O Linux, Linux, wherefore art thou Linux?
7th August 2024
I have been a default Windows user for the whole of my business career. “Default”, because there really wasn’t any choice; all my customers and correspondents created and read documents by using the Microsoft Office suite, and there seemed to be no point in deliberately kicking against the pricks by trying to run Office on any other OS. Besides, all the new computers came with the current version of Windows already installed. This is how Microsoft developed their dominance, and for many years, it has worked. Whilst Libre Office (and formerly Open Office) can read and create MS Office documents, there were (and I think still are) too many glitches for it to be a reliable alternative.
Nevertheless, like many others I have been progressively more irked by Microsoft’s insistence that it is their right to tell you what you can have. I’ve been able to refuse the migration to Office 365, OneDrive, Edge and other “enhancements”, since I retired; they don’t offer me any benefit that I need and can’t do without. I have watched with progressive dismay the later versions of Windows get harder and harder to use and control; there is an icon on the desktop which tells me that “Windows 11 is ready for your PC”, and there it will stay, since I can’t get rid of it. As far as I’m concerned, XP was the best, most user-friendly version, and as far as possible I still use it, which presumably makes me a dinosaur.
For some years, I have toyed with the idea of switching to a Linux OS, but never quite got round to it. The final trigger was the massive outage on millions of Windows PCs that was caused by a Crowdstrike bug. And which has been followed by another outage due to a cyber-attack on Azure, about which Microsoft is quoted as saying “an error in the implementation of our defences amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it”. And of course, Windows is so widely used that it is the prime OS target of all hackers, needing apparently continuous updates to protect it from such.
So a few days ago, I finally bit the bullet and downloaded Ubuntu. And descended into dependency hell.
I chose Ubuntu out of all the many flavours of Linux, because (apart from being free) it seemed the most popular and therefore best supported. It was apparently easy to install a complete desktop from a bootable USB stick, it could be evaluated before full installation and could be installed alongside the existing W10 system. It already included Firefox and Thunderbird, my standard web applications. Also, as well as its supplier giving a clear installation tutorial, there are several fora for newbies like me to hunt for answers to any intractable questions. (It was on one of these that I first saw the phrase “dependency hell”.)
The installation did indeed proceed smoothly. I was particularly concerned that since my laptop has no wired Ethernet connection, I’d be stranded without Internet if the installation couldn’t get a driver for the wireless network device. (This is a hazard that one of the many YouTube tutorials on how to install Linux points out.) For which reason I checked with Ubuntu’s certified devices list, and found that my own laptop was on the list for version 20.04 LTS but not later; so I downloaded that rather than the latest 24.04. (The entry includes the rather forbidding statement that “Standard images of Ubuntu may not work well, or at all”.) And in fact, it worked without a hitch. Choosing the “install alongside Windows Boot Manager” option allowed me to create a partition for each, as it was supposed to. The GNOME desktop appeared and, surprisingly, looked really quite familiar, and not so far distant from my trusty Win-XP, so I spent some time looking round it. I found, mirabile dictu, that I could access all the documents that still resided in the Windows partition and that they opened mostly successfully in Libre Office.
Porting the current profiles to Firefox and Thunderbird wasn’t quite so straightforward until I realised that the installed versions were somewhat out of date, having been bundled with 20.04, and the newer profiles would not run on these older versions. But after updating them the profiles worked and I had my internet and email straight back again with no further fuss.
I could even restart the computer and the boot menu showed Ubuntu as the default startup, and so it did. I felt a warm glow of satisfaction, switched off and went to bed.
Next morning I thought, better check to see that I’ve still got my W10 installation, if I ever need to use it again. So at the boot menu I scrolled down to that selection and hit return.
I really can’t remember exactly what happened next.
The Windows boot manager threw up some indeterminate fault report and immediately started to “repair” itself. Panicking, I hit the stop button and shut the machine down; after a pause to draw breath, I cautiously restarted it, selecting Windows boot manager again, and watched while the restart continued apparently successfully. Once back in Windows I checked all the major functions which appeared to be OK; and in fact, they have remained fully functional ever since with no apparent damage to any files.
