Why Linux on the Desktop is Wrong

Problem is.. OSS doesn't always have the same incentives as the customer. I use my machine about 80% of the time for games. Of those, maybe *2* have Linux clients, perhaps half will work under WINE, or one of its variations, maybe. In terms of other things.. MS did quote well in making integrated debugging systems and language metrics, to tie all it together. Linux has offered what? Mono, which isn't even theirs, and which doesn't support linkable methods to add script easily to applications? Yeah, I am sure I heard of one other, but its some higher end thing, that *has* a license that isn't OSS. Same goes with 3D stuff, which I work with, etc. Gimp has gotten a lot better, but it still has some issues with layout, and possibly with support of some plugins (especially filters, but then so does PSP X, which I prefer over spending $500 for a glorified paint program), which make it annoying to use. Blender... maybe if I sat down with it a month I might learn enough of its quirks to not pull my hair out trying to remember where stuff is, or playing "Wordstar" with it, trying to remember which 14 keys to press to get a result. If I want Nurbs, its probably going to be Rhino, not an OSS program, which "supports" them to some limited degree, but not really. Same with almost everything else in that category.

OSS has a handicap. It gets produced to do what who ever started the project wants, to some extent, locked into interface designs that make no sense, then gets added to, not by people trying to make it easier, but people trying to make it do "more", without necessarily ever doing one thing very very well. And, even when it does, half the time the documentation is the last thing ever bothered with, so you get idiot things like, "Offset - holds the offset rotation.", but with a) no example of how to use it, b) no idea how to set it, etc. There is an entire page in the OSS Imprudence client for OpenSim/Second Life, which contains a list of math functions like that, which you can use in setting values, and ***one*** simplistic example of how to use like 2 of them, which fails to address the most common reason for using them at all, which is things like setting all three values at once, base on an *existing* rotation. (The client uses Euler to show what its set to, but the client uses Quaternion internally, which makes a damn mess, because something like ends up as , when you are done, but ***only*** if you have some way to take and *multiply* it with . This has to be done to "all" rotations at once, in principle, but there is nothing in the examples that tells you how the hell to do that. Euler, by itself, gimble locks, which means setting a rotation never come out "right". The Offset is worse, since there is no way to even enter that, so if you can't enter it, how the client knows what it is, when you use it... And so on.)

If you are talking about OSS in terms of shifting people from Office to OpenOffice, or MS Outlook to Firebird, sure.. The rest of us have to work for a damn living, and that means having usable help files, sane documentation, and not having to bloody guess what the hell a parameter actually does, or how to use it, especially when its the feature we *need*. OSS, in this respect, often seriously pisses me off. If its not hidden some place that makes no sense to me, its not documented properly. As bad as MS is, except for something moving things for no damn reason, they, and most of the proprietary people, know that people need to be able to figure out how to use the damn program, not just the 4 people that came up with it on sourceforge, and anyone willing to spend weeks asking each other questions about, "Ok, so what they hell does XGWET do exactly?", never mind the new guy that has to hunt through 4 years of forums posts, error reports, and people going, "I haven't a clue.", before finding the post that explains it.

I would love to keep some of the proprietary I have. Sadly, its shackled, using unobtanium and krpytonite, to MS' wrist. And that is a much bigger problem than, "Not enough people use OSS."