browse to my Windows shares and everything seemed to be working perfectly. That is until I open the Windows workgroup and encountered an empty folder. I can get to it but none of the shared files appeared.

Once again it was off to the forums. All of them seemed to be full of people with this same issue and there were plenty of helpful experts there giving advice.  Everyone seemed to provide different advice and none of the recommendations actually worked. Following the links that were provided by different people invariably landed me on the same bug report page that informed me that this was a known bug in Gnome and that there was no fix as of yet. Sweet! In the meantime I was easily able to access my Linux machine from the Windows machine with a couple of clicks. Easy. This was not the last of the issues I encountered but the others were not as difficult to overcome. They were still annoying and would probably turn off the average user.

I Like Ubuntu But…

Honestly, I like Ubuntu. For simple every day tasks it is easy to use. Surfing the Internet and using Open Office is not a problem and not much different than using a Windows machine. I also love the fact that it is open and customizable. I can easily change the way my desktop looks and customize the way the system performs and functions to suit my needs. This is great. The problem is when it comes to more complex tasks (that are really not that complex) it becomes convoluted and aggravating. Things like setting up a network or simply accessing a Wireless connection become time consuming and require some knowledge that the average user simply does not have. With Windows these tasks are extremely easy. With Ubuntu it requires downloading a number of packages, unzipping them, running commands in terminal, and then searching through the various forums and blogs to get everything working correctly. The average user is never going to do this. They just want their computers to work and like it or not Windows (and Apple computers) work right out of the box and do everything an average user wants them to do.

I like the challenge that Ubuntu presents. It can be frustrating at times but when I am able to solve an issue I get a sense of satisfaction. I am also constantly customizing and tweaking the environment, which is limited or not possible in a Windows or Apple OS,  so I like that too. I am not an average user though. The average user wants to turn their computer on and get on with the task at hand. They don’t care about customizing their OS and they certainly don’t want to open up the terminal and enter command lines to get the Internet to work. Until Ubuntu and other Linux distributions are able to balance the open aspects of the OS with the needs of the average user who just wants it to work they will not gain a significant share of the desktop market. No matter how much the fanboys shout.

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