One of the main problems with Linux adoption is drivers. Webcams, MP3 players, wireless cards, voice recorders–most of them are problematic, and some of them are downright unusable on Linux. In fact, drivers are kind of a mess everywhere–pop quiz: Where’s your CD of that PCMCIA card driver? How quickly can you navigate a company’s website to download a new driver? Don’t forget the ambiguous, equivocal and generally misleading UI that seems to be standard in all driver-providing websites.

I have a solution: The creation of the UDR–Unified Driver Repository.

Here’s how it works:

Somebody–be they a Windows, Mac or Linux user–gets a new piece of hardware, and tentatively plug it in to their computer. If it works they move on with their life. If it doesn’t, they open up the (cross platform) UDR client, type in the model number of their new hardware, and–a la Synaptic–put a check mark next to the appropriate driver (which must be available for all three platforms, for free). They close the UDR client, it downloads and installs the driver, and zap! you have a driver.

Sound simple? It’s supposed to be.

The question is: Why would hardware makers spend the extra time and money on submitting their drivers to the UDR? Easy: Good old capitalistic competition. Consumers like the ease of the UDR. Consumers prefer hardware compliant with the UDR. Hardware makers that put their drivers in the repository will receive more business than those that don’t. Even if it means making the driver compatible for more platforms.

Naturally, Microsoft is going to join the fray. They’ll release their own, proprietary version, they’ll make it Windows-only, they’ll poke fun at Macs and Linux, and they’ll figure out how to make money off of it (at a guess, I’d say through charging the hardware makers a fee to be included on The List). That’s fine–they’ll lose anyway. Why? For the same reason nobody would use IE if Firefox had come out first. Why go with a proprietary, single platform imitation when the ‘real deal’ is better and free? The only reason is that companies would be just as happy to only release a Windows driver, but if the original UDR is good enough, that’s a faceable problem. The Linux (and open source in general) community has dealt with more serious issues.

And can you imagine walking into a store, and seeing that brand new wireless card have a sticker on it proclaiming “UDR Compliant”, with a penguin, apple and window logo? I sure want to.

A consistently hot topic is Linux adoption–when it will reach a majority, what should be done to encourage it, and who should adopt it.

The first part is easy, it will be the year <insert name of upcoming year here>. The second part…I don’t really have a strong opinion on, because the third part is related but more important.

Andrew Min made the point, in his article “Why games are the key to Linux adoption”, that the people to convert to Linux are gamers. CNET agreed, and ArsTechnica just released a related and encouraging article. When I first read all that, I was like “Dude! That is so true! Excellent call!” But now that I’ve thought about it, I have one problem: The title’s too short–it should read “Why games are part of the key to Linux adoption”. Because as important a market share as gamers are, and as much as they would raise Linux’s profile, there’s a very important type of person left out:

Your common, technically inept, noob.

You know the type–uses a computer for emai (kindly provided by either AOL or their cable company), minor documents and maybe a bit of web surfing. No high-powered games. No business-critical apps. Just Outlook (/Express), Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Internet Explorer. In short: perfect for Linux.

Time for some evidence.

Modern Linux (especially Ubuntu) is ridiculously simple. Burn the CD (which, as the hardest part, has the easy shortcuts of “buy one” or “order Ubuntu for free from ShipIt!”), boot off CD, follow easy graphical prompts, go and make a cup of tea while the installer formats your hard drive and copies several gigabytes onto it, come back, follow intuitive menu, launch required apps, done.

Anti-virus? No need. Spyware? Nonexistent. Routine system maintenance? Not necessary. Bloat? Nada.

Granted, OpenOffice.org (or Abiword) are not quite as powerful as MS Office. And sure, Evolution/Thunderbird aren’t quite as powerful as Outlook/Outlook Express. But for common tasks–who really cares? It’s not like soccer moms are writing research papers, or syncing with Exchange.

And I can personally guarantee that both the amount of tech support calls, and the number of “Honeeeeeeeey! Why did the computer just do that!?”s will decrease.

The one problem is that it’s new. And it requires learning something different. And if only geeks talk about it, you must need to be one to be able to “work it.” But if mainstream OEMs make enough pre-installed Linux boxes, and enough geeks convert their parents, Linux won’t be new, it’ll be “That thing with the funny African name that all the normal people use.”, handily replacing “What’s an operating system? Oh, well I don’t use a Mac.” And after it spreads a bit more, Windows will be “that expensive thing that gamers and business executives and weird people use on their computers. I’m glad I don’t have it–it seems like it keeps breaking for them.”

