Slashdot Mirror
Linux on the Desktop
webmaven writes "Mitch Kapor's Open Source Application Foundation just released a 34 page report on the Desktop Linux market, written by Bart Decrem, who has discussed desktop Linux previously. The OSAF is working on Chandler, which the press have generally described as an 'Outlook Killer', but it's really intended to be in a completely new application category, more similar to Lotus Agenda in some ways than what currently consider a PIM (email + contacts + appointments). The report goes into some detail about the current state of desktop Linux, trends, and various limiting factors, and concludes that while a revolution is not immediately in the wings, a trend can definitely already be discerned, and they expect adoption of desktop Linux to increase over the next few years, and identifies leverage points to accelerate the process."
Look at workalike apps that run on Windows. They can't even make it. You expect users to adopt a new OS *AND* utilities? Get real.
...a question which sounds like "flamebait", but it seriously isnt.
Are there any real objective 3rd parties who investigate and report on the different aspects of linux ( ie TOC, benchmarks, etc ) who truly are impartial to either OS. It seems that anybody writing 'reports' are either slanted towards windows, or linux. I dont think i've ever read a report that says "well, linux sucks at x, and windows sucks at y as well. in summary, they both suck ( or they both rock, or whatever, etc. ) . "
Where does one find unbiased reviews and benchmarks of OS's ?
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Stop trolling.
.02
Linux isn't ready for the desktop but there are people out there willing to attempt to get it as close as they can.
"An Outlook Killer" is something that apparently people feel is necessary but what I feel is necessary is an IE browser (no, no matter what anyone says Mozilla doesn't perform anything close to how IE does, and yes, I have used both (Mozilla in Windows and Linux, and IE on Windows)).
No IRIX workstation was ready for the desktop as what we consider it today, believe me.
Windows and apparently MacOSX are ruling the desktop and will most likely continue to do so.
We are seeing movement towards Linux on the desktop but it's still got a LONG way to go. I guess as people become more and more concerned with getting it there, the timeframe will continue to shrink.
Just my worthless
I don't know, I find the latest versions of KDE and Gnome to be quite nice to use, and very pleasing to the eye. Granted, their actual functionality is very close to that of Windows, but as a standard desktop environment is concerned, KDE/Gnome are pretty nice. Of course, if you're talking about revolutionizing the Windows, Icons, Mouse, and Pointer model of desktop use, that's another story. I'm all for using a gesture-based system like in Minority Report, myself...
"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of"-TMBG
umm.....dude....People Don't give a shit about the browser they have. they use the one that came with the damn system.
if you mean a single browser then yes...Mozilla 1.5 will be that....it is called firebird.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
True, homeusers will probably switch to Linux for the same reason they use Windows now: it's what they use at work.
Centralization breaks the internet.
"they expect adoption of desktop Linux to increase over the next few years"
That's what they said a few years ago. And that's probably what they'll be saying a few years from now. Don't get me wrong, I like Linux. But it's just not for mom and pop and I doubt it ever will be given who is working on it and what they've been doing.
Linux innovates very little except in technological areas. It's GUIs even today fall short of Windows and Mac GUIs, and several years from now I don't expect Linux will catch up. I don't see MS or Apple kicking back sipping pina coladas at the poolside.
I think alot of great work has been done in Linux and I'm a Linux user myself, but not as my primary desktop. Linux is an OS made for geeks by geeks that love to push the geek envelope. That's great stuff in and of itself, but it's not going to put Linux in the mainstream.
And does it want to be mainstream? Do Linux users want it to be mainstream? For the most part, I think not. When asking a technical question in Linux circles, the responses you get range from apathetic to offensive. RTFM! NEWB! It's pretty rare you actually get someone with a little compassion that has felt your pain and is willing to help you out.
Everything about Linux (and Unix in general) seems to be as if it is some kind of rite of passage. You must fight the bear without weapons, then you must walk the fire barefooted and then you must master Unix! It is that final task at which the brave warrior often stumbles...
