Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

As some of you who follow me on Twitter know, I ran into frustrations a few days ago with WPA. In Kubuntu, the distribution of Ubuntu I had installed, the WPA-enabled Network Manager isn’t installed by default (or at least it seemed not to have been installed when I did it - could have been my fault.) I knew that I should do it at some point, but I hadn’t encountered a WPA network until last week, so I hadn’t bothered. Needless to say, I’m doing that right now.

But what I realized was that the whole WPA thing with my laptop added to the pile of “little problems I haven’t solved yet.” Now, of course, as a techie, and someone with a home network, and multiple computers, and varied projects, there is always a list like this. But I’ve come to realize that now that I use Linux as my primary desktop, this list has grown much, much larger than it ever has been.

• After spending close to five hours on the X windows/driver problem I vented about last week. I gave up. I attached the nice brand-spanking new monitor to my Mac Mini, and have been quite enjoying using it. Needless to say, I did absolutely nothing to get it to work. Plugged it in, and it just worked.
• It took me a couple of frustrating hours or so to configure samba (editing the samba.conf file and testing) so that I could share my home directory, with music and video, with my other computers, and share my printer. Of course with my mac, I opened up the system preferences, checked a button, and, voila! Directories were shared.
• I have outstanding issues or decisions to make with my kernel not seeing all the memory I’ve given it (therefore requiring a recompile, which I have been postponing for weeks) sound, a webcam, a scanner, and accounting software. And there were several problems I never solved - including syncing calendars and addressbooks, finding a good time tracker. The problems I “solved” by offloading the functions onto the web.

There are several issues here, of course. First, although I’ve used Linux on the server for so many years, so I’m used to getting things done via the command line, my primary desktop was a Mac for 20 years, so I am GUI spoiled. So desktop functions (as opposed to server functions) that some people probably find trivially easy to do with the command line, I’m looking for a good GUI. Also, having used a Mac for so long, I’m also “it just works” spoiled. In fact, what’s funny is that things that do in fact “just work” with Linux almost surprise me.

And, as Dustin pointed out in the comments to my venting post earlier, a lot of this is not the fault of open source desktop software developers. Hardware vendors don’t release drivers for Linux, or if they do, they remain proprietary. This does, for sure, hobble the usability of Linux on the desktop. Apple has the luxury of a hardware monopoly, so of course things are more likely to “just work.”

And, of course, there has been a lot of resources and money poured into server software for Linux, but not as much for tools for the desktop.

This is my dilemma. I am committed to the ethos of free software. And I’ve talked about how the means and the ends are the same - so it’s important to me to use open source tools. But I also have to get work done for my clients. And I have to eat, too. Adding extra hours to the week dealing with technology problems are hours I don’t spend working with clients. (I estimate that 2-3 additional hours/week are spent just because I use Linux on the desktop.) The WPA fiasco a few days ago fell exactly at the moment when some really important work needed to get done for a client - so it sometimes hampers my ability to get things done.

I do demand a lot of my system. I’ve got tons of peripherals, I’m constantly changing and modifying things - I’m a power user. If pretty much all I did was documents, email and the web, like many people, I wouldn’t be having these issues.

I guess I’m looking to find the right balance, being able to use Linux on the desktop, and actually not feel too bogged down in problems I need to solve. But I’m not there yet. Not only have I offloaded functions to the web, I’m beginning to offload some things to my Mac again (like scanning.) It’s easier for me to think about spending minutes rather than hours getting things to work.