OneAndOneIs2

You probably know the one: You wish to get from point A to point B. Before you can reach B, you have to get halfway there. Before you can get halfway, you have to get a quarter of the way. Before you can get a quarter of the way, you have to get an eighth.

And so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

The popular way of phrasing this one is of firing an arrow at someone running away from you. By the time the arrow gets to where he was, the target has gone a bit further on. So the arrow carries on, until it reaches where the target was, but of course no longer is. So the arrow gets closer and closer, but never actually hits the target so long as he keeps running away.

There are various ways to solve the paradoxes. You can talk about how an infinite series can tend towards a finite answer; you can disagree that there are an infinite number of points between any two points, removing infinity from the equation; you can argue that dividing time into smaller and smaller quantities in order to proportionately reduce distance travelled in each step is not a valid way of creating an infinite sequence.

Whatever. The point is the concept that smaller and smaller issues cause bigger and bigger problems as you get closer to the goal.

Which obviously brings us to Linux and Windows. Again.

More specifically, user interfaces.

There was a time when you couldn't use Linux without using the command line. That time was a long time ago. Now there are Linux users out there who've never used Bash in their lives. Why bother? Put in the latest Ubuntu CD, it installs and configures pretty much everything for you. Anything you need to do later, you can do through the menus accessed from the taskbar at the top of the screen. Install software, add repositories, change configuration settings, whatever.

Very easy to use.

Yawn.

I've mentioned elsewhere that for something to be better, it has to be different. You can't be identical and superior at the same time. Firefox didn't win a big chunk of the browser market by being exactly like IE, it threw in differences like tabbed browsing and easy extensibility to add any features you wanted. It was easy to show somebody the difference, and thus superiority, of Firefox compared to IE.

Screenshots that I used demonstrated a website "as seen with IE" compared to "as seen by Firefox" (with pop-up blocking and Adblock & Greasemonkey installed):

Clearly, Firefox gave a superior end-user experience. Very easy to demonstrate.

But the modern Linux desktop...

Okay, we still have multiple desktops, unlike Windows. Apart from that, though..

• Default Windows: Taskbar at bottom, with menu button on the left, then some quick-start buttons; and a system tray on the right. A few desktop icons.
• Default KDE: Taskbar at bottom, with menu buttons on the left, then some quick-start buttons; a system tray on the right. A few desktop icons.
• Default Gnome: Taskbar at bottom AND top. Menu buttons on the left, next to some quick-start buttons; a system tray on the right. A few desktop icons.
• Default OS X: A snazzy 3D-accelerated quick-start thing at the bottom, a (kind of) taskbar at the top, with menu buttons on the left and a system tray on the right.

A standard windows user who's given a demo of the above desktops will see OS X as something a bit new & different, but Linux..?

It's dull. It really is. It looks like somebody's taken Windows and tinkered with it to make it look slightly different. It looks like a ripoff. It's boring.

Okay, the 3D-accelerated stuff helps a tiny bit: Windows doesn't have the cube effect. But so what, it's only eye candy.

Yes, it's friendly and easy for just about anyone to use. I don't argue with that at all. Any moderately-intelligent Windows user can sit down in front of an Ubuntu desktop and cope without any difficulty. And that's an important factor in getting adoption up.

But.

"You never get a second chance at a first impression." And the first impression of the typical Linux desktop simply isn't as favourable as it could be. It's friendly, it's easy, it's functional. But it's dull.

And different doesn't have to mean difficult. OS X is very different, but it's intuitive and easy to use even so. And because it's significantly different, people can believe (rightly or wrongly) that it's significantly BETTER as well. It's new and different, not the tired old taskbar-driven dullness we've all had since Win95.

The Ubuntu Gnome desktop that will be most people's first experience of Linux these days does nothing to make people think "This is new and different and interesting!" It totally fails to shine.

And there's no need for it! Linux has SO MANY options to jazz up the desktop.

Gnome and KDE are so customizable. Why do new Ubuntu users get presented with this:

Rather than something like this:

That's another Gnome desktop - courtesy of Gnome-Look.org - and even though it's just a different theme and a couple of widgets running, it's a much more interesting desktop.

More than anything, though, we need to stop being ashamed of the command line and showing people what's "under the hood". If adesklets or gdesklets, GKrellMs, and xterms/aterms/whatever get put onto a desktop, they can make it sensationally different, and not just interesting but downright fascinating.

Those are all Linux desktops doing nothing more than running lightweight WM's such as XFCE, Enlightenment, FVWM2 and Fluxbox. They're running a few simple apps like adesklets, torsmo, GKrellM, and terminals running such standards as top.

They look good. They look different. And by showing how different Linux can be, they get people interested in those differences. We shouldn't be ashamed of the command line. It's the single most powerful application in Linux. We shouldn't assume that Gnome and KDE are the best desktops to get people interested in Linux: They make things so easy that they become boring.

We shouldn't try to be comfortable and similar to what users already know. We should try and get them interested in and excited by the Linux alternative.