Dear Microsoft,


I just wrote to you, and I know you haven’t had a chance to ponder everything I said. However, something else has recently come to my attention, which I think you should know about.

About two months ago, the Windows XP installation on my beautiful dual-boot system got corrupted. Even though Ubuntu is very good at playing the scapegoat for Windows’ errors, Ubuntu was actually not at fault: “Microsoft Windows XP” was available in my GRUB menu, and loaded enough to show me a DLL error. My Windows Recovery Disk was in the wrong continent, and frantic ransacking of your official website and Google proved fruitless. I drew a deep breath, and started using Ubuntu full-time.

Recently however, I came across an ingenious workaround: using a product called BartPE to launch winnt32.exe from my otherwise-dead C drive. This enabled me to reinstall Windows. I now present my humbly constructive criticism of the process, with examples of how the GNU/Linux world does it better.

*The disk itself. Now lookie here–I am a legal Windows owner. I have a product key and everything. Mistakes happen, and I find it unreasonable to expect that every single Windows owner is going to keep their disk in good condition (and easily accessible.) You should have an option to download the .iso from your website, and only make it worth anything with the product key and activation. No, I would not like to pay the OEM to send me another one. Now that I think about it, I don’t even want to waste time/money having it  come through the mail–a simple burn is all I need. Take GNU/Linux: Lost the CD? No problem, it’s easily burnable, and you don’t even need a product key (though I understand it’s necessary to prevent piracy)(which Linux vendors don’t have to deal with.)

*Setup. When I installed Ubuntu, I started Setup, selected a few options: time zone, keyboard layout, language, partition and username/password. Then I hit a button, and everything was done at once. I could go have a cup of coffee while it worked, and come back to a beautifully installed system. Whilst installing Windows, it was something like this: Select, wait, select, wait, reboot, select, wait, select, wait, reboot. This is not efficient. I won’t even get into the sheer ugliness of the text-based installer, when you could load a pretty graphical one. And I have yet to figure out why you don’t use (or clone) gparted for partitioning–it’s very convenient to see how your parititions are laid out, not just take an educated guess based on seemingly arbitrary numbers displayed on the screen.

*Drivers: The first thing I noticed was that my beautiful widescreen had been compressed to something the size of my fist–something I would like to use against whoever made the driver decisions at Redmond (the fist, not the beautiful widescreen.) However, I took a deep breath and said, “No problem, I’ll just download it from Sony’s website.” That’s when I discovered that neither wireless nor wired networking was working. And I can’t install the appropriate drivers because they control the internet, and I need the internet to get them, and you see where I’m going. Great. Luckily, I had a backup of the previous, driver-full XP install, and Windows was gracious enough to recognize my external hard drive. I forget if I used the Device Manager or the Add New Hardware wizard to install the WLAN driver–I just remember being frustrated by both, and having Windows search through the “Drivers” directory more than a few times before it found the appropriate file. Once the internet was working, I fired up Internet Explorer 6. I immediately wished I hadn’t, but I realize that most of my complaints have been realized in IE7, so I won’t vocalize them. Whilst navigating to and through Sony’s website, I realized that the right side of my touchpad didn’t scroll. Frustration. And I especially needed to scroll since the screen resolution was so shrunken. I finally got and installed (a time-consuming process in itself) all the appropriate drivers. Let’s compare this to Ubuntu, where the only thing that didn’t work out of the box (er, burned CD) was my sound, an issue easily rectified through a simple graphical utility, appropriately labelled “Sound Preferences.” I’m still not sure what I would’ve done if I didn’t have the backup of my old (driver-full) install. I’ll give you a hint as to what probably would’ve happened–there’d be one less NTFS partition on my hard drive.

*Updates. I understand that XP is on SP3. My installation was slipstreamed with SP1. I had to update once for security reasons. Reboot. I had to update a second time to get SP2. Reboot. I had to upgrade again for security reasons and IE7. Reboot. I haven’t gotten to SP3 yet, because I ran out of free time to reboot in. I also was getting kind of crotchety about the repetitiveness of the whole thing. The only ‘booting I would like to do at this moment is that which involves my foot connecting with something squishy and stress-relieving. Meanwhile, Ubuntu lets you select one of three options:

1. Show a small, noticeable-but-unintrusive icon when updates are available, and let the user download and install them in one click. Only reboot if the kernel itself is upgraded. If rebooting is necessary, allow it to be postponed in one click, and not pop up every ten minutes with a countdown timer.
2. Show a small, noticeable-but-unintrusive icon when updates have been downloaded, and are ready to be installed in one click. Only reboot if the kernel itself is upgraded. If rebooting is necessary, allow it to be postponed in one click, and not pop up every ten minutes with a countdown timer.
3. Download and install updates in the background. Only reboot if the kernel itself is upgraded. If rebooting is necessary, allow it to be postponed in one click, and not pop up every ten minutes with a countdown timer.

