My wife and I have two computers - mine is a somewhat old Pentium III running Windows XP, hers is (was) an even older Pentium III running Windows 98. The years had not been kind to Windows 98, and Microsoft will be dropping support soon. I've always wanted to have a Linux machine in my house - I've been using Linux for 10 years (and therefore I pronounce it "lie-nucks" - you newcomers that call it "lin-nucks" don't know what you're talking about*). I have servers at work that I can play around with, but I wanted a machine that I could use for personal stuff.
I would love to switch my own machine over to Linux, but unfortunately, I have 6 years of data in Microsoft Money, and I can't break my Money dependence until GnuCash will automatically download transactions from OFX servers (although there have been some exciting developments on the devel mailing list). I do my best to use Cygwin to let me play around with my UNIX-like toys, however, it's just not the same as having a real Linux machine.
My wife, on the other hand, almost exclusively uses her computer for web browsing, e-mail reading, and document writing. I cleverly had her using Mozilla, Mozilla Mail (soon to be Mozilla Thunderbird), and OpenOffice.org for these tasks. I showed her Fedora a few times, but she didn't particularly want to switch. I am not easily deterred, so one night I put another hard drive in her computer and installed Fedora. This lead to some interesting conversations - she said I upgraded her computer without asking, and I said that I did ask (she just said no). But I knew I had won the battle when she said "upgraded" - Linux advocacy does work!
I set up the Big Three Applications as mentioned above and made sure they were ready for her to use. When I showed them to her, she accused me of tricking her into using them so it'd be easy to switch her to Linux. (She discovered my plan, but by now, it was too late!) Since I haven't developed any strong affiliation to Gnome or KDE, I went with Fedora's default, Gnome.
So now, the challenge was to quickly solve any issues that she runs in to before it was problematic enough to make her switch back to Windows 98. If I can succeed in this task, then I will finally have PostgreSQL, Samba, Apache/Tomcat, maybe even a little Squid and all those other great projects available at my fingertips... Err... I mean my WIFE will have a nice, stable desktop. It's a win/win situation.
So, without further ado, here is my list of problems found and solved that would have degraded the user experience of a Linux desktop for my wife:
The first thing I had to do was install the
Macromedia Flash Player 6 for x86 Linux
plugin, since my wife likes to play a few Flash games. (And, of course, you
need Flash for Homestar Runner.)
I found Macromedia's site for a Fedora plugin, but the RPM required
libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3. After failing at trying to figure out which RPM
provided that library on my own (I was new to yum - I now know that I should
have used yum provides libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3), I eventually resorted
to reading the FAQ, which told me I needed to install compat-libstdc++.
Of course, it turns out that the game that my wife REALLY likes to play requires Shockwave, and there's no Linux plugin for that without using CrossOver. But after all that work, she can't hold that against me, can she?
And then, of course, there are some sites that just don't work unless you have Internet Explorer. These sites should be severely beaten. Of course, you can always install a user agent switcher, but that won't help on some of the really broken sites.
So, I decided to try running Internet Explorer 6 SP 1 under WINE. You have to follow his instructions EXACTLY. I tried getting away with using the Fedora RPM from the WINE site, and it didn't work. Installing from source did the trick, but ActiveX controls are disabled. I hate ActiveX anyway. I haven't tried installing the Shockwave plugin yet - who knows if that will work, but it looks like it may work eventually.
Then, there was printing. You'd think that RedHat/Fedora would have figured this out by now. It was easy enough to set up the printer using CUPS, but Mozilla didn't have any way to set whether you wanted to print in draft or normal mode, for instance. So, I created a new printer instance in CUPS with one set to draft and one set to normal, figuring that you could at least select between two different printers... but no. If you want to change printers, you have to know the command line options for lpr. That's not good enough.
So, I did some searching. Ah! Mozilla can do things like that using Xprint. Er, except RedHat rather rudely does not support Xprint in their Mozilla builds. Which is fine, except they should provide another way to provide the same functionality. Sure, you can set $MOZ_PRINTER_NAME, but that doesn't make it easy to switch between printers, does it?
I could easily write a script that would pop up and let my wife pick which
printer to use, but I figured there HAD to be someone who has written a GUI
for this. I stumbled across XPP, which I won't even provide a link to because
it depends on FLTK, which didn't compile and provided no documentation on
required libraries to get it to compile. I finally discovered
KPrinter.
I'll spare you the story of trying to figure out which RPM provided KPrinter,
since I now know how to properly use yum (yum provides kprinter).
Plus, it turned out that it had already been installed. All I had to do was
change the lpr command in Mozilla to kprinter --stdin, and not
only can you switch printers, you can change printer settings. KPrinter is
a great tool.
But, I feel obligated to ask, how could RedHat/Fedora and Gnome overlook functionality like this? How is someone who is not technical supposed to figure these things out? Why isn't there a Gnome equivalent of KPrinter? I can understand why I had to figure out the above problems on my own because they involve non-free software, but this is just an ease-of-use issue where an open-source solution exists. If RedHat wants their distribution to work for non-technical desktop users, you'd think they'd fix this. Mandrake probably has this working, but I'm cheap. I'm all for promoting the Linux desktop, if it continues to be as poorly integrated as this, that makes my case pretty hard.
* "Linux" is based off Linus Torvald's first name. You don't pronounce "Linus" as "lin-nus," do you? Sure, you say Linus differently when you're speaking Finnish, but nobody pronounces Linux as "lee-nooks" just because that's how Linus says it in his native tongue.