The Perils of Being a Linux Newb

I’m a Windows guy and I’m not ashamed of it. Despite the problems it has (and what software package doesn’t have problems?) it has been a productive and profitable platform to build a career on. I don’t have anything against other platforms either. Whatever works for you, go use it. Someday I will be cool enough to own a Mac :).

So even though I’m a Windows user, I’m a technology enthusiast at my core so I’m always up for trying new things. A loooonnng time ago (probably 9-10 years ago in my late teens) I set up Linux on a spare machine to see what the fuss was about. I tried Red Hat. I tried Mandriva. Once I got it installed I didn’t know what to do with it. It was nice enough, but it just didn’t grab me. This was also pre-Firefox so the Internet browsing experience was subpar. The biggest hurdle though was installing programs, if I could even find one to do what I wanted. Package managers were sparse and compiling from source was well beyond my capabilities at the time.

Fast forward a few years and I was churning out web sites with ASP/VBScript and some PHP and this new thing called Ruby on Rails came out. I, like many others, was wowed by the famous “build a blog in 20 minutes” video so I got it up and running on my machine but didn’t do anything with it because I was a scripter not a programmer and learning Ruby was well beyond my capabilities at the time.

I’ve been a professional programmer now for 3.5 years. I worked as a sysadmin for a couple years. I’ve used Mac OS a lot more. To save time, let’s just say I’d consider myself a seasoned computer guy with a broad understanding of How Things Work and the ability to figure out almost any new thing. Or so I thought.

I’ve been wanting to learn a new programming language for awhile now. I really like C# and feel I have a pretty good grasp on it so I thought it was time to broaden my horizons. Ruby and Python are en vogue right now and have some philosophical differences from C# so I thought I’d try to learn some Ruby (and Rails along with it). I have an old ThinkPad T60 I just retired so instead of setting up Rails on Windows (which was not that great of an experience the first time around) I decided to go with Linux on the T60. Ubuntu seems to be all the rage lately so I burn the CD and it installs beautifully. No driver issues, in fact, not a single install issue. Awesome! We’re off to a great start.

Time to get Rails installed. I figured the software installing experience had to be better than 10 years ago. It is, but barely. Look what it takes to get Rails installed. Are you serious? I went through all this and encountered a couple errors along the way that I was able to solve with some lengthy Googling. I know what you’re thinking “Lame Windows dude wants a GUI.” Yeah that’d be nice, but I’d settle for an apt-get one-liner. RubyGems appears to be the solution for this, but getting that installed and configured was not exactly straightforward either.

I eventually got it running. In the process of trying to get all the packages installed and configured I had no idea what version of what was installed or how to uninstall Ruby 1.9 after accidentally installing it. I didn’t want to run into some conflict down the road because I had the wrong versions installed.

Worst of all, I felt like I was wasting tons of time configuring everything just to get going and I had no way to really verify I was doing anything right. This feeling would be mitigated with experience so I’m not blaming the platform for that feeling, just pointing out my experience.

With Rails up and running I thought I’d try to find a text editor or IDE with some basic Rails support to at least provide a little structure for messing around with it. Googling around I come across RubyMine but that’s not in the Ubuntu package manager and downloading and installing (still after all these years just an afterthought) requires Java, which is in the package manager. Download Java and try again. No go. This was about the point I had enough with trying out Rails.

Here’s my advice if you want to try Rails: buy a Mac and TextMate.

Not wanting to entirely give up on things, I recalled that there were some big Mono releases earlier in the day. I try following some steps with apt-get to get MonoDevelop 2. No go. Tried the package manager and ended up with MonoDevelop 1. I have no idea what version of the Mono core is installed anyway. Download from the Mono site? Yeah, not so much. Ubuntu, even though it’s the most popular distro, doesn’t have a supported download. So much for that.

How is it after all these years the Linux software install experience is still so awful? Are my expectations unrealistic? Am I still too dumb to get all this stuff? I really wanted to like Linux/Ubuntu/Rails/Ruby/etc and to be energized by learning something new, but apparently I’m just not ready for that yet.