I was inspired to write this by a post on DoctorMO‘s blog about a experience of his with the failure of Ubuntu on hardware. His blog post, compounded upon my personal experience, reinforce my feeling that what we should primarily be working on is compatibility with the widest range of hardware possible, not improving how our desktop looks.
I’ve had to give support for several issues in the past with Ubuntu machines that people are running, that are really stupid issues (wireless cards, graphics cards, etc) that would crash the entire system. Issues that really shouldn’t even be there, are, and they affect the user’s ability to use their system, often to a critical degree. When we taunt that Ubuntu is the most stable OS out there, that should be correct in most every sense of the word, which includes having continued stability on a wide range of hardware. Having a piece of hardware work perfectly under one release of Ubuntu and then it stop working for no apparent reason is something I have experienced personally with my own machines.
Another area of issue is peripherals, which DoctorMO touched on. Things that are of common use in the rest of the computer world – printers, scanners, webcams, drawing tablets, etc. – are oftentimes inoperable on Ubuntu, which is sure to drive quite a few users away from using such a great operating system as this is. Getting a new piece of hardware and then discovering that it doesn’t work on your operating system at all or in a very limited manner is frustrating to a large degree. A major area of issue is MP3 players, the biggest being the ones from Apple. I know that it’s not our fault that their products are proprietary, but we should be making some effort to getting them working to the greatest degree we can on Ubuntu computers.
We have made great progress on getting Ubuntu out there, but now we need to ensure that it works on as many computers as possible. Things that should be as simple to use as plug-and-play, often require lots of complex configuration that new users are clueless as to how to do. The hardware portion of the computer plays a massive role in the user experience, more than just how the desktop environment looks or feels.
It’s hard to get new users when the new users can’t use what you’ve made to a effective degree. If Ubuntu is going to be competitive with the rest of the operating systems out there (mainly Windows and Mac OS), then we have to first ensure that it works on the user’s computer to the highest degree that we possibly can.