Road of Open Source success - III

This is the third installment for this topic. Here you can find first and second posts.

OoBE
OoBE is as abbreviation for Out Of Box experience. I would like to quote "You never get a second chance to make a good first impression". I don't remember who said this but this is something that I firmly believe in.

OEM is a key player in this field. What goes inside the system is dictated by an OEM, and there are a lot of people who don't bother to look for alternatives and just stick to what the OEM has provided.

If you take windows as an example, Vanila install can not play flash, does not have a JRE installed, can't read pdf files, can't play DVD, can't play formats other that mp3, wma & wmv. Only with windows XP, users were able to view compressed files, and the compression format was limited to ZIP. If you give this vanila installed system to a new user, s/he will certainly say that M$ is worthless.

The problem is not only for home desktop users, its also prominent for corporate users. Corporate users try to avoid this problem with the use of custom images. Someone from the IT department is given the responsibility to install windows along with all the required applications, on a single machine. Once this installation is complete, a full image of hard disk is extracted. This image is then copied to the rest of the machines.

Now coming to the open source world, the same issue comes up. The reason for this is not technical but political. Almost all the major distributions, in order to avoid litigations, stay clear from proprietary code. In order to attract more users towards open source, a better out of box experience is required. And nowadays it means that a user should be able to browse the internet without any issues.

I remember my first encounter with Linux, It was with Redhat 5. It really gave me a hard time to bring up the GUI. This was long ago though, and things have changed since then. But the automatic GUI configuration is still important. All the new displays are LCD and there are more coming in the form of a wide screen. Some advanced users have already started using dual monitors. But, still no distribution correctly configures wide screen or dual screen monitors correctly, even after enabling DPMS .Moreover, in case the installer automatically create an xorg.conf, a lot of distributions tend to prefer 16 bit depth instead of the better 24 bit.

The next point is the network connectivity. For majority of the computer population, it means wireless. iPhone comes with Wifi, even the nikon S6 that I purchased 2 years ago had Wifi. Giving complete driver support for wireless cards is a daunting task as manufacturers do not release the required specifications. Even then, distributions should make sure that users get their WiFi up and running without any hassles. I am not a big fan of Ubuntu, but it really excels in this field. Slackware along with zenwalk, on some machines, are the worst; they even have problems with ethernet.

Last but not the least are applications. Firefox solved a big problem in terms of "easy and robust platform" required to access the wild wild web. There are a lot of good addons and users feel at home with it. Next problem comes with plug ins. JRE, flash, acrobat reader, quicktime are required to provide a flawless surfing experience. A lot of of distributions still have some problems with this.

One more aspect comes to my mind and that concerns aesthetics and ergonomics. Some distribution dont provide a custom theme and when some do provide, your eyes pay the price. Distributions have to also consider themes as part of the initial install.