html> The long road to the desktop

Note: This article is quite out of date, having been started in 2001 and finished in 2002. Nowadays, unless you're an avid gamer or need a particular piece of specialized software that has no Linux version and won't work under Wine, you'll probably be fine running Linux. It's roughly on a par with the Mac as far as mainstream software functionality goes. The underlying philosophy (end users good, elitist nerds bad and self-defeating) still stands though.

"If the revolution involves me having to figure out how to recompile my kernel, count me right the fuck out."

-Erik from oldmanmurray.com

No, that's not me talking; I'm a pretty technical user and was building kernels back in 1994. But even as I deploy Linux at a variety of clients, and clients and friends and family ask me about Linux and my partner asks me to install Linux over his Windows 98 machine due to Microsoft's security problems and instability, even as far as we've come, the sentiment kind of resonates. My mom is never going to learn to compile a kernel, and should never have to.

You need to understand that "Linux" on this page refers not to the kernel but to the distribution as end users perceive it: what Richard Stallman and others call "GNU/Linux". Specifically, I've been using Mandrake Linux the last few years due to its strong desktop focus, and I'll be using that as the basis for my conclusions. There are other desktop-focused Linux distributions but Mandrake was one of the first and has come perhaps the furthest. I'm also concentrating on the apps in my partner's program group (subset of the start menu where he drags his most commonly used apps) because he uses a fairly broad range of programs regularly but isn't very technical at all. The only games I'm including are those in that group, because if I included all the retail game boxes I can see from here there'd be a lot more bold red 1's below. Heavy PC gamers have no business using anything but Windows as things stand today, despite the best efforts of Transgaming, so let's just get that out of the way.

Also, while it may be shallow, I'm not considering apps that look like they were written in the 1980's. If a user would have to figure out an interface like that of XEmacs to accomplish a task, I'm considering it impossible. No apologies. I won't restrict it to just Gtk and Qt stuff though; TiK is written in Tcl/Tk and is pretty usable, for example. You'll see this bias especially regarding sound apps, as there have been plenty of them around for years if you're the sort of guy who enjoys rolling his own DSP code and thought DOS GUI's were underrated.

Keep in mind that only a year or two ago, seriously talking about Linux as a competitor in the space currently occupied by Microsoft Windows would have just been stupid, and now people are looking at it with more than just idle curiosity. It already could replace many business desktops, as internal applications move to the web and to thin-client models. But what about the home user?

I'm going to try to include a simple rating from 1 to 5.

1 = doesn't work, probably never will
2 = early support, requires command line knowledge
3 = basic support with missing features, or Windows program runs under WINE
4 = Linux does as well as Windows (for what a home user wants to do)
5 = Linux offers better options than Windows for this application.

There should really be a 6 = no Windows version exists, but we're talking about moving someone's Windows apps to Linux so that would be kind of stupid.

App Used here for The Linux Situation Rating

ACDSee Viewing pictures quickly; browsing directories; minor image retouching There are a ton of image viewers for Linux, albeit none with a set of features exactly like ACDSee. GQView is probably the closest, but the official version doesn't let you browse through multiple images while adding them to your selection, a common task when managing a folder with many images. On the other hand, it's very easy to open an image for editing in the GIMP - one keystroke or a click on a menu item. PixiePlus is also a really promising new image browser which could easily surpass ACDSee, but not until Joe Walmart Shopper can install it without touching the keyboard. Of course, Konqueror and Nautilus also provide a lot of ACDSee's functionality natively. I use GQView myself, but I've patched it to fix that selection problem, something an end user couldn't do, and my lame-ish patches have been ignored. Still, the prognosis is pretty good except for that one minor annoyance. 4

Acrobat Reader Viewing PDF's from the web or email While there is a free Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux, even better are some of the free alternatives like xpdf or Ghostview. Ghostscript will even let you make PDF's, which costs a lot of money for a home user on Windows. Linux has the edge here. 5

Ad-Aware Scanning one's drives and registry for spyware and other malware (not viruses) installed without permission by "free" (no charge to download) software There's no such tool as this for Linux, mainly because spyware for Linux is basically unheard of. With companies like Opera Software producing ad-sponsored products, though, it's only a matter of time before one's needed. 5

Agent Read articles and download binaries on Usenet PAN is every bit as capable as Agent for these purposes. Its interface is a little different and it's not too good for posting binaries, but there are programs available to do that as well. 4

