Is Feisty Fawn the Windows Killer?

I forget which feminist wit originally said "For a woman to succeed at a man's job, she has to be twice as good. Fortunately this is not difficult." The same logic applies - almost - to Open Source software taking on Microsoft. All it took for a piece of excrement like Internet Explorer to become the most popular browser was Bill Gates' finally realising that this new-fangled Internet thingy wasn't just a passing fad, coupled with some bad decisions from Netscape. Oh yes, and some illegal business practices, but then they weren't officially found to be illegal until it was too late. For Firefox to claw back some of the market, it had to be twice as good as Internet Explorer, and of course it was. It still has less than a third of browser share, though. (Estimates vary wildly, but the highest I've seen is 32%.)

For this reason, I'm sceptical about claims that the latest Open Source wonder is going to be a "windows-killer". Has OpenOffice replaced MS Office? Has the GIMP replaced Photoshop? These have the advantage of being free products competing against expensive products, so you'd think they would have cleaned out the competition without having to be twice as good (which they aren't, and even they were, the average person wouldn't notice the difference). So why should the latest Ubuntu release be a windows-killer?

Having said that, Feisty Fawn (the codename for the latest Ubuntu) is the closest I've seen. The main thing that puts people off experimenting with Linux is the idea that Linux is "difficult", meaning that only people with thick glasses and bad skin have the natural endowments needed to use it. This might have been true in the 1990s (it took me two weeks of hacking to get my first Linux installation running properly) but now it's a complete myth. One of my friends replaced Windows with Linux on all the computers in his workplace and customised the icons and menus to look like Windows (e.g. the OpenOffice icon was a "W"). It was over a week before anyone noticed. The difficult part is that you have to install it, and most people neither know or care that installing Linux is often easier than installing Windows. Install an operating system? Isn't that what we have geeks for?

This is where Feisty Fawn comes in. Like a number of recent Linux distributions, it comes on a live CD, meaning you can put the CD in the tray, restart your computer and play around with the new system without needing to install it. If you like it, you click on the Install icon and it installs itself. All you need to do is say where in the world you are and what type of keyboard you have, which compares very well with my first experience of installing Linux, which was a red screen saying "Welcome to Redhat 5.1. Do you have any PCMCIA devices?"

Another thing that new Linux users often find problematic is installing codecs for sound and video files. These things often aren't included in Linux distributions for complicated legal reasons, but Feisty gets round the problem by offering to download and install them as soon as you click on a file which requires a codec (e.g. a .avi file). Sometimes genius is simply a matter of doing the obvious when no one else has.

The real killer, though, is the Windows Migration Assistant. I didn't bother with this, since I was migrating from a different Linux distribution, but people are raving about it. It will import all your Windows documents, settings, addresses, music - you name it. I'm told it will even set up your Internet connection using the information in Windows. If you're thinking "So what? How long does it take to enter your IP address and a couple of DNS servers?" bear in mind that the vast majority of computer users do not know what a DNS server is.

Of course every distribution has its problems. Feisty Fawn is very good at detecting hardware (especially, I hear, wireless hardware, which used to be a weak point), but although it installed the right drivers for my Audigy sound card, it forgot to set the mixer correctly, so my sound was muted until I realised what was going on. Beryl, the software for producing pretty 3D desktop effects (the kind trumpeted in Vista) is not installed by default and I had to do some serious configuring to get it working. There again, Beryl is just silly eye-candy, so if people want it that much, they shouldn't mind editing a few files to get it. Normal 3D graphic acceleration is supplied easily enough.

On top of all that, there's the feel-good factor. Although Bill and Melinda Gates are nice folk who care about AIDS, and Microsoft can only be described as "evil" if you forget about most other multinational corporations, many people still feel kind of dirty when they use Windows. No danger of that with Ubuntu. For a start, it's a Bantu word meaning "I am what you are because of who she is," or something like that. Anyway, it means something nice, as you'll find out if, like me, you keep typing www.ubuntu.org instead of www.ubuntu.com.. The main website (for the operating system, not the World Forum of Civil Society Networks) looks like a United Colors of Benetton advert. Even the nudie calendar backgrounds (not supplied with the main download) look very tasteful and kind of humanistic. This is the key to success: convince people that they are doing good at no cost to themselves and you're onto a winner.

So is Feisty Fawn the windows-killer spoken of in the ancient prophecy? I don't think so, though it it will probably, like Firefox, start nibbling away at Windows' market share, especially in developing countries. So maybe you can do some good at no cost to yourself.