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No Linux Finger Pointing, Please

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols's (in?)famous "Five Ways The Linux Desktop Shoots Itself In The Foot" has generated as much heat as it has light. I feel I can boil all five of his points down to one simple exhortation. Dear Linux community: Stop blaming other people for your own failings.

When talk turns to the reasons as to why Linux has not taken off like gangbusters on the desktop at the expense of Windows and the Mac, it's always someone else's fault. Mainly, it's Microsoft's fault. (Apple is scarcely mentioned, even if Apple effectively commands five to ten times Linux's desktop slice.) Or hardware manufacturers are blamed, for lack of device driver support -- even if one of the things about Linux that's raised as a plus is the fact that it already has robust hardware support.

I remember a time, recent enough ago that I scarcely need archive.org to read the articles that discussed it, when people were saying that Linux shouldn't care about what Microsoft (or whoever) does, and just make the best OS possible. I think I've said the same thing myself a few times as well.

I still feel this way, and I have far more respect for that attitude than I do for just blaming Microsoft out of hand. If nothing else, it's because an atmosphere of crying wolf make it all the harder to finger Microsoft when they do in fact do something wrong.

The big argument about the Linux desktop has taken on the flavor of a Catch-22. Call it the Desktop Linux Identity Crisis. If you do the hard work needed to make Linux easier for most people to use, you incur the wrath of the "community" -- in reality, a small and highly political fraction of the community whose voices are way out of proportion to their actual size and influence. You're DUMBING LINUX DOWN! they scream. (Never mind that an environment that's as hostile to experts as it is to newcomers is crippled in a way that such "dumbing-down" can only hope to approach.)

Now, if you don't do that work, Linux remains end-user-unfriendly in both design and appearance -- not just to Joe Internet, but people with genuine expertise who don't feel like devoting two hours to hand-editing their xorg.conf files just to make full use of both of their screens. They have actual work to do.

Make Linux more friendly and you alienate its staunchest defenders. Don't do that, and Linux ends up right back where it has been for a decade or more: a powerful and impressive server OS, but a desktop curiosity.

Here and there, people are beginning to do that aforementioned work. Ubuntu has their own end-user design team; Intel has the very end-user-centric Moblin; Google's Android and their forthcoming Chrome OS look like they're written with the guy behind the keyboard in mind.

Good steps, but still first steps. The other thing that has to happen throughout the Linux ecosystem -- something far more important and valuable than a unified Linux distribution -- is a unified sense of responsibility, a sense that blaming other people for what amount to your own shortcomings achieves nothing.

That's a social achievement, not an engineering one. That also might be the reason why it's been so difficult to achieve.

Code is easy. Community's hard.

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