AOL Connect to and use America Online. Linux is a big zero in this department today. George is sick enough of Windows that he says he'll cancel his AOL account in order to switch to Linux, but others may not have that option. A beta version of an AOL client has been leaked, and older versions of AOL reportedly run under a commercial variant of Wine. With the news that AOL will be dropping Internet Explorer for a cross-platform HTML engine in their next release, it seems likely that this rating will increase soon. 2

AIM Connect to and use AOL Instant Messenger. Lots of Linux choices here. I use Gaim, which supports nice useless features like buddy icons. ("I believe you have my stapler") It doesn't do file transfers, but some other Linux AIM clients do. Gaim also supports other chat systems like Yahoo and ICQ, which I expect the real AIM client never will, and features like chat logging are hard to live without once you've used them. 4

Audiocatalyst Converts audio CD's to wav or MP3 files. grip does a good job and its interface is no worse than Audiocatalyst. It uses the LAME mp3 encoding engine, so its quality is much better than Audiocatalyst which uses the infamous Xing engine. However, grip is slower, not only because LAME is slower but because unlike Audiocatalyst it won't rip and encode in one pass. Also, the LAME encoding program used by grip isn't included with Mandrake Linux, so the user has to go out and find it on the net. Of course, Audiocatalyst doesn't come with Windows either so there's no real change there. Further, though, Mandrake has set grip up so that it appears the encoder used with the "LAME" setting under the "MP3" tab is oggenc, which makes Ogg Vorbis files. These sound better than MP3's but don't work with any portable audio players to date. If Mandrake is going to patch grip in this manner (entirely understandable due to the patent license issues with distributing MP3 encoders in a commercial product) they should at least include in their patch a dialog box that pops up when they start grip indicating that the MP3 setting doesn't actually make mp3's by default. You have to obtain and install a copy of LAME, change grip to use something other than LAME, and then choose LAME again. This additional confusion makes ripping CD's using Mandrake Linux still easy for technical types but unworkable for normal users until they figure out that their eyes are deceiving them. It may also have the effect of getting people to make Ogg files more, but since we chastise Microsoft for promoting WMA in this manner it seems reasonable to expect better of Mandrake. 2

Audiogalaxy Satellite Peer to peer music sharing program. They do have a Linux client, but it needs to be installed from the command line and has no user interface to show what files are coming in or out. Not a problem here but someone buying Mandrake at Wal-Mart would probably be out of luck. 2

CD Player Plays audio CD's. XMMS is what I use for this, but of course there are many others. 4

Cool Edit Editing applause out of live recordings; normalizing; occasional EQ or compression With the release of Audacity 1.0, and even more so the beta version of 1.1, Linux finally has a usable, if still fairly basic, audio editor. It is multi-track, non-destructive (even Cool Edit hasn't gotten there yet), (in 1.1) handles up to 32-bit samples, and supports LADSPA plugins as well as arbitrary import and export filters. I rate it a 3 rather than a 4 only because the really useful one is still a beta and not available in an easy to install form useful to non-technical types. Still, things are certainly looking up. As I write this, GLAME is in version 0.6.3 and starting to look useful as well, though still more developer-friendly than musician-friendly, and the more pro-audio focused Ardour continues to make slow progress as well. 3

CoolPlayer A lightweight MP3 player for when Winamp and Media Player start sucking. This is one of about half a dozen media players George uses. Basically, when one of them starts misbehaving he switches to another. This is more or less the situation under Linux as well, though things fail less catastrophically. Still, at under 64K this is one impressive little program. 4

Creatacard Gold Create, print, and email greeting cards from American Greetings' designs. I haven't tried this under WINE yet, but the likelihood of a native port is pretty slim. This one is used maybe twice a year, anyway. 1

Desktop Themes Windows control panel to select themes - sets of colors, border styles, font sizes, etc. I think this came with Plus 98. KDE and Gnome themes make Windows 98 themes look pretty lame. KDE will even force its fonts and colors on non-KDE apps when it can. As with Windows, there are many apps that don't respond to the themes, but most do. 5

F-Prot Virus scanner. There is a native Linux version of this tool now, also free for personal use. Of course, like other Linux virus scanners it tends to be more useful for finding Windows viruses since Linux has had so few. As long as Microsoft declines to port Outlook to Linux, that lack of need will probably continue for a while. 5

Favorite Radio Stations Folder containing links to various Web radio stations While web radio is slowly going away due to unbearable licensing and other money problems, many stations are still around. Linux can deal with Shoutcast/MP3, Ogg and Realplayer streams nicely. Media players such as xine with the appropriate win32 codecs can even handle MS Media Player streams, but users have to know where to get those codecs and install the players by hand (in the case of Mandrake users, Penguin Liberation Front would do the trick if anyone knew about it.) 3

