This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Why MS still rules the desktop Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

But once you're up and browsing, you notice little things. For example, Mozilla needs the Flash plugin loaded. That's reasonable. And the installation process is pretty straightforward. Except that two hours later, it still wasn't working. The Flash files are installed in the (seemingly) right directory. But still every time Mozilla comes to a page with Flash on it, it pops up a notice that Flash needs to be installed. This is exactly the sort of unexpected error message that puts my father on the hot line to sys admin (= me).

After installing Flash, before launching Mozilla has started asking the user to select a profile. I could set this to "Don't ask again," but Mozilla (latest version, by the way) doesn't record the new profile I created 8-10 times last night. (I believed I screwed this up by initially telling Flash to install itself only for one user rather than system wide.)

I spent about three hours last night trying to get the system to be able to play any form of video file. No luck. Too hard for the likes of me.

I gave up trying to get my linux server to deal with the sound card years ago. Now, it's not as if MS is the only option - for non-technical users, I would expect that a Mac would be the simplest solution - easy to set up, easy to deal with, and fewer admin issues with hack attempts. But go read the linked story - this is why Linux on the desktop is laughable at the moment. The simple stuff is just too hard for most people. Windows makes the simple stuff easy - where it falls down is in security, later. But Linux doesn't help you with that - if you can't get a printer installed or the browser to work right, you are roadblocked before anything else becomes apparent.