• PC World
• »Software
• »Operating Systems

I've sometimes been labeled a cheerleader for Free Software. This doesn't bother me too much; there's no doubt that I am a lot more gung-ho on Linux and related technologies than most of my colleagues. But lest I seem like a full-time penguin apologist who can't fairly critique his platform of choice, I'm using this month's Free Agent to revel in that oldest pastime of tech columnists: I'm going to gripe.

As loyal Free Agent readers know, if I have to sit down in front of a computer, I want it to be running the Gnome desktop on Linux. I've been using Gnome for years; and I've watched it mature from a downright ugly, needlessly complex playground for geeks to an attractive, simple interface that holds its own against commercial alternatives. I've watched so many rough edges disappear, it's sometimes hard to believe how much progress has been made, and in how short a time. And yet, every day I still encounter rough edges that make me think there aren't nearly enough folks out there hacking away at this stuff.

I'd Like to Watch

Take, for instance, the fact that I still have troubles playing any sort of rich media (usually video) in my Web browser. It doesn't matter whether I use Mozilla Firefox or one of the two native Gnome browsers, Epiphany and Galeon, both of which use Firefox's rendering engine. Much of the time, if a Web page wants to serve me a video, I'm out of luck.

There are several reasons why. The first is that we still have competing standards for streaming video. On a Windows box, you've got to install three different video players (QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media--all with their own browser plug-ins) in order to confidently approach a video-laden site. Of those three commercial players, only Real offers a Linux version. It's fallen to Free Software hackers to fill in the gaps--which they've done pretty well, all things considered.

Gnome's Totem media player can hook up to the video-playing engines of both the GStreamer and Xine projects. Both engines can play all three varieties of Web video when fed the proper codecs; if there's a similar all-in-one solution available under Windows, I'm not aware of it. But getting Totem to embed itself in a browser and play video in-place on a Web page? Well, there's a way to make it happen, but it's not airtight.

Sure, if you follow the instructions on Ubuntu Forums, you'll be able to watch all the movie trailers at Apple's site right in your browser, just the way nature intended. But keep surfing around, and sooner or later you'll hit a video that's been encoded differently--perhaps using a newer codec not yet supported by Totem--and you'll have hit a brick wall. Or, even more frustratingly, the Web site you're visiting might sniff your browser to discover you're running Linux, at which point it will tell you (often wrongly) that your system is incompatible with the site's offerings, and not even give you the opportunity to try playing the video. (I'm looking at you, CNN.com.) Maddening!

I Want My Cacophony, and I Want It Now!

Equally maddening is the state of sound on most Linux desktops. Explaining this mess requires a brief, oversimplified history lesson.

Once upon a time, Linux sound drivers fell under the umbrella of OSS, the Open Sound System. OSS's capabilities were pretty limited; configuration could be a real pain; and there was no support for what's known as "software mixing," which lets cheap sound cards play sounds from different apps simultaneously. (That's very important if you want to hear your beloved "new instant message" sound while you're watching a trailer at Apple's site.)

A few years back, some courageous coders noted the need for an OSS replacement and began work on ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. ALSA gives us what we need, but there are backwards compatibility issues and all sorts of other foolishness we needn't get into here. Ubuntu Linux tries to compensate for ALSA's shortcomings by adding a third element to the mix: ESD, the Enlightened Sound Daemon.

ESD works great, except when it doesn't. In the case of my Ubuntu machines, all sound-producing apps I've encountered play nice (no pun intended) with ESD, except for those built on Flash or Java. So if there is a Flash ad on a Web page making some noise, nothing else on the system can sound off until the Flash ad is gone. If I fire up SoftSqueeze--a Java app that tunes into the music stream being fed to my Squeezebox elsewhere in the house--I can hear it, but nothing else while it is playing. This is a pretty bogus state of affairs. Users don't expect problems like these, because they've not experienced them on other platforms. Sometimes, even an extremely geeky user who groks computers an order of magnitude better than the rest of us gets frustrated by this sort of thing and throws in the towel. I'm not quite there yet; I have faith this will all be solved. I just wonder how much longer it will take.

Back to Java for a moment, for additional pain. The latest version of Sun's Java plug-in for Linux seems to ignore the system clipboard in certain situations. I learned this the hard way recently while traveling on business. I was accessing my work e-mail via a Web interface provided by Lotus Notes. (Yes, sigh, we use Notes.) The Notes Web interface uses Java applets for various things, including the text-entry box where you craft new messages. I tried copying some text from another window and pasting it into a new message. Didn't work. I tried it many different ways, all to no avail. Then I tried copying text out of my message-in-progress. Again, no dice. The same operations work just fine in Windows.

Some Google searching revealed that others have noticed this problem, but I found no solution. So, when I'm working remotely, I can't paste text into e-mails. This is terribly stupid; but what's more, it makes a user feel like the mistake is their own. ("What am I doing wrong, here?") It's the sort of thing that makes people hate computers.

You Can't Do That

Also in the "Is it my mistake?" department: I recently added a new launcher button to my Gnome panel. (In Gnome, you have as many panels as you want on the screen; they're multipurpose bars akin to the Windows taskbar or OS X's dock and menu bar.) The button I added launches Gaim, a fantastic instant messaging app.

When I selected the stock Gaim icon for this button, the system seemed to accept my choice, but then immediately painted a completely different icon on the button. I right-clicked the button and selected Properties to double-check my selection. Yes, I'd selected the icon I wanted, and the Properties dialog box was showing me my selection. But the button still sported the wrong icon, no matter what I did.

After some experimenting, I discovered that if your current icon theme specifies an alternative icon for any installed app, then that alternative overrides any manual icon setting. There's nothing that informs you of what's happening; there's also no option to override the theme's setting. You follow steps that should definitely work; they don't; and there's no explanation why. It's like selecting red text in your word processor, getting blue text instead, and having absolutely no inkling (pun intended) why this is happening. Maddening.

One more: In Gnome, there's no built-in way to customize your Applications menu (the Start menu equivalent). There used to be a means to do this, but it was removed in a previous version of Gnome, and no new functionality has emerged in its place. I am lucky that the Ubuntu Applications menu is so trim and organized. I have yet to play with Fedora Core 4, but I understand its users are not so lucky.

I suppose all computing environments have their pitfalls; I'll take this set of annoyances over adware and spyware issues any day. And there is no doubt that Gnome and Linux itself have come a very long way in the past few years: I no longer have to manually "mount" removable media devices when I plug 'em in; font installation has become easy as pie; and I can rip, mix, and burn with the best of 'em. But right now, as I sit out on my back porch, my trusty IBM Thinkpad on my lap showing me the day's work e-mail, I just wish I could open a new message and paste this column into it for delivery to my editor.

What's your biggest gripe since adopting Linux? If you haven't taken the leap yet, what bugs you about your current environment and makes you want to jump ship? PC World's Free Agent wants to hear from you. Speak Freely!