Freeamp Another player he uses when the other ones crash. This one is actually free software and has a native Linux version. 4

GoZilla Download manager, to automatically schedule big downloads and resume them when they fail. I use wget along with my handy middle mouse button, but that isn't going to cut it for a normal end user. Konqueror has some download management stuff built in, like auto-resume, but programs like Caitoo and Aria provide the functionality of GoZilla without the banner ads and spyware. 5

Officejet Control Panel As far as I can tell, this is simply a dialog duplicating the front panel functions of our G55. While Linux will happily deal with the G55 as a printer, I don't know whether Mandrake includes SANE (Linux scanner support). If it does, then installing the G55 will be a plug and play affair. I'd guess the "scan to" button on the front panel probably won't work, but we've never used it. 3

ICQ Chat on the ICQ chat network ICQ programs are obsolete now that ICQ has been merged into AIM, so Gaim works wonderfully for accessing my old ICQ account. 4

Internet Explorer Browsing the web Konqueror, the KDE web browser, seems to be equivalent to IE5. It does flash, javascript, with Crossover it'll do quicktime and shockwave. It's getting hard to find popular web pages that don't work in it, and it allows finer control over Javascript, allowing the user to block just pop-up windows. I do my web banking on it. For a smaller, faster browser, Galeon is also available. It's based on the same engine as Netscape 6.x but without all the crap. It allows even finer control over pop-ups, too. Unlike IE, there have been no remote exploits in the wild to date in Konqueror or Galeon. And of course there are various versions of Netscape around, not as nice as these browsers but there are still a few sites out there that check to make sure you're running either IE or Netscape before they'll let you in. 4

K-Meleon Browsing the web This is like Galeon for Windows, using the same engine, and is George's main browser. Galeon is probably a little bit better than this, actually, due to a better preferences dialog and easier access to features like enabling animated images by site. 4

Limewire Peer to peer file sharing Written in pure Java, Limewire works fine under Linux. 4

Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet analysis StarCalc 6 and Gnumeric both do everything either of us uses Excel for, which is basically making lists and figuring out expenses. He's also started playing with GobeProductive, which exists for both Windows and Linux. And Excel, like the rest of Office, runs under Codeweavers' Crossover Office. 4

Microsoft Outlook Email and contact management I use kmail to handle my email, but under Windows I used Eudora. Someone who has a lot of Outlook contacts would probably want to use Evolution, which looks and feels like an updated Outlook but doesn't expose the user to virus attacks. If you really want to live the full Outlook experience, it runs under Codeweavers' Crossover Office. 5

Microsoft Word Word processing StarWriter 6 does everything either of us needs Word for, and more. He's also started playing with GobeProductive, which exists for both Windows and Linux. And of course Word itself runs under Codeweavers' Crossover Office. 4

mIRC Connect to Internet Relay Chat servers I don't use IRC much, but there are so many Linux IRC clients out there and IRC is such a Linux haven that the biggest problem is going to be deciding whether you want to use kvirc, xchat, ksirc or whatever. Kvirc is the closest in features and scriptability to mirc, while having no remote exploits (so far). 5

Morpheus Peer to peer file sharing Morpheus now uses the Gnutella network, meaning Limewire can replace it. 4

MP3 Editor Allows simple chopping and fading of MP3's without conversion to and from WAV. No direct Linux equivalent that I know of. There are mp3 cut and paste utilities for Linux, but command-line only. This program runs under Wine, but crashes too often to use. Of course, you can open and save mp3 files directly using Audacity, but that does cause generation loss. 2

Nero Burning ROM Burning audio and data CD's I use a set of scripts I created. Of the GUI burning tools, GCombust seems fairly popular. Nero will convert MP3's to audio CD data on the fly; I don't believe gcombust will do that. gcombust's interface is also kind of daunting, and the first time it's run it presents the user with a pretty intimidating dialog asking them to type paths to programs. Finally, gcombust must be run as root. While it will run as a normal user under Mandrake, it won't find mkisofs or cdrecord because their permissions are set to none world. Other CD burning programs include xmp3burn, which burns mp3's directly to audio CD's like Nero but is only available in source form, and kisocd, more or less the KDE version of gcombust with similar strengths and weaknesses. 3

Netscape Composer Edit simple web pages. Netscape Composer also exists under Linux, though I don't know whether it's still there in 6.x. Mandrake includes 4.x. There are no other simple WYSIWYG web editors for Linux that I know of. 4

