Hello. You don’t know me, but you probably know of me. I am a Linux user. I’ve read “Running Linux” “Linux Network Administrator’s Guide”, subscribe to Linux Journal and have at one point or another tried almost every flavor of Linux out there. I think my first distribution was Caldera OpenLinux 1.0, back in the days when there were no evil Linux versions. That said, I am not a geek; I am an end-user.

I am the person the geeks mock and flame. I ask silly questions (“How the hell do I fix my magic cookies?! I am tired of having to run ‘cp .Xauthority /root/’ every time I want to run a graphical interface as root!!!”). To be sure, I used to read my log files on a regular basis, compile most programs on the system and mock those who strayed from the command-line. Secretly though I was jealous. For me, Linux is an operating system, a framework in the background that I can pretty much ignore, but that helps me more easily work on those things I feel are important: Word processing, spreadsheets, image editing, coding, email, cruising for porn, er, useful information on the web. I did not, and still do not, want to focus on the underlying OS. I want to simply use GIMP, OpenOffice, FireFox, Kontact, emacs, Kdevelop and the occasional round of Frozen Bubble.

In my quest for happy end-userness, I have over the years slowly simplified my distribution choice. OpenLinux gave way to Slackware, which gave way to Debian, which gave way to RedHat, which gave way to SuSE, which gave way to Libranet (hey! This is almost as exciting to read as Matthew 1: “Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas . . .”!). In between there have been brief flings with the likes of Knoppix and Gentoo, but mostly it has been a straightforward progression towards end-user simplicity. In that time I have neglected and forgotten most of my sysadmin skills. I update via xadminmenu and administrate via Webmin. I do not want to think much about the underlying OS. I haven’t switched to the 2.6+ kernel simply because Libranet has no easy way for me to get there (I cannot use kernel binaries: I still need to be able to recompile the kernel. That is the one thing I will not give up on). Unfortunately, with Linux you have to think about the OS. I switched from Debian to SuSE when I upgraded my motherboard and started using SATA. It just would not work at the time under Debian. I switched from SuSE to Libranet when I decided it was time to get my Hauppage TV tuner working (that, and I really hate both RPM and the SuSE file structure: Opt? Why the heck would I want opt on my hard drive?!). So I am now a Libranet user.

Life is simple in comparison with my previous distributions. It is still a pain doing my daily updates, discovering that Frozen Bubble no longer works because I’ve updated my nVidia driver, or that I’ll have to uninstall half my system, including adminmenu, if I want to install the drivers to get Kino working, but overall things are fairly stable. I may not be able to use the eraser on my Wacom digital pen in GIMP, but at least X is up and running regularly.

In comparison to my wife, and her Windows XP system, life is a lot more difficult. Her software runs, period. She does not have to chase down libraries, work out incompatibilities, wait for a driver that supports a particular chipset (and don’t even get me started on DMA/IRQ issues!), or the dozen other things I must do just to install or upgrade a software package. Do I want to switch to XP though? No. I want a Linux desktop, with its dazzling array of free and open-source applications, its security, and its cute penguin mascot, but I want it to work effortlessly. I do not want to repurchase my OS every few years or deal with draconian end-user licenses. Where do I want to go today? Anywhere my imagination takes me, not just where your restricted license says I have to go. So no, I am not interested in XP or any other Microsoft offering.

I do want my Linux applications to work with me rather than against me. This is not going to happen until at least two things occur: hardware vendors accept that there is more to the world than Microsoft and build software-agnostic components (and open-source their drivers), and Linux developers create a universal installer, preferably one with both a genius and an idiot (end-user) mode. The hardware side of things seems to be improving, albeit slowly. The software side is not.

A universal installer would either contain binaries for every possible Linux distribution and version (which would make it ridiculously large and unwieldy), or be able to compile from source on any distribution. If compiling from source, there would be a mechanism to gather the needed libraries and work out compatibility issues. This has the potential for abuse, so a decent security layer would also need to be built in. The closest installer to this so far is Gentoo’s Portage system. If it were only able to better handle all of an application’s dependencies and compatibility issues, it would be perfect. Perhaps it already is; I haven’t used it since Gentoo last failed to install with my VIA SATA chipset. Damn you, Gentoo! (although really I should be damning VIA)

With these two simple improvements, the world of Linux would be a much friendlier place. So Santa, if you would be so kind as to work with hardware vendors and Linux software developers, you could make this a very merry Christmas for at least one end-user. And for next year we could discuss the mandatory ASP-based system administration to help the rest of the users who make the switch to Linux not become spam zombies like they were when they ran Microsoft systems. Be we can discuss that later.

Sincerely yours,

Nathan “End Luser” O.

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