Why Linux sucks as a Desktop OS?

Okay, the topic should be “Why Linux sucks for Windows users?”, but it mentions what I’m going to write, a bit better. This is not a Linux bashing post. It is just a real world experience. We have a background of 10 years of Linux experience on several distros, starting with Slackware 3.x.

For the past 10 months, I’m showing Beryl and all of those excellent effects to my customers, and installing Linux on request. I’m pushing Linux usage, but the results are really bad.

Here’s what happened:

• After installation, customers left our shop happily.
• No tech support requests for some time.
• After some time, people started to call us, saying “The effects are lost, and I don’t know how to turn those on”. We welcomed our guests to Linux console, where they must clear /tmp/*, X, Gnome and Beryl related settings under /home/user. Believe me, this is really hard to describe, to a Windows user.
• We got requests about random lockups. The cause is not known, and logs show nothing either. We were unable to solve those random freezes.
• Some customers started to complain about slow network connectivity, we tried everything including router change, but unable to solve the problem. (Check the Google for Slow Network Connection, especially slow DNS resolution).
• Almost all of my customers returned back, requesting deletion of Linux partition to recover space for Windows.

Now, here’s the experience list:

• Most of the Windows users don’t care security.
• Most of the Windows users don’t care virusses or trojans.
• Most of the Windows users don’t want to use commands.
• Most of the Windows users want a stable system.
• Most of the Windows users want to have “SOLVABLE PROBLEMS”.
• Most of the Windows users want to play games.
• Most of the Windows users are NOT idiots, they just want to make things easily.
• If you recommend Linux as a stable Desktop OS, you will lose customers. We did.
• If you recommend Linux as an operating system for everyday desktop use, you will find yourself in the hell of unsolvable problems.
• We compared our experience with Windows to Linux, and the result is: Windows has superior exception management for debugging purposes. At most of the situations, you get an error message saying (nearly) what’s wrong.

After all of these, our company decided to use Linux on only servers. We will not support Linux on desktop PC’s for a long time, until it is mature enough to be usable.

Coming soon to a theatre around you: CodeGear Delphi Reborn

Today is a brilliant day. When I woke up, I saw the birds were singing differently. The sun was shining more than as usual. Then I stumbled upon Nick Hodges’ post at CodeGear blogs.

The news is, at last, they have decided to rip WinForms support and C# support completely from our precious IDE. C# support will be as generic as VB.NET, which will allow only editing and compiling. Also, WinForms support will be dropped, and this means that .NET dependency for Delphi IDE will be dropped too.

Welcome to heaven!

Now, to all coders out there: Soul of Delphi 7 is coming back, with the all new features for Delphi 2007. Stay tuned, stay excited, Delphi is really returning back now.

Congratulations to CodeGear for this wise decision. We hardcore Delphi developers always loved you, and owe you much.