Linux has reached a very critical point in its history IMHO. People are starting to get sick of Microsoft's buggy code and invasive tactics and they want an alternative. The word about Linux has started to spread. Yet, Linux is a much more complicated OS than Windows. Most home users don't want to have to type a username and password just to access their computer. They don't want to be told that they don't have permission to install a software package and thus, have to remember a second password to install it. Yet, this is how Linux and the Unix systems that inspired it work. We who use Linux see the advantage of this. It keeps us on our toes and forces us to think before we delete that big bunch of files and makes us decide just how badly we want that new software before we hastily install it. So, we have two types of users interested in Linux. We have the old Unix veterans and DOS users where a command-line is second-nature. We have the new generation of computer users who don't even know what the command prompt in Windows is for and never use the "run" command. How can we please both? Well, there is the saying that you can't please everybody, but I think we could come close. I'd like to see a home edition of Linux which bypassed the login procedure and dropped the user into some kind of GUI. It would still require the root password to do certain things like install and remove software, but most things would be done as a normal user. This hypothetical Linux would have very good hardware detection and be able to load modules for pretty much any hardware you throw at it. Redhat and its derivatives are handling much of the hardware detection already, but they aren't quite up to Windows yet. To make the home user want to use them, they need to be as good (and preferably better) than Windows at picking up hardware and setting it up. Redhat has never detected my modem, for example. For people like myself who like to fiddle with our systems and like the way Unix works, there should continue to be the traditional Linux. Another approach is to make it the same OS, but give the user a choice of whether they want it set up for home use or multi-user mode at install time, or first boot in the case of a computer shipping with Linux. The various versions of Linux out now are a mixed blessing. On the good side, they give choice as to how they want their system to feel. I like the "do it yourself" attitude of Slackware while others like Redhat's automation. On the bad side, many software vendors have picked Redhat as the only Linux distribution they support. I fear that Redhat will become the Microsoft of Linux and kill off competition. I want software to use an install/uninstall procedure that isn't distribution-specific. Well, I guess that's enough rambling. The bottom line is that the next few years are absolutely critical and I think it will be quite obvious whether Linux will succeed as a home-user OS or remain a niche OS within the next 5 years. I think that no matter what, Microsoft is starting to really get in trouble and users finally realize that the computer randomly locking up or their word processor crashing in the middle of writing that important document isn't normal and should not be treated as such.
