Linux for non-nerds: still fails

Disclaimer: I’m a nerd, geek, whatever you want to call it. As proof, I spent a Sunday afternoon installing Mint Linux (10) into a virtual machine on my Mac Pro. No real reason, other than I wanted to test out a non-Windows VM in VMWare Fusion, and because I haven’t installed a Linux distribution in a long time.

Install was extremely simple, other than the fact that vmware-tools wouldn’t install because I was using the “light” install of Fusion. A re-install of the full Fusion solved that issue.

I then upgraded all of the packages. Great.

Fired up Firefox. It’s version 3.6. I wanted version 4. Should be easy, right? Download it and install. Not so fast.

I went to the package manager, looked for FF 4. No dice. After a bit of searching, I realized that I had to add the FF repository to my repository list. Once I did that, I could upgrade to FF 4.

I then took a look at the direct download (compressed archive) file from the FF site. You have to unarchive it, then do some command-line work to actually get it installed. Of course, you will still have FF 3.6 and FF 4.0 installed.

Now, none of this was difficult for me to do, and probably for most people who are using Linux, it’s obvious and expected. However, I’m starting to look at things from a non-geek point of view lately, and this is a total disaster for non-geeks who just want to install the latest version of Firefox (or any other software install that isn’t already in the default repositories). On Windows, I just double-click the installer and go through the simple wizard. On the Mac, I just drag the icon to my Applications. Easy, simple, upgrades are done for me.

The worst part is: it’s not like Firefox is some obscure tech-head application; it’s probably the most-used application on a Linux system.

If Linux ever wants to move past the non-geek-user phase (i.e. to the point where I would recommend it to my mother), it had better get this kind of stuff cleaned up. Honestly, I would have thought this kind of thing would be made so much easier by the time 2011 rolled around, but apparently we’re still stuck in 2000.