Open Letter to all Linux distributors

Hello, my name is Nathan Thompson and since some time around the year 2000 I've been aware of Linux and even started using it; my first copy was Storm Linux 2000 and since then I've tried so many distributions I've lost count.

Since I started using Linux I have seen some very impressive advancements, this has largely centred around the desktop environments and office software which are important for commercial use on workstations however one place where Linux is still as far behind as it was the day I started using it is in multimedia support.

With every distribution I have used I had to manually go and find packages for Xine or Mplayer codecs which would allow me to play even the simplest of videos. That meant that every time I installed a distribution whether because I want to switch from one to another, one of my experiments left my Linux installation inoperable or I was from an older release of a distribution, I had to spend hours or even days looking for packages to make the multimedia support in that distribution workable. I wind up (re)installing distributions quite frequently, especially when I'm unhappy with one distribution and want to try another and often that's shortly after finding out the multimedia support is so hopelessly bad that someone with my limited knowledge would have to spend days or weeks trying to get it to work adequately.

In Slackware Linux I have had to compile MPlayer and codecs from source, in Mandrake I would spend anywhere between 45 minutes to a few hours trying to find all the multimedia codecs from a Penguin Liberation Front repository and in SUSE Linux I happened to find some codecs after half a day searching thought Google just to find out that the codecs I had gotten only gave me working video and no sound. In most other distributions it took me even longer and what multimedia I could get in every distribution I've tried was very limited.

I hear claims all the time that x distribution “just works” or its “Linux for the masses” or maybe its “making Linux work for you...”, but how can that be true when I have to spend hours on the Internet searching for codecs for each distribution I choose to try, or worse, I have to spend hours trying to figure out what particulars apply to each distribution in order to try to compile MPlayer from source and then RPM complains later on because it doesn't know I have MPlayer installed.

Its my understanding that the poor multimedia support is because of licensing issues, that's understandable for the distributions that are free but what about ones like SUSE Linux or Mandrake Linux which cost an arm and a leg at least once or twice a year for a boxed set with the developer tools I need. For the most part all GNU software is freely available to you distributors at no cost so where is all that money going? Sure I know you have your wonderful employees to pay and you need to make some sort of profit or it just wouldn't be worth making your distributions but if you invested some of that money into licenses for the codecs or even just raised your prices a little bit to cover the extra expense I think you'll find a substantial increase in the popularity of your distribution as well as a substantial increase in revenue.

2005-01-21T12:09:55