Interesting percentage

Posted Jan 11, 2003 14:41 UTC (Sat) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

I think the oft-cited claim that "Linux may be good for servers but it doesn't have a chance on the desktop" is wrong, and that the people who claim it are looking too much at home use and not enough at the corporate desktop. Furthermore, I expect that when people get used to using Linux at work, they will want to use it at home too, just like the way it happened with MS Windows. The future is bright.

You are right with one caveat: the install problem. At work, there's a sysadmin to install whatever OS on your computer.

Most users, however, are not competent to install an OS, even if the install is RedHat easy. (And, yes, the RedHat install is pretty bloody easy.) From what I'm told, the Windows install nowadays is harder than the RedHat install... but that doesn't matter, because you can buy a computer with Windows preinstalled.

Until you can just as easily buy a computer with Linux preinstalled as you can one with Windows or MacOS, Linux is going to have a hard time taking off amongst the home users. The only folks who use it will be people like us (who are competent and indeed prefer to install the OS ourselves), and people with family members (or close friends) like us. And I'm not talking the $300 WallMart PCs. You need to be able to walk into a CompUSA, and find the Linux machines (with running demos) sitting in a section next to the section with the Mac machines and the Windows machines. I would never want such a machine myself; I'd rather have the bare metal and install my OS myself. But most people probably don't even realize that you can install your own OS; you buy the computer with something on it, and that's what the computer has.

There are of course security issues too.... RedHat probably is getting pretty close to the point that a user could configure services, accounts, etc. well enough entirely from the GUI. (I hate this myself; I do *not* want to use GUI tools for that kind of system administration. If that becomes the norm, we will see that all those studies which show a sysadmin can run x times more Linux boxen than Window machines will start to turn around. I'm convinced of the crippling inefficiency of a GUI for somebody who really knows what he's doing and wants to do things in bulk. On the other hand, this is better for the individual home user, so long as the rest of us geeks still have distros where we can configure things the way we prefer.)

And, of course, a grue home user distro should ship with a very secure default installation. Use stateful iptables to let *nothing* in, and only let stuff out. Don't even be running sendmail (or exim or whatever your MTA is), don't have inetd answer ftp or telnet or anything else, don't enable SMB servers or NSF servers by default. Anybody who wants to use that kind of stuff should have to learn how to enable it, as just a minimum barrier to give a slight chance that people using it will be aware of security issues.

-Rob