I got a text from my brother this afternoon, asking if I wanted to come over to his place and hang out and watch a movie. So I went over, and when I got there I found him struggling with his media center.
He had some big elaborate Linux system set up, with a media center on a Banana Pi (apparently one fruit flavor isn't enough?) and a Linux desktop running some obscure distribution called Peppermint (because peppermint and banana are flavors that go so well together!) and he sat there flailing at it for like 20 minutes, trying to get XMBC to actually play a movie. He tried multiple different approaches, through XMBC, through the browser, and even through VLC with a DVD in the drive, (which sorta defeats the whole purpose of having a media server,) and nothing actually worked. No matter what he did, no movie would play.
Finally, I said, "you keep working on this; I'll be right back." And I left and drove back to my place (about 10 minutes away), grabbed my Windows 7 laptop, and drove back. When I got there (total elapsed time: about 40 minutes) he was able to play video... but he had no sound. He was able to get the program to play test sounds, but not the audio track from the movie.
I opened up my laptop, got the Wi-Fi password from him, went to my Amazon Instant Video library.
Have you seen this?
Yeah.
Have you seen this?
Yeah.
Have you seen this?
No, what's it about?
X, Y, and Z.
Sounds fun.
So I grabbed the HDMI cable from his media center, and I had a movie running. Total time: about 2 minutes.
Now, my brother is by no means a technical illiterate. He's got a CS degree from a good school with a pretty Linux-heavy CS program. In a sane world, he should have been able to get that working easily.
Problem is, he's not in a sane world; he's in Linux-land. They've had some great successes over the years in certain areas, but end-user-facing software is not one of them. Which isn't too hard to comprehend; we're talking about heirs of the Unix Tradition, a system design philosophy that's 3 decades out of date now, heavily influenced by the same people who coined the term "luser". Outright contempt for end-users runs deep in the Unix Tradition's DNA.
My system was designed with end-users in mind. I don't need to configure anything to make the sound work. If I have headphones in, it automagically turns off the speakers and redirects sound to the headphones. If I unplug headphones, it turns the speakers back on. If I stick an HDMI cable in, it automagically turns off the speakers (and the headphones!) and redirects sound to the HDMI out. All without any input from me beyond changing some hardware connectors around, because it was developed by people who understand that there are obvious responses the user will want from his computer under certain conditions, and they set it up to do those things by default. Apparently the Peppermint people, and the core Linux people, don't understand that.
You know who does understand that? The Google people. Which is why they've managed to produce the only Linux distribution that's earned a non-trivial market share among end-users. But Android really isn't a desktop OS.
Maybe they ought to make it into one? Then maybe my brother would be able to watch movies with no hassle and no poking around in fiddly configuration settings and wondering why nothing works.