Organic Designer Design 3D Organic Arts screen savers. While Linux has more screen savers than you could ever want, I'm not aware of any that include a facility like this to edit 3D objects within the scenes. 2

Paint Shop Pro Retouch photographs. GIMP makes Paint Shop Pro look pretty lame. George has even started to use GIMP under Windows. 5

Pong 3D update of old 70's videogame. There are a few simple 3D Pong type games available for Linux, but nothing like this. This game doesn't run under either Wine or Transgaming WineX. Hasbro has since sold its Atari properties including Pong to Infogrames, which isn't too interested in Windows, let alone Linux. 1

Quicktime Player 4 Play Quicktime videos, usually movie trailers. Version 5 runs under Codeweavers Crossover nicely. Doesn't seem to work in free versions of Wine though, and Crossover is 20 bucks. Plenty of native Linux media players will do Quicktime, but not the Sorenson video codec that 99% of today's QT videos use, so they are of little practical value. 3

realMYST Full-movement 3D version of the classic exploration game. Doesn't run under Wine or Transgaming WineX. No native port forthcoming. 1

Realplayer 7 Play Realaudio radio streams and occasional video files. Realplayer 7 works fine under Linux and Realplayer 8 should be here soon. 4

Sharp Wizard Sync Synchronize Sharp Wizard OZ-700 with Outlook address book There are plenty of Palm sync tools for Linux, and Sharp produces a Zaurus PDA which runs Linux, but the Wizard uses a proprietary protocol which requires its own Windows program to sync. However, a shareware program called XLink/Win provides fairly complete backup/sync/data management features for Sharp and Casio PDA's and apparently runs under Wine. 3

Tux Racer Downhill 3D racing game starring a penguin. Free software, available for Linux. We even bought the deluxe commercial version which works on both platforms. 4

Visio CD labels, booklets, inlays; greeting cards; mailing labels; photo layouts; basically any one-page document that doesn't fit into the word processing model StarDraw can do anything we use Visio for and more, but it won't open Visio documents directly. (We have never used Visio templates or stencils, which is good because StarDraw doesn't support those either.) We may be able to convert them to WMF or SVG files so we could at least open them to print. Meanwhile, Visio itself runs under Wine though I haven't tried this myself yet. 4

Winamp George's main audio player program. XMMS is everything Winamp is, only without the marketing. 5

Windows Explorer File and folder management. Konqueror is everything Windows Explorer is, and more. 5

Windows Media Player 7 Play Windows Media radio streams, AVI/MPEG videos and WMA/WMV/ASF files. XMMS will play MPEG videos happily, as will any number of other Linux media players. (Right now my favorite is xine.) With a quick download of some easy to find codecs, AVI, ASF and WMV files can also be played, though I've experienced stability problems when I try to do this. Of course, once again the novice user won't know where to look for the codecs or perhaps even know they need the codecs. 3

Winfax Pro Fax documents from any application that prints. I have heard that CUPS can be made to set up a print queue that then faxes documents, and I've set up network fax capability for a few clients under Linux, but Mandrake's only mention of faxes is in the inclusion of "Fax Viewer" in their start menu. 2

Winzip Open and extract files from ZIP files. Konqueror is supposed to do this without needing an external program, but there are programs like gnozip and ark which behave like winzip. Drag and drop isn't what it is with winzip, though, and the handy "check out" feature in Winzip isn't duplicated by anything I've seen. 3

XnView Image viewer for when ACDSee crashes. There's a native Linux version of XnView, but GQView is more stable. 4

Yahoo Messenger Chat on the Yahoo Messenger system. Gaim, Gabber and Everybuddy all talk to Yahoo Messenger readily, and Yahoo makes a native Linux client which isn't really as good as Gaim. 5

Current status:
11 5's
18 4's
8 3's
6 2's
3 1's

or, 37 of his common tasks can be done easily under Linux and 9 can't.

When I started this in October 2001, that was 34 yes and 16 no. He's also deleted some apps that he doesn't use anymore (such as the Dazzle Amigo program that required the no longer working Dazzle video adapter, and Napster which now sucks ass.)

I don't believe this is a representative set of applications for every potential Linux convert, but it is wider than that used by most home users while not straying too far into specialized stuff. Corporate users will tend to make use of a small subset of these applications, plus in-house stuff that tends to be more of a barrier to conversion. Linux will likely never be better at everything than Windows, but it already is as good or better at many things without involving paying anyone money or pirating software. Industry politics is now a greater barrier than usability for Linux on the typical user's desktop.