It wasn't until this year, about 12 years since I sat down and first used Windows 95 and (almost) all of its successors, that I found a description that I think is the fundamental flaw with Linux systems that is holding it back from being accepted as a mainstream alternate choice for operating software. Let me explain how I found this...
Liking my online gaming, I also like to have voice chat while I play online to talk to my relatives as we play games. A few years ago we found Ventrilo and had hours of fun playing game while using this. But, I didn't like that there was no client for Linux with Ventrilo. One day I came across Mumble, a somewhat similar application to Ventrilo. The differences? Mumble was open source software and also had (at the time) a Linux client. It was also being keenly developed. I thought this would be a viable alternate choice to Ventrilo and so, set out to convert my rellys to use it. Doing this is a pain in the ass to say the least.
Anyhow, about 4 years on we're using Ventrilo and now we get a second hand laptop from my brother and he loads Ubuntu on it for us. It's great and it's what I'm using now to type this blog entry. So I thought, "Hey, I'm going to get Mumble then I can chat on the laptop too!" Off to the Mumble website only to find that there is no latest version of the client for Linux (which is required to connect to the latest version server). I had a look in the Ubuntu package manager for it but only found an old version - useless since the server is the latest. I checked the mumble forums for any precompiled 1.2.2 binaries but to no avail.
What I did find, was this thread which, in the second post, basically sums up what I think is the main problem with Linux for the everyday user. The post says:
"With linux this isn't so easy. You'd have to release and maintain a packet for every distro / version. (Ubuntu 9.10/8.10/8.04 RedHat....and so on). This is why you have packet maintainers for the different OSses that feed your releases into the source tree of the distro.
We don't do that for snapshots/pre release version. So you either have to self-compile or find a packet from someone who did. If you have a specific request for a distribution you might be lucky and someone in this forum can give it to you."
Linux really needs either some unity across distributions for the software packages in the pakcage manager repositories or a system for applications that allows users to easily install and/or compile programs from the latest code releases.
I don't fully understand the relations and requisites required when compiling software under Linux systems, but this doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to install the latest version of my favourite softwares.
Until this can be made more user-friendly ("dubmed down" "point and click"), I can't see Linux being a reasonable alternative for the every day PC user.
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