Lin­ux seems like the per­fect so­lu­tion for the new brand of portable PCs, net­books. It’s ef­fi­cient, re­quires few re­sources, and can run most if not all of the pro­grams one usu­al­ly runs on such small com­put­ers - word pro­cess­ing, email, web brows­ing, and so on. Large, com­plex soft­ware pack­ages that re­quire Win­dows to run per­form abysmal­ly on low-pow­er com­put­ers like net­books, so ef­fec­tive­ly the need to run Win­dows is nul­li­fied.

Why, then, do con­sumers (and re­view­ers!) choose Win­dows over Lin­ux for net­books?

(In the re­main­der of this ar­ti­cle, I will refer to “Lin­ux” when I some­times mean “the Lin­ux com­mu­ni­ty” and oc­ca­sion­al­ly “the open-source com­mu­ni­ty at large”.)

User In­ter­face

I think the prob­lem is two-fold. First, Lin­ux’s user-in­ter­face is still not up to par with that of Win­dows, even Win­dows XP. GNOME’s user-in­ter­face has not been tru­ly up­dat­ed for years, and the ba­sic com­po­nents of a Lin­ux UI - the file man­ager (Nau­tilus), the web browser (Fire­fox) sim­ply don’t run as well as their Win­dows coun­ter­parts. By some trick or sleight of hand, Win­dows Ex­plor­er and Fire­fox on Win­dows sim­ply run faster than on Lin­ux. No, it’s not mea­sured in raw per­for­mance - if any­thing, web page ren­der rates on Lin­ux should be faster. When the user clicks a but­ton in Win­dows, or dou­ble-clicks a file fold­er, or any­thing of the sort, the com­put­er sim­ply re­sponds faster. Espe­cial­ly if the com­put­er is new, com­put­er re­spon­se time in Win­dows is al­most in­stant.

This is not true with Lin­ux. Even though Win­dows tends to slow down far past the level of Lin­ux with time, and Lin­ux more con­sis­tent­ly main­tains re­spon­se time, that first im­pres­sion of the Win­dows in­stant re­spon­se is pow­er­ful. I can’t put my fin­ger on what caus­es it right now, but cer­tain op­tions in the Lin­ux ker­nel con­fig seem to help. On the whole though, the Lin­ux sys­tem is tuned more for con­sis­tent per­for­mance than in­stant­ly over­rid­able user re­spon­se.

This is ev­i­dent when run­ning mul­ti­ple, in­ten­sive tasks at on­ce. Lin­ux slows down, but ev­ery­thing in the GUI is still click­able. Win­dows, how­ev­er, is much less ca­pable at han­dling com­plex mul­ti­task­ing. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the or­di­nary user doesn’t care.

Over­all, Win­dows is just more pleas­ant to use. This is a com­bi­na­tion of the above-de­tailed re­spon­se time ef­fect, and al­so be­cause Lin­ux’s in­creased flex­i­bil­i­ty, al­so per­tain­ing to the UI, hin­ders us­abil­i­ty. Sim­ply put, the Lin­ux UI needs to be bet­ter de­signed, for or­di­nary users and not for de­vel­op­ers or hack­ers or pow­er users.

Eco­nomics

The sec­ond prob­lem is one of eco­nomics. There are two types of goods in a sim­ple eco­nomic anal­y­sis - nor­mal goods and in­fe­ri­or goods. Nor­mal goods are those that you buy more of as your in­come in­creas­es. In­fe­ri­or goods, on the other hand, are goods that you buy on­ly when your in­come is very low. A com­mon ex­am­ple in eco­nomics is sin­gle-ply toi­let pa­per - nor­mal­ly, peo­ple on­ly buy cheap toi­let pa­per when they have a great need to save money. Wealth­ier in­di­vid­u­als avoid the pro­duct al­to­geth­er.

My propo­si­tion is that Lin­ux is cur­rent­ly be­ing seen as an in­fe­ri­or good. This ZD­net blog post ex­plains the si­t­u­a­tion per­tain­ing to Lin­ux in Africa. Ra­dio sta­tions, an im­por­tant tool for com­mu­ni­ca­tion in Africa, prefer to use pi­rat­ed ver­sions of Win­dows in­stead of le­gal­ly ob­tained copies of Lin­ux. The Lin­ux dis­tri­bu­tions pro­posed are specif­i­cal­ly de­signed for their broad­cast­ing pur­pos­es, and in ba­si­cal­ly all re­spects have bet­ter-de­signed UIs (for broad­cast­ing) than Win­dows. In this case, Lin­ux is ob­jec­tive­ly more suit­ed for their pur­pos­es, so why do the ra­dio op­er­a­tors prefer Win­dows?

