What Linux needs

I'm a longtime reluctant Windows user who dual-boots Linux and uses it sometimes out of curiosity. I have come to the conclusion that Linux is a technically superior OS to Windows. It is easier to use day-to-day if you want it to be, meaning if you use a user-friendly distro such as SuSe and let it install KDE and all. It is more flexible than Windows. It is easier to install than Windows. Wine has made great strides in getting those annoying legacy Windows apps to work on Linux. So what's holding Linux back in the desktop market? For anyone but a Linux expert it is much harder to administrate than Windows, and getting any hardware to work that doesn't just work out of the box is a nightmare. While I realize that the everyone would like to see open-source drivers for hardware released by the vendor, this isn't goning to happen universally. What Linux needs is interfaces in its kernel to binary-only drivers. This is necessary so that users who get the latest wireless card or MP3 player that doesn't work out of the box can simply pop in the CD that came with it (hopefully if they could release them as binary-only and write them for one standard kernel interface, manufacturers would start making Linux drivers), click next a few times, and violia! their hardware would work, regardless of what kernel they were running or whether they even knew what a kernel was, and without compiling any source. Such interfaces are already showing promise in some areas. NDISWrapper has been a very successful project. FUSE has just been put into the main kernel tree. NVidia uses such an open-source interface to binary-only drivers. Also, this does not mean that one would not be able to have a driver directly in the kernel instead.

The other thing holding Linux back is the insistance that packages be packaged in such a way that the libraries necessary for the package to run aren't just included, making packages distro-specific and creating real headaches for the end user. Yes, this is a space saver, but bandwidth and hard drive space are cheap nowadays. My understanding is that in Windows, if you need a dll to run something, the package usually just comes with it. Likewise, if you need a library to run something in Linux, the package should just come with it, whether statically liked or simply packaged together and installed if necessary. I know that these changes will be hard for some to swallow, as they emphasize ease of use over more technically-oriented goals, but if Linux is to become a strong desktop OS, these last few barriers to ease of use must be dealt with.