Ubuntu 9.10 still not ready for the masses
It's a long story (and a half-written post), but I am now running Ubuntu 9.10. And I just had a disappointing experience.
I have two computer screens. It's common enough nowdays. I've never had much trouble with the two screens in Windows, but it's always a PITA in Linux.
When I was in Ubuntu a couple of days ago, I managed to set everything up as such: one big virtual desktop, with the taskbar and launchbar on the left screen (the LCD, and the screen closer to my face.) When I just rebooted into Ubuntu, both screens had nothing but the wallpaper (and an identically placed mouse pointer) on them.
"Oh no," I thought to myself. "Ubuntu thinks both of these monitors should be displaying the right side of the screen." A quick test with the mouse pointer confirmed my hypothesis. So I hit ctrl+shift+F1 to get to the command line interface. I logged in, opened /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and changed the size of my virtual display from "2560 x 1024" to "1280 x 1024". I rebooted and all was well.
It took me five minutes. But it struck me: the average person couldn't do that in five minutes. From diagnoses to resolution, there are several steps in there that would send the average computer user running to the help forums. If that happened to my father, he'd send me a text message saying his computer isn't working. And even though I was able to fix the problem, I shouldn't have to deal with this crap anymore.
Conclusion: 2010 is not going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
I have two computer screens. It's common enough nowdays. I've never had much trouble with the two screens in Windows, but it's always a PITA in Linux.
When I was in Ubuntu a couple of days ago, I managed to set everything up as such: one big virtual desktop, with the taskbar and launchbar on the left screen (the LCD, and the screen closer to my face.) When I just rebooted into Ubuntu, both screens had nothing but the wallpaper (and an identically placed mouse pointer) on them.
"Oh no," I thought to myself. "Ubuntu thinks both of these monitors should be displaying the right side of the screen." A quick test with the mouse pointer confirmed my hypothesis. So I hit ctrl+shift+F1 to get to the command line interface. I logged in, opened /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and changed the size of my virtual display from "2560 x 1024" to "1280 x 1024". I rebooted and all was well.
It took me five minutes. But it struck me: the average person couldn't do that in five minutes. From diagnoses to resolution, there are several steps in there that would send the average computer user running to the help forums. If that happened to my father, he'd send me a text message saying his computer isn't working. And even though I was able to fix the problem, I shouldn't have to deal with this crap anymore.
Conclusion: 2010 is not going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.