Ac­cord­ing to that post, Win­dows is seen as a “first world stan­dard”, and to the ra­dio sta­tions, en­cour­ag­ing them to use Lin­ux seems like try­ing to “cheat lo­cal peo­ple out of get­ting the same qual­i­ty of soft­ware that is used in the de­vel­oped world”. In this case, Lin­ux is seen as the in­fe­ri­or good. It is seen as the pro­duct that one choos­es to use on­ly when one does not have the eco­nomic re­sources to use a “bet­ter” pro­duct, like Win­dows.

Part­ly, I blame pre­vi­ous (and in some cas­es still on­go­ing) ad­ver­tis­ing and pub­lic­i­ty for Lin­ux as a “low-cost al­ter­na­tive” to Win­dows. The use of both those terms have cre­at­ed huge prob­lems for Lin­ux’s im­age to­day. It is seen as be­ing the cheap­er “ver­sion” of Win­dows - that which one would buy on­ly if they lacked the abil­i­ty to pay for Win­dows. It is al­so paint­ed as an “al­ter­na­tive”, and com­bined with the ef­forts (well-placed!) of such pro­jects as wine and OpenOf­fice.org to en­sure Win­dows com­pat­i­bil­i­ty, cre­ates again an im­pres­sion that Lin­ux is try­ing to live up to Win­dows, and should on­ly be used when one has no other choice. In­stead of cre­at­ing choice, Lin­ux seems to have in a way lim­it­ed it.

So­lu­tions?

I hon­est­ly don’t think very many peo­ple, if any­one, has a so­lu­tion to Lin­ux’s per­sis­tent im­age and mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion prob­lems. I think Ubun­tu, my pre­ferred and fa­vorite Lin­ux dis­tro, is the on­ly dis­tri­bu­tion so far to even come close to a us­able, well-re­spect­ed Lin­ux dis­tri­bu­tion. (In my opin­ion, it’s more well-re­spect­ed than us­able.) I don’t claim to have the an­swers ei­ther. How­ev­er, I do think that Lin­ux needs to stop copy­ing Win­dows. I don’t think that Mi­crosoft’s UI is nec­es­sar­i­ly the best ei­ther. OpenOf­fice.org doesn’t have to look ex­act­ly like Mi­crosoft Of­fice 2003. More UI in­no­va­tion from with­in the open-source com­mu­ni­ty, and al­so more open-source UI de­sign­ers, are need­ed. Lin­ux should be aim­ing for in­creased us­abil­i­ty, not sim­ply look-alike Win­dows func­tion­al­i­ty. UIs for pro­grams need to be de­signed, re­viewed, and test­ed, with third-par­ty test sub­jects, if pos­si­ble.

I do not con­done, how­ev­er, de­creased Win­dows com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. Lin­ux needs to work flaw­less­ly with Win­dows file for­mats and net­works (and, to some ex­tent, Win­dows ap­pli­ca­tions) in order to be com­pet­i­tive. De­vel­op­ment al­so needs to be easier on Lin­ux. Face it friends, au­to­conf and au­tomake are out­dat­ed and clum­sy. Make­files are out­dat­ed. IDEs, such as KDe­vel­op (in all other re­spects an ex­cel­lent IDE!), that re­quire the use of au­to­conf and au­tomake are, by ex­ten­sion, out­dat­ed. Soft­ware de­vel­op­ment is too slow and clum­sy right now on Lin­ux. This is not to say that Lin­ux-based soft­ware de­vel­op­ment tech­nolo­gies are bad! Sub­ver­sion, for ex­am­ple, is an ex­cel­lent ver­sion con­trol sys­tem. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it’s most easi­ly used in con­junc­tion with a Win­dows-based IDE. Soft­ware de­vel­op­ment needs to be re­moved from the do­main of the text-based ed­i­tors and com­mand-line hack­ers, and in­to the do­main of easy, rapid, com­mer­cial (and vol­un­teer) de­vel­op­ment. User-in­ter­face de­vel­op­ment, for ex­am­ple, is ex­treme­ly easy on Win­dows due to Mi­crosoft’s well-de­signed tools for UI de­vel­op­ment. Sure, Qt De­sign­er fills the same shoes, but Mi­crosoft’s tools are bet­ter-made, and more flex­i­ble with­out sac­ri­ficing us­abil­i­ty. If Lin­ux could adopt a con­sis­tent pol­i­cy on which UI toolk­it to use, and then make that UI toolk­it very easy to pro­gram with, I’m cer­tain that ap­pli­ca­tion de­vel­op­ment on Lin­ux would blos­som.

