Ubuntu and the 'Average User'

For years, free-software advocates have asserted that Linux is ready for the mainstream desktop. Critics have responded that, sure, Linux has come a long way since 1991, but it’s still not for ‘average users’. Until grandmothers can get an Ubuntu system up and running without having to hack a wireless driver or an xorg.conf file, we’re told, the Linux user base will remain limited.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of an Ubuntu ‘fanboy’, so I can’t pretend that I don’t have an agenda. Even so, I think that a logical analysis of the anti-Linux arguments above exposes crucial flaws.
Most of the thoughts below are not very original—they’ve been made by plenty of people before—but I think they’re worth repeating as Windows apologists assault Ubuntu’s usability with renewed vigor in the wake of the Linux netbook surge (see comment #17 here for an example of these attacks).

Who’s Normal?

First, when Ubuntu’s detractors speak of the ‘average user’, what they really mean is the ‘average Windows user’—that is, a user who’s spent the last fifteen years being taught to use computers in a certain way. If Ubuntu fails to behave like Windows, they count that as a strike against mainstream users.

Strangely, Apple doesn’t receive such criticism, even though its operating system, like Ubuntu, deviates in many ways from Windows. Indeed, having never owned a Mac, I feel very uncomfortable using one—the absence of a two-button mouse still bothers me, and I’ve yet to figure out how the OS X window manager really works. But this doesn’t mean—and no one suggests—that OS X is not for the average home user.

If Macs are perfectly acceptable even for people who have never used anything besides Microsoft platforms, then the argument that Ubuntu is not suitable for non-geeky users is flawed and hypocritical.

Defining ‘Out-of-the-Box’

My other major objection to the assertion that Windows ‘just works’ whereas Linux still requires substantial hacking is that, in short, it’s completely untrue. Sure, the laptop that you bought with Vista pre-installed came with everything working ‘out-of-the-box’. But try installing a generic copy of Windows onto the same machine, and you’re lucky if even simple things like ethernet and USB work without your having to hunt down drivers for them.

And OS X only ‘just works’ because of Apple’s rigid monopoly over hardware and software. Installing OS X on non-Apple hardware (à la hackint0sh) is hardly for non-geeks; it’s also probably illegal, depending on whom you ask.  Ubuntu would probably work pretty amazingly if all of the hardware it ran on were manufactured by Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company.
If proprietary platforms ‘just work’, it’s only because hardware vendors configure them before they reach consumers. In other words, someone else does the hacking so grandma won’t have to.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu currently enjoys only minimal support among OEMs, although the situation has improved substantially over the last year, as many major hardware vendors have begun selling Ubuntu pre-installed, especially on netbooks.

Ubuntu’s far from perfect.   But charges that it’s still beyond the reach of ‘average’ users are unfair and ignorant. As the unprecedented struggle between Linux and Windows in the netbook market continues to pan out, such unwarranted criticisms will hopefully be exposed for what they are.

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