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IBM and Its Thoughts on Desktop Linux
Knuckles writes: "According to c|net, IBM will give desktop Linux a thumbs up at the Desktop Linux Conference in Boston on Monday. Sam Docknevich of IBM's Global Services group will give a speech titled, "The Time is Now for Linux on the Desktop." It seems that IBM will not go for the multi-purpose desktop, though, but for machines performing narrowly defined functions (kiosks etc.). However, basic office workstation seem to be included in this definition, according to C|Net" And in a classic case of the right-hand not knowing what the left-hand is doing, Realistic_Dragon adds: "IBM was leading the words of Red Hat's CEO in comments to the UK government last year saying that '...open source was not ready for the desktop'.
This is a little OT, but since they are so upbeat, I have to report that kernel used in Suse 9.0 has problems with IBM's own ThinkPads. Pressing the Fn button causes keventd() to go crazy eating up 100% CPU and the computer has to be painfully and slowly rebooted.
Boo on the original posting!
This has nothing to do with open source on the home user's desktop.
The article "Red Hat: Stick with Windows at home" describes why home users should stick with windows (or macs or whatever open source.)
This article is dealing with linux on the desktop when a system needs to give its users a closed, locked-down interface!
Apples meet oranges.
Davak
I don't want to look like I'm defending IBM but if you read the quoted article from The Register carefully, you'll notice that IBM said that OSS was not ready for the desktop in 2002. It was because of the delay of the British Parliamentary Commitee in charge of revealing the study that we came to hear about it till now. Yet, I must agree that this news, and the their recent investment in Novell makes IBM look bad.
R.Actually, they're both paying homage to a much older bit of propaganda: One God, One Church, One Bishop. Meaning that in light of the unity of both of those bodies, the Church should be ruled by the Bishop of Rome as the Western Church wanted it and not by a council of equal bishops as the Eastern church would have it.
What in the world are you using? LFS? Gentoo? Why are you compiling gaim? I've never compiled gaim myself and I've been a Linux and gaim user for five years now.
.exe you got from download.com than selecting a program from a list in synaptic and telling it to install doesn't mean that you can't be retrained in all of 5 minutes. I sure did that with a friend of mine and he had no troubles installing the software that came with his distro. Learn to use the tools that are there for newbies and you'll be fine. It's not really so hard, and I can personally attest to this because the learning curve has dropped significantly since I started using Linux. It's ready for those who are willing to use it.
If you sit a user down at a windows box, you'll never see them say "I want to customize the UI of this thing, give me a different window manager now!" They'll just use what's there. In the case of linux, if it's KDE2 then they'll use that. If it's KDE3 then they'll use that. If it's fvwm then they'll likely have some trouble until you show them how to work it. My largely computer illiterate friends had no troubles at all with windowmaker or icewm.
And as for dependencies, use your distro properly! Debian, Redhat, Mandrake, SuSE, ad infitum will have programs to properly manage depenancies so you don't have to. This problem was solved ages ago. apt and RPM were written well before I started using Linux, so it's not like they haven't been around out in the open for you to find.
Sure, maybe this or that distro might not have everything perfectly set up the way you want it, but then again neither does windows initially. Things still have to be installed, and just because you might be more used to double clicking on some random
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."