The same can’t be said for the Linux installation. After logging out of Windows and restarting with Ubuntu selected at the boot prompt, the restart got no more than a couple of seconds in, reported errors and stopped with a “Freezing execution” message. That’s how I’ve left it until I can muster the courage to start fiddling again.
Meanwhile, I decided to repeat the Ubuntu installation with the same bootable USB stick on another older computer which, though reasonably capable, is used only as an occasional backup with Windows XP and doesn’t have any critical content or functions, and can be internet-connected with an Ethernet cable. Here, again, the installation of 20.04 LTS was smooth and successful. And this time, there seemed to be no problems with selecting either Windows or Ubuntu on boot-up; I tried this several times to be sure.
The issues started when I wanted to install my printer, which is a relatively old Canon MG4250. It clanks a lot, but still prints and scans perfectly. Installing this on any Windows system had been easy, but the Canon disc doesn’t include Linux drivers. No matter: after a little while spent searching, I found that the Canon website does have a Linux driver for the printer and the scanner. The snag is, it’s over 10 years old. After following the somewhat convoluted instructions to download, unpack and run from the tar file, I was faced with an installation failed message, saying it needed two packages – libtiff4 and libpng12-0 - that the system didn’t have. So at this point I was faced with the Linux “dependency hell” that I’d read about.
At this point things started to get really deep. You’re supposed to be able to easily download any software packages you need from the Ubuntu archive; but that only applies to current versions of the packages. After discovering a thing called Synaptics which is a utility for properly managing package installations, I found that my installation had libtiff5, but that wouldn’t do for Canon; it had to be libtiff4.
Many iterations of web forum searching later I discovered that there is in fact a site for old releases, handily called old-releases.ubuntu.com; and you can find libtiff4 on it. In fact you can find about 40 different libtiff4 modules. So you have to know which of these is the one you want. It took a bit of head-banging to work out that I wanted libtiff4_3.9.7-2ubuntu1_amd64.deb, so I downloaded that, ran it in a terminal window with the instruction sudo dpkg (according to advice on one of the Linux fora) and waited.
I didn’t have to wait long. It wouldn’t install: it “PreDepends” on something called multiarch-support, which wasn’t there. “PreDepends”? What kind of OS is this? It seems that with every other new release of the Ubuntu desktop, some of the earlier packages are upgraded and the old ones removed. So older software that you want to add, which requires these specific old versions, won’t install.
Round the loop we go again. Eventually, after another trawl of the fora, I discover that you can tell the installer to ignore multiarch-support and it will go ahead anyway. Which it did; libtiff4 got installed in the end, but with a warning (which hasn’t gone away) that I have a “broken package”. Never mind. A similar effort was needed for the libpng12-0 package, though a bit easier, because a helpful forum soul had provided a direct link to it which enabled an immediately successful install.
With both these packages finally in place, the Canon printer driver finally went through its process and, with the printer connected locally via USB, I could actually use it, which was great. But I wanted to use it via the network, and when I tried that, Ubuntu would only use a basic driver, not the one I’d spent days trying to install. Round the loop again; I had to re-load the driver telling it explicitly to use the network setting of the printer. Then it would condescend to work.
Phew! But it’s slower than it is on Windows, which is surprising since it’s touted as a “lightweight and highly efficient operating system”...
After all this effort, it’s now clear to me why Linux is never going to challenge Windows or MacOs in the general user sector. Yes, it’s free; but the other two are also effectively free since every new or second-user computer comes with one of them pre-installed. Ubuntu claims that it’s a “secure, open source modern operating system used by millions” and the Ubuntu desktop does have most of the features pre-installed that everyday users would want. But the “millions” who are using it are like the millions of car owners who prefer to look under the bonnet and do as much as possible of their own servicing. There are hundreds of millions of car owners who never open the bonnet.
If you are going to use Linux, even the most user-friendly versions, you have to be knowledgeable enough about computing and with plenty of free time to deal with glitches. Ubuntu proudly says “By using Ubuntu you can benefit from the contributions of millions of users from all over the world, from direct contributions and feature designs to two decades of learning resources and troubleshooting advice.” It doesn’t point out that you have to.
After this experience, I’ll carry on using the Ubuntu desktop for some purposes and may grow to be comfortable with it. But despite despairing of Microsoft’s attitude to their users, I’m not going to ditch Windows just yet.