Really my main beef with linux is how hard it is to set the thing up when you haven't gone through the process in the last six months. I generally forget what the config file is named that I'm interested in, or where it happens to be located. Frankly, any setting that most users will have to change at some point in their life should be easily accessible through the GUI menu system.
I will admit that it is a heck of a lot better than it used to be, but I still have to do a bit of googling to get my linux system usable. Windows on the other hand, you can go to the control panel and what you want to change will likely be in there somewhere, unless it's application specific, and you don't have to read any manuals or docs to figure out how to configure your system - it's intuitive.
You can still choose to install the Office Assistants, but you've always been able to choose not to install them. I've never had to deal with Clippy, from Office 97 through Office XP. Of course, most people prefer to just bitch and moan rather than do something about the problem, so it's not surprising that people are still complaining about Office Assistants.
If people are already using Linux on the desktop, they don't need to read a report about Linux on the desktop, do they?
...)
(not to mention that every "desktop" distro in the past two or three years has come with a pdf viewer by default
The requested URL
I am forced to agree with you. As much as the clip annoys me, the cat makes working easier.
I think it's his personality. Instead of just doing a stoopid "trick" animation every now and then, he just goes to sleep. Or something else less invasive than "I'M A CLIP!!!1 IT'S SO COOL!!!1"
OMG! Wau!
It would be nice, however, if someone would put out a goddamn program that isn't called 'kApp', 'kBrowser' or 'kCoolgame'.
Cuteness has its place, but it's a real pain finding the right app most of the time.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Mac OS X certainly refutes your claim that "*nix is for servers and hackers, not Joe Sixpack...."
I do agree with your analysis of the state of the Linux UI, but Apple has demostrated that you can put an effective and attractive GUI on a unix machine.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
What's wrong with xpdf? or GGV?
No - we need an OS/windowing system that forces coders to make things usable automatically. Command line and graphical launch should be the same thing from a developer standpoint - instead of having to pop-over to the command line, the user should be able to pop-open a constext menu for the run-parameters of a program, and see limited options, not just an ambiguous text-passing system. It should be more convenient to write a configuration system through a graphical widget window then through a text editor. Basically, I think code should move away from the simple text config file, and more into a database-style concept of a header that defines widgets. So, the configuration simply becomes an onscreen list of widgets - with no text file to get confused by. Sure, if the coder leaves out the doctext then this thing is confusing - but at least widgets will give you a vague idea what the control does.
The problem is that all major OS's are gradually evolutionary growths from the 80's. None are actually "designed".
You actually detail some of Linux's problems quite well. Let's see:
/dev/null. Until then continuing to use the same old crap will be cheaper in man hours and dollars. And as always management can almost always be convinced to keep using the same old thing if it worked well enough that they didn't get blamed.
"I don't run Windows anymore unless I want to play Carmageddon II at home". I don't recall ever walking into Wal-Mart and buying a Linux game. Consumers want to be told what to buy. Such as: Get Armagetron here! 3D! Multiplayer! New, new, new! (No, really check it out). Windows has better games because Windows games have better advertising because Windows has a bigger market share. It'll be a long time until you hear some ten-year-old say, "I had to install Linux so I could play Doom 6.66. It just isn't the same on Windows."
"at work I only get into Windows if I need to use the custom workorder system that ties into Novell and MS Access." Legacy software, hardware, and geeks will eventually fade into
"We need to start new-to-computers people with non-MS operating systems." Great idea. But have you ever looked at the books or web sites these people try to learn from? You know the ones where there is a chapter on the mouse complete with blow-by-blow steps for double clicking? Try finding something like that for any distro. Your standard Linux distro has hundreds of powerful, Ghz using, bandwidth blasting apps that new-to-computers" people can live their entire lives without using. The community is great as long as you know that hard drive storage is different than system memory. If your knowledge isn't that advanced (like 90% of users) you'll be lucky to get any help at all.
With all the incredible advances the community has contributed to Linux sometimes Windows is still necessary.