Ob­vi­ous­ly the open-source de­vel­op­ment mod­el has been rel­a­tive­ly suc­cess­ful up to this point. Its free flow of in­for­ma­tion and code en­cour­ages it­er­a­tive de­vel­op­ment and widens the net for pro­gram­ming tal­ent. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, it still has a long way to go. Lin­ux’s rep­u­ta­tion can­not be fixed by more ef­fec­tive cod­ing alone. The user-in­ter­face prob­lems that many Lin­ux pro­grams face can­not be fixed with­out a more com­mer­cial-like de­vel­op­ment mod­el, or more full-time (may­be paid!) work­ers. Un­til that hap­pens, Lin­ux is like­ly to re­main an in­fe­ri­or pro­duct in the eyes of the pub­lic.

There’s been a lot of talk re­cent­ly about why PC gam­ing is “doomed”, main­ly be­cause of the ev­er-grow­ing amount of PC game pira­cy. I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly think that PC gam­ing is doomed at all, although I do think there will be a sig­nif­i­cant shift in the way the PC game mar­ket works - to­wards a more con­trolled dis­tri­bu­tion mod­el, per­haps, like Steam.

This is what I think about pira­cy, how­ev­er. It’s a self-sus­tain­ing cy­cle, in a way: high video game prices en­cour­age gamers to pi­rate games in­stead of buy­ing them, “forc­ing” video game man­u­fac­tur­ers to raise prices or keep prices high in order to not lose rev­enue. Those high prices in turn con­tin­ue to en­cour­age pira­cy. This loop is not nec­es­sar­i­ly un­break­able, though there are sev­er­al fac­tors that, in my opin­ion, con­tribute to its sus­te­nance:

1. Too much push for re­al­ism. High qual­i­ty graph­ics is not nec­es­sar­i­ly pho­to­re­al­ism, but the ob­ses­sion with pho­to­re­al­ism ba­si­cal­ly en­sures that de­vel­op­ers and pub­lish­ers spend enor­mous amounts of money on game de­vel­op­ment, and are sub­se­quent­ly ex­treme­ly afraid of “lost” rev­enue. This keeps game prices high. I think per­haps a bet­ter “mar­ket­ing catch­phrase” would be be­liev­abil­i­ty. Most games are not re­al­is­tic at all in any way ex­cept for graph­ics - after all, why play a game if you could do the same thing in re­al life? Games are, al­most by def­i­ni­tion, un­re­al­is­tic. That’s what makes them fun. Games do, how­ev­er, need to be be­liev­able. They need to pro­duce sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief in the gamer, just like a good movie.

2. An­ti-con­sumer poli­cies. This in­cludes schemes such as DRM and copy pro­tec­tion. It is help­ful here to cat­e­go­rize pira­cy in­to two groups - “dis­tri­bu­tion” pira­cy and “con­sump­tion” pira­cy. Pira­cy con­sumers are often some­what ig­no­rant of their ac­tions - they are sim­ply look­ing for a cheap­er way to play a game. Con­sumers are not nec­es­sar­i­ly skilled at ma­nip­u­lat­ing com­put­ers or games. Pi­rate dis­trib­u­tors are com­plete­ly aware of their ac­tions, and are usu­al­ly the ones who break the en­cryp­tion schemes on most games. They are usu­al­ly very com­put­er-saavy.

