An associate and I have been using Pidgin (formerly GAIM), with the Off The Record (OTR) plug-in, to securely collaborate on Project X. Although OTR worked, there were times that it didn’t work very well… longer messages got errors instead of being transmitted properly, and some days it didn’t seem to want to work at all.

Yesterday, my associate discovered that there was a new version of it available, which claimed to solve these problems. I agreed that we should update it, and we each began to do so. It took him just a couple minutes — he’s using Windows, and there was a Windows installer already built for him. I’m still using Ubuntu “Feisty Fawn” 7.04, and since newer versions of OTR weren’t available in the repositories I know of, the only way I could see to get it was via source code, something I haven’t often had to do. The older version was really causing trouble, so I gritted my teeth and picked up the source code.

It wasn’t as bad as I expected, but it wasn’t easy either. The steps are simple enough: run the “configure” script; if it says you’re ready, run “make”, then if all is well there, run “make install”. The problem was with dependencies.

The new OTR wanted a new version of Pidgin, a new libgcrypt, and a new libotr, all available only in source-code format. The new libcrypt wanted a new libgpg-error and a header package that I didn’t have; the new Pidgin demanded a TLS/SSL library that it didn’t specify; something else wanted some other thing before it would compile. The configure scripts were usually pretty good about providing enough information to fix the problems, but would only report one problem each time they were run, and each of the problems required hunting down the specified package and doing the same configure/make/make-install process on it as well. All in all, it took me nearly an hour to finish the upgrade.

(Fortunately, after all that, the new OTR plug-in seems to work a lot better than the older one. I’m happy with the upgrade, despite the amount of effort it required.)

A friend and long-time user of Linux often complained about this kind of thing before, and said that the repository system was a huge improvement, but I didn’t quite understand what he meant until now. If you had to go through all of that every time you wanted to install or upgrade something, then Linux definitely wasn’t accessible to most people before… I’m an experienced software developer, and even I found it daunting. My wife and mother-in-law are both pretty computer-literate, but I’m pretty sure both would have given up on the process at the first error message that they didn’t immediately understand; anyone less experienced would have found simply comprehending the instructions too great a task.

The people that have claimed that Linux is “ready for the desktop” for the last five years or more are nuts. It’s barely there now, for a few people at either end of the technology spectrum — the technorati (who aren’t fazed by processes like those described above) and the people who just want simple applications like e-mail, web-browsing, and word-processing (who seldom or never need to do any work on the actual OS). Anyone else is going to find it tedious, at best.

But it’s getting better all the time. The new “Gutsy Gibbon” version of Ubuntu, which came out last Thursday, probably includes many of the packages that I had to manually update on the older version. It may even include the new OTR package itself in it’s repositories; I know that it includes a more recent version of Pidgin, at the very least. I haven’t looked at it yet; I’m planning to do so this weekend, if I have some time to spare.

When will Linux be ready for the average user? I can’t answer that any better than anyone else, but it’s rapidly reducing the number of people who would be dissatisfied with it.