Counter point away...
I've been using Galeon (based on Gecko) for a while, and it now actually pains me to have to use IE if I ever sit down at a Windows machine. Even the development releases (e.g. 1.3.5) which have had many features removed for rewriting have more nice features than IE. For example, the ability to add nice textbox widgets to your toolbar for search engines, and not just some limited set of search engines, but anything at all (I use the Google one constantly, but I also have one for PlanetMath, for example). Of course, there's also tabbed browsing, which is so useful and obvious that it's ridiculous that IE doesn't have it. Galeon is also quite fast. I've never had any performance issues with it.
I've also tried Konqueror, and thought that it was pretty nice (though it lacked some things like tabbed browsing, but hey, it's a filemanager too). I don't use KDE however, so it takes too long to init all the KDE stuff the first time Konqueror loads. If you don't mind KDE though, it's probably worth looking at. It'll probably load as fast as IE does in Windows if you're running KDE (as it won't have to do anything to initialise).
There are plenty of "IE Killers" already available for Linux - why not try these two?
I've been using Wintel for over 15 years and have just recently installed Red Hat 9 on an older K6-2 550. Here are a couple of points I think are worth mentioning (ubergeeks can exclude themselves from the classifications below):
1. Linux is ready for *some* desktops only, namely ones where users won't be constantly tweaking and installing new software and hardware. You want a computer for grandma to browse the web, send email and view a few grandkid photos? Linux is great! You want to roll out corporate desktops where employees don't really need to be able to download and install the latest version of KaZaA? Linux is a godsend (provided the business software you need is supported).
2. Linux is *not* ready for the average user desktop. The average user wants to do everything grandma wants to do, but they also want to be able to install or upgrade software and hardware *easily*. In addition, they want a fully functional GUI, with no *necessity* of dropping to a CLI for everyday tasks. They want to be able to go to a third party software/driver website, follow the 'click here for Linux version' hyperlink, download the file, then double-click to install it.
Needless to say, as long as Linux distributions and desktop managers continue to proliferate, the average user's requirements will never be met. I say this as a *fact* not a *prescription*, so spare me the Linux-strength-in-diversity comments. I just think you can't have your cake (freedom/diversity) and eat it too (Linux on average desktop).
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
I tend to agree with him. Starting everything with a k or a g is annoying as hell. Everytime I used to boot up the 'konqueror', I started thinking about how much I hate the Mortal 'Kombat' where you use 'Koins' to unlock 'Koffins' in the 'Krypt'. IT'S FUCKING ANNOYING TO HAVE EVERY PROGRAM START WITH THE SAME LETTER. The g's in gnome are still annoying, but as much to me because i dont get reminded of the whole 'kombat' thing. I mean, say what you will about microsoft, at least it isn't Microsoft mOffice that comes with mExcel and mOutlook and mWord. That's why I use enlightenment, no omnipresent prefixes there, no-siree. Now let me go fire up ETerm..... Oh dear god no, what have they done???? And in the new version, E17, they have about ten more built in apps on the way that all begin with E. Jesus christ it felt good to get that rant out though....
Another VERY good reason why home users will use Linux rather than Windows is that DRM realted technologies will be abhorent to Linux so when they buy their CD and it won't play on their PC they'll just bring it back and tell the store to go to hell and download the tracks from XXX. Likewise when they pick up a few DVDs over in the US (or Europe) and come back home they will be able to just play them and not discover that they have locked themselves out from playing the rest of their collection. Now I know that Windows does not preclude them doing these things, but you have to venture into a seedier underworld of crackers where on Linux the hacking will be done out of the box (or else they will just have to get any DVD to play and then be able to play any other DVD without fear).
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
No it's not. It just means that the IT department who is doing the installation should better understand what they're installing. The people you're referring to are the same people that wouldn't use the help functionality anyway, so it doesn't matter whether they have the hand-holding Office Assistant or the standard HTML help to work with. In either case, they're going to call IT.