This Sunday, fresh after finishing setting up a home Wi-Fi network for my parents, I decided to wipe the old Windows 7 installation from my mother’s laptop and reformat and reinstall everything. The system had got cluttered and glitchy by then, and the last straw was a bug that caused every document sent to printing to be printed indefinitely over and over, as long as there was paper.

Instead of reinstalling Windows, however, I wondered if this time around I could install Ubuntu, mostly for ease of maintenance. (When working with Windows on my parents’ machines, I’ve long been frustrated at its poor and inconsistent logging, often requiring trial-and-error sequences to make things work, and the inability to fix even the most trivial but show-stopping errors in proprietary software without access to its source code.)

My mother, 46 years old, previously relying on me even to copy files under Windows, is just about as close to a non-technical user as one can get. Since she only used Firefox, Picasa, and the bundled card games, she said she didn’t care which OS to use, and so my parents greenlit this installation.

Instead of the GNOME flavor of Ubuntu, I chose Kubuntu 10.10, partially for ideological reasons and partially because it would be more familiar to former Windows users. As such, it was going to be a test of the system’s usability for an average non-technical user, and its quality of localization for someone with next to no knowledge of English (which she only started studying very recently). So, without further ado, I booted the freshly downloaded live USB image…

Since I rarely install Ubuntu from scratch—most of my installations are upgrades—the installer was a pleasant surprise. It looked slick and professional, easily on par with that of modern commercial software. However, along with it came the first minor problem: it reported the computer as not being connected to the Internet, not even showing me the list of Wi-Fi connections. To remedy this, I had to enter live CD mode (“Try Kubuntu”) and connect to the home Wi-Fi network through its panel, after which the installer reported being connected. Ideally, I think the installer should expose the network connection widget, so that the user can manually enter network settings if necessary.

Along the way, I opted to install the restricted extras. After the installation finished without trouble, I started tweaking the system. First of all, I saw that KWin animations were being sluggish. I tried to run Compiz, but to my surprise, it didn’t run at all. Only then I checked OpenGL settings and saw that X was using the Mesa software rasterizer, even though I saw a “Searching for proprietary drivers” window just before the installer rebooted. (So apparently KWin compositing can function kinda-sorta-bearably even under software rendering—kudos to the developers!)

Using Jockey, I installed the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and rebooted… only to discover that, while KWin now had normal performance, all the fonts suddenly increased in size! I have no idea how changing the driver could also change the default DPI, but thankfully KDE has a setting to force 96 DPI, which I used. After that, I increased the default font size from 9 to 10, simply because that laptop’s screen was small for its resolution and the default 9pt UI font looked too small. On most monitors, however, the default should be acceptable, either with the default slight hinting or full hinting, which I enabled on that computer for better clarity. The choice of hinting style strikes me mostly as a matter of personal preference.

I also found out that the restricted extras were not installed for some reason even though the installer prompted for them, so I installed the kubuntu-restricted-extras manually. Even worse, while the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package was installed, the fonts themselves weren’t, because the user didn’t accept the EULA. I have to remove and reinstall the package to actually download and install the fonts.

That done, I changed some other defaults: deleted some software that I knew my mother would never use (such as KPPP and KRDC), installed Ubuntu Software Center, replaced Rekonq with Firefox, and Dragon Player with VLC. I would use Muon instead of Software Center, but sadly it doesn’t seem to be available in Russian yet (hint, hint).

Finally, I added shortcuts for Firefox, Kontact (where I configured her email account), and commonly used folders to the desktop and panel, switched Dolphin to use double click and table view by default, switched the desktop widget to display the desktop folder like in Windows, and replaced the standard notification widget with Colibri.

At that point, I saw another problem: the default Kubuntu color scheme is too low on contrast. That Asus laptop has a fairly lousy LCD matrix, one of those cheap low-contrast matrices that change brightness depending on viewing angle. So white and light blue icons on a light greyish-blue panel didn’t cut it. After trying a few themes, I settled on the Cream theme for Plasma, which provided a dark grey panel, and the LuckyEyes color scheme for Oxygen. Still, I wish Kubuntu was more high-contrast by default; Ubuntu and Windows 7 do better in this department.

