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 :)