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Red Hat 8.0 Reviewed
Jon writes "Eugenia from OSNews is giving Red Hat 8.0 a run for its money. She posted a very detailed and balanced review for the new version of Red Hat, which aims to be a "business desktop". Very interesting article and discussion over at OSNews." Several people also sent in the stories from InternetNews as well as LinuxPlanet.
Here's the thing I wish the "desktop Linux" community would come to understand. It doesn't matter how nice the desktop environment is, how cool it looks, or how easy it is to use. It's all about the applications, or more specifically, the DOCUMENTS.
Linux would be making serious headway onto the desktops of corporate machines (and greater penetration into the consumer market) if the Wine project would mature to the point that you could run any Windows app flawlessly on your Linux machine.
Barring that, if there were even a collection of native Linux apps that could read and write perfectly to the MS Office document formats (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, ACCESS, VISIO, PUBLISHER, etc), Linux would see a major boom.
Some folks "get it". When Ximian developed Evolution, they realized that in order to make it to the corporate desktop, they would have to write a plugin for Exchange. Crossover is doing great work extending Wine, and may someday reach the point where Windows apps can "just work". The only problem (in some people's view) is that these products are closed source and proprietary.
There could have been Open Source alternatives to these products, but OSS developers have decided that having five or six desktop UI's is more important than having one good UI and applications that can open the file formats that 95% of the world uses.
Ready for the "business desktop"? I don't think so.
Proof positive /. moderation points have been ransacked by Windows users who only have half a clue.