The Near-Term Future Of Open Source Desktops

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The Near-Term Future Of Open Source Desktops

Posted by timothy on Monday July 14, 2003 @10:51AM from the it's-a-comin' dept.

securitas writes "eWEEK has two related articles on the growth of open source software. The first article is about the growth of desktop Linux, featuring Lotus and the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) founder Mitch Kapor, who says (among other things) that call centers will be where the next wave of growth for desktop Linux happens and that 10 percent of global desktops will be Linux in a few years. He bases his statements on a report by Eazel and GNOME Foundation co-founder Bart Decrem entitled 'Desktop Linux Technology and Market Overview' (PDF) mentioned last week. The second story is about open source software growth in the government sector where government agencies like the U.S. Census Bureau have embraced OS software for projects like the State and County QuickFacts site. Based on Perl, Apache, MySQL and Linux, the site gets 200,000 page views a day."

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The near term, strictly speaking, of course. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-14 11:14 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Near-term future of open source desktops?

They will remain shitty.
Re:Linux is cheap by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-14 11:19 · Score: -1, Flamebait

Funny thing, I submitted this just yesterday. Who's COCK did you SUCK, securitas? ComanderToeCheese? CowboyLeatherMan? Obviously you SWALLOW!
Open Source? More like Open Sores by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-14 11:22 · Score: -1, Flamebait

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Open Source fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Linux box (a P4 3200 w/1024 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Athlon 900 running Windows XP, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Linux box, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Mozilla will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even vi is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Linux machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Linux box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the Linux machine's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3200 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that Linux is a "superior" OS.

Open Source addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use an Open Source over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
The reason by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-14 11:42 · Score: -1, Flamebait

That linux sucks on the desktop is the file dialog. It is _~**N_O_T**~_ , and i repeat
N___N _OOO _TTTTT NN__N O___O __T N_N_N O___O __T N__NN O___O __T N___N _OOO ___T

Acceptable for a production enviornment. Its a stinking motif relic from the 19-fing-80's! Both kde and gnome need to create a unifed file dialog infrastructure using the freedesktop standards and drop gnome-vfs and kioslaves for a unified file access mechanism. Then, and only then will it be ready!