As you can see, only one action is required to make a dinosaur system fully updated.

As I told you before, I’m sure I can find many more grievances, but I think these are the most important ones.

Have a nice day, and best of luck,

Timmy Macdonald
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Dear Microsoft,

First of all, I’d really like to thank you. MS Office is, in my opinion, the best office suite on the market. Windows has made many contributions to home computing–first and foremost instilling the concept that computers are for everyone–not just socially deprived nerds. Though Windows remains a fairly effective way of getting things done, I decided to switch to GNU/Linux this summer for reasons of my own. I really like the view from there. That said, I’d like to ask after some basic features implemented in Windows that are standard (as free, open-source software no less) in GNU/Linux.

*Updating. Updating Windows is a painful process–the OS itself tends to pop up unexpectedly, chew up needed bandwidth, and restart at inopportune moments. What’s more, individual pieces of software must all be updated individually. This is, quite frankly, a pain in the neck. It can’t be difficult to integrate ONE, all-inclusive, non-intrusive updating utility. Yes, it might be an extra step for application developers. No, I do not sympathize with them. Please do this.

*Workspaces. Workspaces aren’t a very big deal…but they’re darn handy. Yes, I know I can download them for Windows from your “PowerToys” section, but there is no good reason they’re not included on a vanilla install. And I can’t really think of a reason it doesn’t include transition effects when you move between them.

*Themes. I believe there are 3 legal themes for Microsoft Windows XP. This has got to stop. Yes, I like blue. No, I don’t like it that much.

*Sensible administration privileges. I really like the concept GNU/Linux has which is that programs run on the lowest permission level they can. This is instrumental in stopping spyware. I feel unsafe when I’m logged in as a Windows administrator. Is that the attitude you want?

*Filesystem. Ext* (especially Ext3) is better than NTFS. No defragmenting, more reliable, please switch. There is no shame in this.

*Open document formats. Both releasing all of your own document formats, and adapting MS Office to include Open Document files. Natively.

*System resources: Why is it that my Ubuntu installation runs faster than a friend’s Vista installation…with 8 times the RAM, and ~double the processor? And functionality is debatably the same, to boot.

*Internet rendering: I know you can convince IE to pass the Acid3. It’s OK to shamelessly copy & paste Firefox/Chrome’s source code, that’s what it’s there for.

Please take these suggestions (and I’m sure there are more that I have yet to think of) into consideration. For the good of your product. For the good of your company. For the good of your millions of users. Please.

With warm regards,

Timmy Macdonald

I think GMail has made an error.

No, it’s not a big error, and yes, it’s still my favorite web-based email service.

But they still messed up with GMail Labs.

It’s a great idea, so far it’s giving off great fruit, and I would be a sadder person today if it did not exist. That said, I was kind of interested in how to develop for it. So I went to the Labs portion of my Settings page, scrolled to the bottom, and was told:

Looking for something we don’t have? Suggest a Labs feature or join the Gmail team and write your own!

Lame! There are probably hundreds of people who would love to get a development kit from GMail and write their own Labs features, host them externally, and suddenly POOF! GMail would have hundreds of plugins, and it would suddenly be just as awesome as Firefox or gedit or vim! I’m not saying GMail needs to release its source. All I’m saying is that they should release enough of it for developers.

FAQ

Q: How would this help Google?

A: It would make GMail much more powerful, giving it an edge over the competition.

Q: How would this help me?

A: It would provide you, the GMail user, with a much more powerful interface.

Q: Why do you keep using the phrase “much more powerful”?

A: Because it sounds better than “powerfuler”.

Q: That was a terrible answer.

A: And that’s not a question. Are we even?

Q: But, couldn’t you just submit a feature request?

A: Yes, but it’d have to be an exceptional idea for the official GMail staff to make it. Opening it up would provide a lot more people willing to code, which would make the good ideas happen too.

Q: What if this crashes GMail?

A: They already have the option to open GMail without Labs.

Q: What about privacy?

A: I’m sure there’s a way to give developers enough control to develop, but not enough control to feed them your personal information.

Q: What about Better GMail/Greasmonkey? (Thanks, Peter)

A: First of all, native is better than third-party. Second of all, a LOT of end users don’t know about/care about Better GMail/Greasmonkey. Third of all, Better GMail/Greasemonkey only works on computers you install it on, while what I propose would be universal for your account.