Red Hat's CEO Suggests Windows For Home Users

Selecter was one of many readers to point out a ZDNet story in which "the CEO of Red Hat now says that Linux is not ready for the desktop, but may be ready in a few more years. Curious - I'm wondering if this is the start of a corporate only retrenchment of Linux, or just a bump in the road to Linux having a wider desktop share?" Apropos that, Gwobl writes "Jim Lynch, over at ExtremeTech, weighs in on the fate of the Linux desktop, now that Red Hat has apparently turned its attention to the enterprise and Novell is buying SUSE (to go with Outlook clone Ximian, which it also owns). Lynch's take: Cheer them on! The Linux world needs these strong champions. And don't overlook Novell's networking roots. Time was, Big Red defined networking."

Comments

Linux is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Long live FreeBSD!

Fonts, etc.

[Ender Ryan]

The fonts issue has been fixed for... well, quite some time now. All distributions ship with good font support these days.

Every "modern" app, ie. KDE 3 and GNOME 2, supports the new font system.

Number of Linux distributions: There's no way to make a good installer that will install a commercial app on Linux and have everything work. There are too many dependencies for specific versions of libraries and things that would make this sort of thing worse than any kind of Windows DLL hell.

Complete horsedung. Proprietary apps can ship with all the lib versions they require, just like many do with Windows. This is often an excuse given by vendors, but vendors that support Linux properly don't have many such problems. Eg. Loki always shipped the versions of SDL, OpenAl, etc. their games depended on, and none of their games had library problems.

OTOH, glibc sometimes breaks some apps, usually when said apps are doing something wrong.

The only problem with Linux these days is hardware installation, due to lack of support.

Re:Yup.

[Arker]

I'd love to see the models you're comparing.

The fact that you're quoting megahertz and not mentioning the cpu types tells me right off you're probably not doing a very accurate comparison. A 1ghz G4 is roughly comparable to a P4 at over 2ghz performance wise, and is easier on the battery. I looked at a lot of Intel based laptops before I bought my TiBook, and found a few that were roughly comparable hardware and price-wise, but nothing that was significantly better without being significantly more expensive.

Defend the mac, but please DON'T LIE. Tell me you like the OS. Tell me you think the hardware is pretty and durable, tell me the apps are good, tell me they are great for multimedia, but NEVER, NEVER tell me they are cheaper!!!

OK, the OS is great compared to Windows (I still like a proper *nix setup better, and you can run that too;) the hardware is very nice, durable, well designed; the apps are very nice for sure, and yes, they're great for multimedia. And no, they aren't, as a rule, cheaper. But they're about the same price, that's enough.