Linux Has Run Out of Time

There's talk that the city of Munich, Germany—a bastion of open-souce idealism—will give up hope and move from its LiMux-brand of Linux to Microsoft Windows. Everyone is trying to understand this with a lot of online complaining.

I like Linux and would love to just go all-in with it as the mavens tell me I can do. But I cannot. I use these computers to make a living by writing and podcasting. I also produce photographic art as a hobby. I can't accomplish any of this with Linux.

Yes, I can kind of "get by" but that's about it. There are a lot of products that I need that will run on WINE, a chunk of code that allows Windows software to run on Linux. It's not perfect. It takes tweaking, there are all sorts of issues, and, more importantly, what's the point? If I have to run Windows applications, I want Windows, don't I?

It's like vegetarians who crave meat and eat meat-"flavored" tofu burgers instead. Again, what's the point?

I want native applications on Linux. While there are thousands of functional applications that run great they do not cut it in the end.

For example, I tried with the help of Linux experts to get a podcasting rig to run a simple digital-to-analog converter and pre-amp over Skype. Forget it. Nothing worked right. Linux did not like the gear and Skype on Linux stinks.

I also noticed a curious phenomenon within the Linux expert community of making suggestions that don't work. When called out for the fail, the expert would always say, "Well, I never tried it, I just heard that it worked." This commonality is deadly and seems universal.

Then we have Photoshop, Illustrator, and the entire Adobe universe. None of it runs on Linux natively and people "have heard" that it runs okay on WINE. This is no good. Then GIMP enters the conversation. Yes, as a Photoshop clone it's actually pretty good. But the name says it all: hobbled.

Now we move on to the Office Suite from Microsoft. There are many good competitors in this space, many free. They all seem perfect for the small office or even a city government, like in Munich. The word processors, in particular, are very much like the reliable versions of MS-Word—you know, before the appearance of the "ribbon" interface.

People in the Windows world can find these suites on Windows, too, namely Libre Office and Apache OpenOffice. Both are fully functional office suites.

Microsoft does not like these things and performed format changes, such as adding the .docx format. That was a setback for the clones because .docx became the default "save as" format for Word and too many users could not figure out how to save any other way; docx became a fly in the ointment for clone suite users. I always told people it was rude to use .docx, because it is. Not every computer user in the world can read this format.

Ironically, Microsoft didn't need to change anything. Word is just better. Excel is better. PowerPoint is better. It's that simple.

When I tried to get my own family to use the alternative Office Suites, they rejected every option. My wife, for example, likes the Windows way of tracking and saving all changes in a document, and the ability to reclaim old text. Why anyone wants to keep what I consider junk is beyond me.

Nobody was going for it. And I admit that while I do not care about tracking changes, I do like the grammar checker on Word. It needs improvement, but it does a good superficial sweep and catches little errors. This is particularly handy for professional writers, many of whom are sloppy and expect the waning army of editors to fix things. I also think the Microsoft spell checker is better than the alternatives.

If I want a word processor to create e-books, for example, or to organize large texts I use Scrivener. Does Scrivener run on Linux? Maybe someday. I still do the original writing in Word, then run it to Scrivener for organizing and compiling. Linux is not part of the scheme.

Now there may be something that shows up on Linux that everyone will have to have and we'll all have to buy a Linux box or dual boot because of it. Visi-Calc sold a lot of Apple II computers in its day—1979—because it alone ran Visi-Calc. That was then, this is now.

Time has run out for there to be a must-have killer software package on Linux. Anyone writing such an application writes it for Mac or Windows, because that's where the customers are. All the super applications for Linux are on the server side and that ends the discussion. Yes, this could change someday. But that someday is not on the horizon.

Right now Linux on the desktop remains a cheap curiosity, that is kind of fun to play with when you are bored.