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 poor multimedia support right after the installation is a big contributor to that discontentment.

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 had to spend hours searching Google until finally a fellow SUSE user told me where to find codecs and even then I had to know which ones I needed and I had to resolve some broken dependencies. 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 want. 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.

Consider this, the majority of people adopting GNU/Linux are mostly former Unix users excluding Mac OS X users who, like the Windows users, make up a much smaller number of those adopting GNU/Linux. The fact that there are some Windows users switching to Linux and Mac OS X and some Mac OS X users switching to Linux and Windows says to me that people are willing to switch operating systems if they truly find them better so why aren't the number of people adopting GNU/Linux from these operating systems higher? When comparing both Mac OS X and Windows to Linux one glaring difference comes to my mind, all three operating systems are modern and have modern features but a lot of Linux distributions don't come with good multimedia support out of the box. A new user's experience with installing software on most distributions will be limited to whatever visual tools have been included with the distribution, some more technically inclined users might figure out how to use a command like program like apt-get or uprmi but most won't understand why they can only play a very small collection of video formats in Linux and how they are supposed to add support for more. I'm sure I'm going to hear the argument that they can get help in mailing lists with instructions but most new users won't know enough about the operating system to follow those instructions with complete understanding and reflecting on my first experience trying to get multimedia support in Linux I was ready to go back to Windows because of how difficult it was.

Obviously some people won't have much trouble adding in the extra multimedia support for themselves but that's because they either already have the experience or they had some idea of what they were doing before hand and had some good instructions, new users aren't likely to have either. Then there are people like myself who don't have the time on their hands to spend an entire day filling in the gaps in their chosen distribution because the company behind it didn't want to do it themselves but somehow still think they can justify putting a price on an unfinished product. Don't get me wrong, I used to love Mandrake Linux before Galaxy and MDKDM came along and now I like SUSE very much but I've only purchased a nice boxed copy of a distribution once since I started using Linux and that's because I cannot justify paying $80 CAD of my hard earned money as a student who wants to put his education before getting a job, on a distribution that doesn't have something a Windows or Mac OS X user has the privilege of taking for granted.

What I want to see is distributions putting more effort into improving multimedia support, so far all I've seen is some distribution including a copy of RealPlayer which can only support the RealMedia format and a few other simple formats that are sound only and that is not what I call effort. What I would consider effort is making licensed codecs available with the distribution on the installation media and if necessary adding the price of the codecs to the price of the product or making the codecs available on a separately available CD that costs little more than the price of the licenses for the codecs and the cost of media and shipping.

2005-01-21T12:09:55