Then I presented the system to my mother.

First, she requested the KDE main menu to be switched to classic mode, calling it more familiar. She quickly figured out how to use the Web, thanks to the familiar Firefox icon, and how to check mail. Then she asked how to switch between different Wi-Fi networks, as they have two different ones at their apartment. I pointed her to the network management widget, and she figured it out easily.

File management proved to be trickier. Before, she never learned to copy files on her own under Windows. I showed her how to open two different folder windows and copy files via drag and drop (she needed to be told that “move” means that the files are deleted in their source folder). She then accidentally clicked the desktop switcher button instead of the quick access button, and wondered why all her windows suddenly slid off the screen.

Then I asked her to open a freshly USB flash drive (since she wanted to learn to copy photos there). This part, however, proved less than intuitive. She quickly found the USB icon on the panel and clicked it to open the removable devices menu, but to actually open the flash drive, she tried double-clicking it—to no avail. Furthermore, the “Open in File Manager” menu entry was in English, not localized into Russian. I had to point her to that menu entry, and then show her two ways of ejecting the flash drive. It was not obvious to her that she had to right-click the flash drive’s list entry in Dolphin to bring up the ejection menu entry. I had to guide her to the eject button on the panel, too, but once she found it, the “plug/eject” icon metaphor became obvious to her, and she started operating flash drives without my help from now on.

She also complained that there were no card games in the default install, so I had to install KPatience, using that as an opportunity to demonstrate the Software Center at work. I hear they had that fixed in Natty.

Finally, since she used Picasa before to manage photos, and my father also used it on his laptop, I looked for a way to install Picasa under Ubuntu. My first bet was the official Linux version, but it turned out that it simply packed its own copy of Wine and wasn’t localized into Russian. On the other hand, when I installed the Windows version of Picasa under Wine, it didn’t display folder labels, and I had to look into the “Linux version” (massive sarcasm quotes) to understand why. I suspected that the problem lay in missing fonts, and discovered that the Linux version bundled Vera font files in its Wine fonts directory. One copy operation later, the version manually installed under Wine ran without glitches, in Russian. I also installed Shotwell as a possible alternative to Picasa, but when I tried to open an image from it in an external viewer, it said that no external viewers were available…

Later, I entered her Gmail credentials in Kopete to let her chat with me via Google Talk. The concepts of IM applications were highly unfamiliar to her, and I had to explain how to post a message, how to see if I’m online, and how to see if there were incoming messages. The messaging indicator was initially unfamiliar to her, but she soon got used to the concept of all message notifications being gathered under the envelope icon.

Another problem came in the form of the HP LaserJet M1120n MFP. While printing over the network worked out of the box, I had to search Google to discover how to enable support for scanning over the network. After I ran hp-setup, both Simple Scan and XSane found the scanner, but displayed an error. One Google search later, I found out that the HP proprietary plugin that was installed missed a library symlink in /usr/lib. I added it and then the scanner worked, but was it really that hard for HP to make sure it would work out of the box? How is a casual user supposed to solve this?

To summarize, here are some things that Kubuntu could improve, usability-wise:

• Expose network settings in the installer, so that the computer can be connected to the Internet without leaving the installer.
• Use a more high-contrast theme by default. Either use a darker panel, or darker icons. The contrast of the default Oxygen color scheme could be improved as well.
• Add default actions for removable devices that can be executed without opening the menu, for example, by double-clicking. Furthermore, make it possible to access removable devices from the desktop in more than one way without a Dolphin window already open.
• Improve interoperability of file associations between GNOME and KDE applications. If I associate image files with Gwenview in Dolphin, then Firefox and Shotwell should pick it up.
• Display clearer error messages in scanning applications. I only found out about the symlink thanks to Launchpad, because the message was a generic “I/O Error”.

Finally, I’m not sure that “restore session at startup” is a good default. To my knowledge, no desktop environments other than KDE do this. GNOME, Xfce and Windows all boot to a clean desktop session by default.