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

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.