| Must free beer always taste like Schlitz? |
Sep. 13, 2005
Having just bought a house, I've been busy constructing a Linux-based media server. The experience has left me both amazed and frustrated by the state of desktop Linux software.
Let me explain...
I don't own a TV, so my media server is very music-oriented. It also plays DVDs.
Initially, it took me several days to sort through the vast array of available free software that could serve as the basis for a home music player. Because I wanted a more-or-less full-function "living room computer" that would run a full Debian Linux installation, I wound up picking mpd ("music player daemon").
Simply put, mpd is amazing. It's tiny, fast, responsive, cross-platform, offers various bindings, is fully open, and has huge momentum behind it. There's even an MPICH version of it, in case you want to run it on a multiprocessor system efficiently, or on, say, a cluster, in order to power a huge Internet radio station. In short, mpd exemplifies the kind of rigorous, spare-no-effort server product that leads to Linux having few peers in the server space.
All well and good. But for any server, you've got to have a client -- in this case, the software that runs on my Linux desktop. And here's where Linux falls down. It isn't for lack of variety, and it's not for lack of competition. Its just that Linux developers seem to have have insanely low standards for user interfaces.
The mpd homepage lists six graphical mpd clients -- or "MPCs" if you will -- that can run on Linux and X. It also lists four non-graphical clients. Sadly, the non-graphical clients are, across the board, more featureful and usable than the graphical clients, and that's a sad testament to the state of user interface standards for Linux users.
To add insult to injury, a developer named Kevin Dorne in mid-August released the first Mac OS X client for mpd -- a program, that -- you guessed it -- is beautiful to look at, intuitive to use, and, in its first release, seems more than stable enough for production software (well, I only tested it for a few hours on a friend's Mac).
Take a look for yourself.
The nicest of the Linux clients for mpd is called "glurp." Here's a glurp screenshot:
(Click image to enlarge)
Compare that to this screenshot of the new Mac OS X client:
(Click image to enlarge)
Which would you rather use?
Oh, by the way, there are also a number of PHP/Web interfaces for mpd. They have even uglier, harder to use interfaces than the Linux client programs.
The trouble is that Linux users have become accustomed to using software with ugly, stupid, and quirky interfaces. The attitude is that, hey, it's free, use it and don't complain.
What do you think? Is good taste too much to expect in free software? Let me know.
--Henry Kingman
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