You’re right though, there is nothing inherent in open source which contributes to quality, but neither is there anything inherent in commercial software which contributes to quality.

And I disagree where the “even my gramps can use it without any complains!” argument. If non-geek users aren’t complaining, it isn’t because the software is top notch – it’s because they’ve become acclimated to the idiosyncrasies. This is why our parents still double click on web links in browsers and why they “don’t know where the file went”. It’s the same reason why the majority of features on mobile phones are never used, and why the iPhone UI was such a breath of fresh air (mum actually encodes her CDs to listen to on her iPhone, without any suggestion or instruction from me – I can’t see her being able to do that on Linux right now with equivalent music players).

After all these years, the average Linux desktop still steals focus just when you’re typing your password into a login box, still doesn’t give you nice mouse acceleration, still doesn’t integrate fully with installing/removing apps, still has very poor consistency with menus and dialogues.

You mention OpenOffice; it does mostly work, but ever seriously used styles stuff in it? It makes far more “developer sense” than the equivalent in MS Word but it’s horrendous compared to, say, Pages on the Mac. Then there’s Inkscape, which is perhaps the foremost open source vector art package, but again, the usability is a far cry from the commercial products in the same space. The GIMP – I love it, but again, it’s anything but a model for usability. Eclipse… eh, I won’t go there.

These are all quality issues that the layperson isn’t going to know to complain about (because they’re either fudge around and come up with a learned work-around, or come to accept that “it just does that”), and which commercial OSes and applications (well, some more than others…) worked out long ago.

(Then of course, there are some open source applications which are simply amazing, but my point is that there is nothing inherent in open source which contributes to quality.)

But, supporting with ssh and vnc, thats a good point, might dual boot it for the moment and try it out to see what happens :).

When it comes to dropping rubbishy commercial software from your home PC, don’t stop at the O/S. Get rid of Windows too, I say.

Completely agree with you with regard to a lot of the server-side, enterprise level offerings. I remember working with a colleague who basically had to decompile some Websphere code to prove to IBM support that there was a problem, and it was theirs. I have not delved into WebLogic or Oracle in as far as installation and troubleshooting goes, but I have heard better things about WebLogic (actually, it’s Oracle WebLogic now, so who knows, heck it will be Oracle Java, so who knows, heh).

Documentation-wise, while Spring has uber-doco, many others are a bit more mediocre (in my view). Websphere is a bit bizarre, in that practically everything, everything is documented in the Redbooks, you just need to be able to find it – once you do though, it’s like finding gold among crap (okay, probably not crap, but you get the idea).

On the desktop side, things are a bit more gray however (especially doco-wise), but certainly the open source world is learning and maturing. While before the idea was from programmers for programmers or tech-savvy users, now people will take the pain to write UI facades around complicated command-line utilities (at least this is my experience in the Linux world). But as a whole, it is still behind – there are a few notable exceptions (again quoting from the Linux side): desktop environments like Gnome and KDE are generally quite advanced, probably only ’second’ to the Mac in terms of cohesiveness and UX.

Support is a funny one – it is probably the biggest irony of all: the biggest case against open source in many less-informed enterprise circles is support. When in fact, free support is available, and answers are driven by the need to help, not by support contracts. The time it takes newsgroups, mailing lists, and forums as well as the quality of the answers is something commercial vendors should think about.

Heck, for almost all enterprise offerings (Spring, JBoss), commercial support is alive and kicking, both independent, and “official” (e.g. Springsource^H*12VMWare/EMC, Redhat).