Posted Sunday, 10 October 2010
I must admit that I was pretty anti-Ubuntu sometime ago. My ideology was that the hackers can get onto a real distro like Debian or Fedora, while end-users can blissfully use Windows. Why create something that's neither here nor there? Why bake a half-assed distro to trade off hackability in the name of tight integration and out-of-the-box functionality?
I vividly recall opening up radios and alarm clocks in my childhood and being fascinated by them. I learnt about electricity from AA cells, small electrical bulbs, and tiny motors in toy cars. I learnt about light while playfully burning paper under the sun using a magnifying glass. My intuitive understanding about magnetic poles can be traced back to my experiments with refrigerator magnets as a child. Right from then to when I discovered HTML in web pages; it all relied on the fact that I was free to play with all these devices. Even without writing any code, and just playing with my new Linux machine, I learnt a lot of things that were opaque on Windows. Other kids might have been exposed to the same devices, but might not learnt as much - nobody's consciously thinking about how hackable everyday devices are.
No, most normal people don't care about whether something is open source or closed source. They want do their email and and get off from work quickly. This isn't about them. This is about those curious kids who, given the right environment, can be the innovators of tomorrow. If all devices were sealed black boxes, their curiosity would die out. Get them a hobbyist electronics kit, right? Wrong. It's so over-whelming, the kid'll probably throw it out of the window and go back to its comfort zone- playing with teddy bears. Dumping Debian on a Windows user is like that- it's incredibly inaccessible: only those in the elite top bracket will switch, and we've potentially lost many great minds.
If someone really wants Windows, they should buy it; but they should not have to pay for it simply because there isn't a viable alternative. Windows is as bad as a sealed iPhone- there's nothing wrong with it, but curious people should have a choice to explore the richer world that we've created. They should have access to alarm clocks, radios, and software they can pry open. Ubuntu must become widespread- so much that every one of those curious kids has access to it. It should be marketed as a "viable alternative to Windows for the curious". I consider it a grave error in the educational system if a school adopts Windows instead.
Ubuntu has to make some compromises like including proprietary software as part of its default installation; I'm all for it if it makes users comfortable while giving them a peek into the richer world. After all, very few will pick Ubuntu over Windows just because it's open source. Personally, I wish it were more hackable, but there are other distros like Debian for that.