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Kylix in Limbo
IgD writes "Kylix, Borland's Linux port of their popular Delphi compiler has been covered on Slashdot before. LinuxWorld is reporting that Kylix development is in limbo. Many speculate this is a politically correct way of saying the project has been abandoned. There hasn't been any updates to Kylix 3.0 in well over a year. One user who attended BorCon this year wrote in his blog that Borland didn't have any updates to Kylix planned for 2004. This is really disheartening news. Why didn't Kylix sell? Does this say something about the application or about the difficulties of marketing a commercial Linux application?"
For the Older crowd who will understand My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread Mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning. My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli. Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), the term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system. We all took gym, not PE ... and risked permanent
injury with a pair of high top Ked's (only worn
in gym) instead of having cross-training
athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built
in light reflectors. I can't recall any in juries
but they must have happened because they tell
us how much safer we are now.
Flunking gym was not an option ... even for
stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than
gym.
Every year, someone taught the whole school a
lesson by running in the halls with leather soles
on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot.
How much better off would we be today if we only
knew we could have sued the school system.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the
pledge and staying in detention after school
caught all sorts of negative attention. We must
have had horribly damaged psyches.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish
something before I was allowed to be proud of
myself. I just can't recall how bored we were
without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-b ox
or 270 digital cable stations.
I must be repressing that memory as I try to
rationalize through the denial of the dangers
could have befallen us as we trekked off each
day about a mile down the road to some guy's
vacant 20, built forts out of branches and pieces
of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got
to be the Lone Ranger. What was that property
owner thinking, letting us play on that lot? He
should have been locked up for not putting up a
fence around the property, complete with a
self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm.
Oh yeah ... and where was the Benadryl and
sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I
could have been killed!
We played king of the hill on piles of gravel
left on vacant construction sites and when we got
hurt, Mom pulled out the 48 cent bottle of
mercurochrome and then we got our butt spanked.
Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed
by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of
antibiotics and then Mom calls the attorney to
sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious
pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either
because if we did, we got our butt spanked
(physical abuse) here too ... and then we got
our butt spanked again when we got home.
Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for
coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel
driveway while playing with Tonka trucks
(remember why Tonka trucks were made tough ... it
wasn't so that they could take the rough Berber
in the family room), and Dad drove a car with
leaded gas.
Our music had to be left inside when we went out
to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my
imagination a couple of times when we went on
two week vacations. I should probably sue the
folks now for the danger they put us in when we
all slept in campgrounds in the family tent.
Summers were spent behind the push lawnmower and
I didn't even know that mowers came with motors
until I was 13 and we got one without an
automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive.
How sick were my parents? Of course my parents
weren't the only psychos. I recall Donny
Reynolds from next door coming over and doing
his tricks on the front stoop just before he fell
off. Little did his Mom know that she could have
owned our house. Instead she picked him up and
swatted him for being such a goof. It was a
neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person I knew had
ever been told that they were from a
dysfuncti
With 20 plus distributions, at least 5 different package managers and none of them compatible with each other Linux is doomed as a desktop operating system.
End users want ease of use, up to date applications, compatiblility with the internet and other users and most important they don't want
needless complexity of an operating system.
A few reasons why Linux is going to fail:
1. Too many different distributions.
2. No standard place for putting files.
3. No standard upgrading scheme.
4. No standard package management system.
5. Cost that is approaching that of Windows and while you can get most of the things for free it is a major time waster.
6.WINE. Just the fact that WINE is needed proves that Linux does not have the applications users want and need.
7. Hardware support is dismal for new hardware. Linux drivers are months, sometimes years behind the Windows versions.
8. The applications are poor quality imitations of Windows applications. Take GAIM or XMMS for example. Winamp easily shares a soundcard, XMMS doesn't. GAIM looks like shit compared to Trillian.
9. The need to convince someone who already has Windows to shell out $89.00 for SUSE just so they can trhow away all of the Windows shrinkwrap that came with their computer.
Good luck on that one.
In fact, Linux needs a lot of help because it is simply not gaining any sort of desktop market share and rightfully so because Linux
sucks.
linux users don't like using apps which were half-ported using a windows emulator (see wordperfect, winamp3)
you want to make gui apps? use the qt or kde libraries. use gtk even. you want a gui app in an easier language? use pyqt, pykde, or even pygtk. perl-gtk if you're really desperate. kylix doesn't offer anything over these. I personally made a few pyqt apps in a matter of hours (see pysp), how much easier can it get?
who wants to distribute 40 megs of libraries with their application? I don't remember exactly how many libraries kylix need[s|ed], but it was fairly stupid
I signed up to download kylix, and I started getting flyers in my mailbox (my physical mailbox) from borland. nobody wants that.
enough said
again...enaugh said
infact you should look at what slashdot has to say about linux right here.
I got a greased up Yoda Doll shoved up my ass!!!!!!!!
ANAL YODA!
YODA ANUS!
BLOODY SHIT!
I've talked with several book publishers about this, and was told about first-rate Linux books by major houses that sold under 1,000 copies in a year. And selling Linux software is even harder.
Do you like to see MS running the whole frickin' (desktop) world? If so, then keep it up, and Linux will continue to be nothing more than your little toy.