I wanted to preview this here first before Monday's publication. The people on this forum are probably the best and most helpful Linux users there are. Please accept this in the spirit intended.

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An open letter to the Linux Community.

You are my last hope. I am a small business owner with a small network of computers. Simple stuff really, invoicing, customer data storage, research…we are not any different than most small businesses today. Our computing needs are simple, yet we rely upon our network to get our job done. In August of 2004, a particularly nasty variant of Bagle wiped us out. Even with Norton and Sygate standing guard over us, we got hosed. 36 hours were spent in cleaning up the mess and restoring our operation. My fault. I should have had better protection than I did. Norton took 90 hours to address the variant that hit us and instead of blaming the software, I made a decision. I migrated us to Linux.

Now, let me clarify one thing. I am not a system administrator, nor am I a guru of any operating system. I am a business owner who relies upon my machines to operate smoothly and with efficiency. I have learned the basic things I must know in order to get the job done. As a life-long Windows user, I faced some daunting challenges. Choosing a distro was actually one of the biggest. Suse 9.1 Pro and Kanotix were the two I finally settled upon, but that is not really important because the problems I face are not distro specific, they are Linux specific.

While I am amazed at the power and flexibility Linux brings to my operation, I am totally befuddled by several shortcomings in Linux. One in particular stands out. As media consultants, it is imperative that we are able to view news clips and streaming video in our browsers. Finding that Linux of any flavor lacks this ability “out of the box” was stunning. Equally as stunning, were the steps necessary to add the necessary software. See, I don’t care anything about licensing problems or GPL issues. What I care about is an operating system that does what I need it to do without having to spend 3 hours making it do so. After an hour on the respective forums, I found out that Mplayer was the tool I needed, along with the mozilla plugin for it. It only got worse from there. Finding the proper Mplayer with the gui and the mozilla plugin was not near as traumatic as installing it. I had no idea how to resolve dependencies and if it weren’t for the kind and patient people in the forums, I would still be struggling with it. In some respects, I still am. The people who answer posts in the forums from people like me are the only thing that keeps Linux alive.

So my letter to you is not intended as a slam against Linux, but a call to make some basic and necessary changes. The argument has been, “Linux is free, you have to do a few extra things…” Not so. I paid 89.00 US for Suse and it should work out of the box, completely and without caveat. Until simple things like video streaming and webcam conferencing are included in the bundles, Linux is destined to remain a hobbyist’s operating system. While Linux has made great inroads on the server side, as a viable alternative to the Windows Desktop, it is failing

Ken Starks
Austin, Texas