Linux for the masses … so what is important for the average user ? Well. I’ve realized I managed to use only Linux since ‘94 because I’m the antithesis of average user. I’ve asked a friend what is important. She told me
- I want to listen my music
- I want to download and organize my photos
- I want to sync my data with my iphone (sic!)
- I want to browse the net
- I want from time to time to write a document and be able to print it at work.
Easy ? not really :( and I’m a bit disgruntled about this. Let’s go in order. Here I’m using ubuntu 10.04.
Music
I’ve started with rhythembox. It’s the default music player in ubuntu. I’ve been using it for years. While configuring it on a new collection of music, the very first bug I’ve encountered is the [bug
537272](https://bugs.launchpad.net/rhythmbox/+bug/537272) . No way to
get out of it of this loop. And if you use rhythembox on a collection that comes straight from windows media player, you might imagine the frustration as wma is the default encoding. To solve this problem I converted overnight all the wma files to ogg with ffmepeg. This solves the import problem, but it should be easier…
So far, so good, but now I want to sync these songs with his iphone. Well. rhythembox does not allow you to do that, or maybe it does, but certainly not out-of-the box and in a way that I can explain to joy user. The iphone is there in the menu, but there is no way to copy music on it (it an iphone with the version 4.0 of the firmware fresh from an apple store). I’ve tried to look everywhere. It seems a very common problem and syncing indeed works with older version of the firmware, but no luck with the latest “updates”.
On top of that there are various shortcoming of the interface : searching (it seems that rhythembox is not able to search at the same time in the song title, filename, meta data and provide a list of songs that match your request) jump to the current song (I’ve to install a plugin for it even ) lyrics (right click, property, lyric .dahhhhh a bit less intuitive way ? other player do this better) well not pretty (I’ve a friend that choose a model of a laptop just because it has a white keyboard… so you can imaginable that for some people these things are important)
So I tried Exile . It’s a more usable player. The interface is more “human” with many features that make joy-user to feel home . But It crashes far too often and it does not even see the iphone.
Then I tried Listen music player that is a pretty nice player. Written in python and pretty stable. But Alas, not iphone. But much better then ryhtmbox as a player and I settled on this one for the moment.
I’ve tried also Gtkpod but there it seems it only works with older versions of the firmware.
Last I tried Amarok (on a gnome system, but I hope that the dependency system is able to install it in any case). I hoped this would work as everybody says on the net that is the most mature player out there… For me it failed to import the music library and out of frustration I gave up trying the iphone support…
Photos
I’ve been using f-spot for years. It gets better and better, but it seems that it’s default behavior of copying and reorganizing the photo collections by date is completely against the mind setting of most of the people. Why is this the default ? Let people live their life as they want ? More you try to bend them toward a different schema, more you risk to loose them in the process. F-spot has also a number of shortcomings, sometimes it crashes, but all in all it pretty usable. And it is also able to read and index photos from the iphone. Yeeee :) Something that bluffed me is the time it takes to export photos to a folder. Copying 1000 photos to a usb pen took 2 hours !!!!!!! while copying photo directly from nautilus takes only 30 mins … This was not cool.
F-spot is also terribly slow with its slide show. It does not allow to rotate photos during the slide show and sometimes it stalls up 5 to 5 seconds to redraw a new photo…
I’ve tried also showtell, the upcoming default ubuntu photo manager… It failed to import from f-spot large part of my photos on the first run. I kinda of gave up, but I’ve high hopes…
Other
I’ve to say that we often tend to focus on negative aspects. On ubuntu the chrome broweser runs very well delivering a more then acceptable user experience. Openoffice also works nicely both with old word documents and to edit new document. Thumb up here. Nothing to say.
Conclusion
When I started writing this article I had a very negative picture. I’ve to say that on a second thought things are not that bad after all. The main problem are not surprisingly proprietary formats. From wma files to the f***ing iphone. They are all playing against FOSS applications and the have the high hand all the time. We can try to catch up, but it’s difficult. And trying to explain this to the average user is difficult. They says that simple things in life should be simple. And while this is true in general, they fail to understand is that what is simple for windows / apple user is extremely difficult in the FOSS world because of the lack of open standards and commercial practice that force this state of affairs. I use an openmoko as day phone and I never had any of these problems :)