   Which group is tar­get­ed by game copy pro­tec­tion schemes? Pub­lish­ers would like to think the con­sumers. Copy pro­tec­tion pre­vents “ca­su­al pira­cy”, they say. How­ev­er, in my opin­ion the re­al­i­ty is, “ca­su­al pira­cy” oc­curs when a pira­cy con­sumer un­know­ing­ly down­loads a pi­rat­ed pro­duct from the In­ter­net, that al­ready has the copy pro­tec­tion re­moved. I’m pret­ty sure that pub­lish­ers lose much more money from widespread In­ter­net dis­tri­bu­tion of pi­rat­ed games than they do from, say, Joe­Bob giv­ing his bud­dies a copy of the game so they can all play to­geth­er. Copy pro­tec­tion re­al­ly tar­gets pi­rate dis­trib­u­tors - it sup­pos­ed­ly makes it hard­er for them to dis­tribute games il­le­gal­ly. Does it? Def­i­nite­ly not. Cur­rent in­dus­try copy pro­tec­tion schemes (Se­curom, Safedisc, etc.) are easi­ly bro­ken by pi­rates. “No-CD cracks” for games are re­leased by pi­raters some­times even be­fore the game is re­leased. Worst of all, **copy pro­tec­tion schemes con­vince pi­rate dis­trib­u­tors that the game pub­lish­ers are evil and greedy and don’t de­serve the prof­its from video game sales. This leads them to con­tin­ue pi­rat­ing video games.

   What’s the lesson here? Copy pro­tec­tion doesn’t work, it’s easi­ly bro­ken, and all it does is make things worse.

Some so­lu­tions have been pro­posed to the­se prob­lems. Cen­tral­ized con­tent dis­tri­bu­tion sys­tems, like Steam, pro­pose a seem­ing­ly al­most-per­fect way to con­trol the­se fac­tors. The built-in “ac­ti­va­tion” sys­tem pre­vents gamers from in­stalling games that they do not own (as long as those games are Steam-ex­clu­sive), giv­ing pub­lish­ers peace of mind in know­ing that their prod­ucts will have to bring in rev­enue to be played. How­ev­er, Steam is in­stal­lable on as many com­put­ers as the user wants, along with its games, so it does not pre­clude small groups of friends from play­ing a game to­geth­er. (Its ac­ti­va­tion sys­tem pre­vents mul­ti­ple copies of a game to be played on­line si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly.) The na­ture of hav­ing an ac­count with a user­name and pass­word makes many peo­ple he­si­tant to freely give away their cre­den­tials, mak­ing ram­pant pira­cy much less ap­peal­ing.

Its on­ly flaws are this. One is pure­ly tech­ni­cal - Steam does not work through proxy servers, mak­ing life ex­treme­ly dif­fi­cult for some gamers be­hind prox­ies. This can sure­ly be re­solved, easi­ly, through some fu­ture Steam up­date. The other is some­thing of a mar­ket flaw - Steam on­ly al­lows games to be pur­chased new, then kept or gift­ed. There is no “used games” mar­ket on Steam. Some gamers (in­clud­ing my­self) buy most games used, which is cheap­er and very ap­peal­ing for those will­ing to wait for a pe­ri­od after a game’s re­lease. eBay prices for many old games are ex­ceed­ing­ly af­ford­able. How­ev­er, be­cause of Steam’s lack of a used game mar­ket, all game pur­chas­es on Steam are at some­what in­flat­ed prices. A game that one could buy on eBay for less than $10 might still sell for $40 on Steam. Gamers who no longer wish to play some game do not have the op­tion to re­cov­er some of their ex­pens­es in pur­chas­ing it - their on­ly op­tion is to give the game away to an­oth­er Steam user. This means that sec­ond-hand trans­fers of games on Steam is very lim­it­ed.

I think, with the res­o­lu­tion of the­se mi­nor is­sues, plat­forms like Steam will be­come the ubiq­ui­tous method of dis­tribut­ing games on the PC. Lest de­vel­op­ers feel that con­sole dis­tri­bu­tion is the on­ly way to go, let me put forth my opin­ion that con­sole gam­ing is even more an­ti-con­sumer: it forces the con­sumer to buy en­tire­ly new, un­flex­i­ble hard­ware if some game is ex­clu­sive to one par­tic­u­lar con­sole. There are cur­rent­ly no such things as cross-con­sole stan­dards. And do not think that con­sole games can­not be pi­rat­ed. Sim­ple en­cryp­tion schemes and spe­cial­ized me­dia do not pre­vent con­sole games and em­u­la­tors from be­ing dis­tribut­ed wide­ly on the In­ter­net, as they are even now.