CNET’s Stephen Shankland blogs Walt Mossberg’s opinion that much-heralded Ubuntu Linux, now avaiailable as an option on Dell Machines, isn’t ready for prime-time. My experience is that if you can keep users in Firefox, Thunderbird or Evolution, even OpenOffice.org, things are OK.
Once they stray and start trying to open packages listed under the apps menus, or hook up their digital camera (which may well work… it’s just where do the pix go…?) things get iffy. And while software updates exist (my fresh Ubuntu install wants to update 118 packages -most of which I don’t have a clue about what they do) the process is bewildering, time-consuming and failure-prone. Linux’ geek roots are still too evident… if you want ‘easy Linux (BSD, actually)’ buy a Mac…
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Linux was once very simple for geeks to use and had no user applications. Corporations, in making it halfway accessible to users, made it impossibly complex for geeks to use. So now neither Geeks nor users are finding it useful.