Kokul’s World

Ubuntu Linux has been triumphed for its easy-to-use features for new beginners. While that may be true for most consumers, it becomes difficult to use when you want to get things tweaked and running more your way.

One instance of this is Samba. Despite having a GUI interface, I just can’t seem to make it work. Thankfully, thanks to online community support at the Ubuntu Forums, it is less stressful. However, no matter what, there is always some config file to edit or executing some command in terminal. It really does become a pain. For a new user who is new to Linux, such as myself, it is really intimidating to try and get under the hood of the operating system. Yes the community documentation and support is helpful, but it still feels intimidating since changing one little line can bring down the whole operating system on the next reboot.

Another nitpick I have with Ubuntu is that when you install a program, sometimes the documentation isn’t that great. What does that mean? Well several times, I have run into the problem where installing a new app has broken another one. Either that, or the new app makes an unexpected change in some obscure config file which messes up some little hack that took me a while to do, and I have to redo that hack all over again. Sometimes it gets to a point where I am ready to throw my computer out the nearest window.

Drivers can be another mess also. Some drivers work, some work partially, and some don’t work at all or exist. For those unfortunate users who have hardware where there are no drivers, they don’t work, or they only give access to the basic hardware features, Ubuntu Linux does not seem like the greatest thing that has happened to them.

Now I’m sure there are going to be those who will strongly disagree with my viewpoint and argue that the benefits outweigh some of the problems. I do agree that they do. However, if some of these problems aren’t corrected, or even made just a little easier to solve for the end-user, it is going to be hard to get it into the mainstream for Linux overall. Case and point, ArchLinux or Gentoo. These operating systems are quite difficult to use, requiring terminal quite a bit. Some distributions of Linux do not even come prepackaged with a GUI manager such as GNOME! The user needs to use command line to run the OS, and figure out how to install the GUI themselves! Microsoft Windows became mainstream because it was easy-to-use, and there was no real need to edit any config file or run a command prompt command. One just needed to dive into control panel to control anything in the OS.