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Novell, RedHat and Sun Commit to a Linux Desktop
DeckerEgo writes "InfoWorld reports on the Linux desktop and how Novell, Sun and RedHat (wha?) are working on making 2004 the year corporations start adopting open desktops. But which desktop? Most interesting to note is how Novell is planning to beef up the number of Ximian, Gnome, Mozilla and OpenOffice developers after its SuSE aquisition is complete. Does this mean that SuSE will stop being one of the best KDE distros out there and follow the way of the Gnome?"
Some top players committing to bolster the options available to those looking for an alternative to the stuff from Redmond. VERY good news.
Perhaps not, the CEO of SUSE recently said that they are sticking with KDE, but also making Ximian desktop better for SUSE.
RH seemed like they were well on their way in RH 8/9, then suddenly pulled the plug.
"Ok you hippies, get cracking on that code so we can quickly package your hard work"
Sure wish someone large company w/ deep coffers would buy Mandrake and support the *best* KDE distro IMHO.
This guy is way out there
I love SuSE, and I love Gnome. I know many people out there may disagree, but having SuSE actually provide better Gnome support is wonderful news to me.
Regardless of that fact, having some big companies work together to create a unified front, a unified showing for Linux on the desktop, whether they use KDE, Gnome, or whatever, is good news as well.
Looks like some fun and interesting things are coming.
Jason Lotito
The 2000.00+ USD cost per developer to write commerical QT apps might be an issue with corp. adoption of KDE.
Everyone that has ever commented on the state of the Linux desktop has begged for consolidation. And now with Novell/SuSE, RedHat, Sun, HP, and IBM all backing Gnome it would appear that said consolidation is finally going to happen.
I suppose this means that one desktop environment (probably Gnome, at this point) will get enough support to bring Linux to the desktop, something that alot of people have been denying Linux is ready for in the past few weeks.
The only thing that really bothers me is that Random Corperate Giant is making the decision, not the users. When it comes down to it KDE and Gnome are both on top because they are both Really Good, and that fuels competition, etc. They've stayed "euqally" as popular because their respective user bases like them so much. So the most well known, in my opinion, Linux, Network OS, and Unix providers get to pick what they like and back it... Frightening.
I am wondering if they are going to put alot into user interface design like Apple did with OS X, and if they will be selling it preinstalled on computers like Windows does, that should deffinately bring up the market for it, also a unified desktop would be great for it too, people seem to think different on the subject though.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I suspect we will wind up with the:
Knome Desktop Environment.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
wouldn't it be funny if 3drealms didn't finish Duke 4 ever until linux dominated the home desktop market.. then they'd have to re-write their game AGAIN so it would be compatable..
LOL
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
The reason KDE and GNOME have come so far so quickly (within 5 years) is that they've had each other to feed off of and compete with. If there is any considerable swing in one that the other dies off, it'll mean suckage for the "winning" desktop.
Just look what happened with CDE and OpenLook in the previous UNIX desktop war. After people standardized on CDE, it started stagnating until KDE was founded and eventually GNOME killed it off.
I've been a GNOME user since GNOME 1.0, and I would hate to see Suse switch to GNOME, since they've been a driving force behind KDE, and thus a driving force behind GNOME.
KDE's better. Hell, even Linus uses it. But just because KDE's better doesn't mean Gnome sucks. Gnome's faster, GTK is better than QT and GTK apps look better in Gnome, and Gnome is overall less bloated. But KDE is far more configurable, so I like it better.
-1, trollbiter
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
once SUSE is acquired by Novell. Personally experiencing two cases of acquisitions of smaller company by the larger one, I know how much those promises worth. Less than 'my 2 cents'.
Dropline Gnome is quite good too...
I firmly believe that the only way Linux will make it's way to the masses that would normally use Windows or Mac is for the desktop to be unified. They need an interface that everyone else will know when they need help, not one that looks different.
That's hilarious. I was going to title this post "Informative Troll". I should have - looking at the mods slapped on it already. I wasn't trolling - honest.
The biggest problem I see with Linux on the desktop is there are too many hardcore hackers working with it. I wrote a report on this for my history class, for our section on technology. We learned about this guy, Kevin Mitnick, and he pretty much took over the internet singlehandely. He also bought a Ferrari with some money he stole from AOL users, by "fishing" peoples accounts. If not for the underground lawbreakage that is possible with this Operating System (OS), the Internet (and also the Intranet) would be much safer. There are heaps of people trying to steal our Ebay & Paypal now thanks to Linux. I don't like Microsoft any more tha next dude but is not the answer.
click here to incinerate homeless people
Redhat puts as much or more work into the desktop then anyone, who founded freedesktop.org there smart guy? who i'll give you a hint his e-mail address starts with an H and ends with a redhat.com
who wrote Orbit with very significant controbutions to gnome-terminal, gconf, freedesktop.org and maintaining Gtk+. Mike Harris is a huge contributor to X itself.
I know this is slashdot but please don't open your mouth unless you have a clue.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
What do you mean "now part of"? KDE's been in debian for as long as pretty much anything else, and I don't know of any sort of partnership between debian and KDE, so what are you talking about exactly?
Ummm, more like Solaris needs something a little more modern than Motif.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
For that reason, my money is on Novell making it on the desktop because they have a good understanding of deploying desktop/corporate systems. Sun and RH are more server folks. Maybe they can collaborate in some way?
IMHO.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
They just said they would improve GNOME.
Personally i prefer KDE for business reasons, but hey, if a better GNOME helps the cause.. why not..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I am curious about Sun's motivation. Cost effective Dell and IBM servers running *nix variants seem to have pulled the rug out from under Sun's market strategy. Sun's only strong product is Java, and they dont distribute it in a way that is conducive to acquiring revenue. If their strategy does center around Java, it would make sense for them to support an open desktop *nix system, because it would provide an effective way of promoting Java use. Personally, my respect for Sun was vastly diminished when Bill Joy was elbowed out. I think he was their best resource, and I think he could have provided them with a new product capable of keeping them in the market.
What's that... we get the disclaimer after we read the post.... Do you work for Microsoft?
emacs.
Okay, positive Linux desktop story...how long until SCO decides they need to remind everybody that they're still around?
My guess is we'll see something Friday.
This is a negative impact on KDE and the tone of the article suggests that Gnome will become the defacto standard for Novell/Suse.. this makes a lot of sense, not only because Novell owns Ximian but because.. as the article states, they want to give a 'single target to ISV's'.
Since RedHat is already Gnome centered..this target is and will be GTK+, which allows for third party linking without them having to pay licensing fees.. this is where the choice of QT finally comes and bites KDE... sad but true, a little ironic though... that KDE loses out because it is not friendly enough to corporate types vis-a-vis QT* while Gnome will win(at least it looks like it will) because it is.
*For those in need of a li'l background QT is licensed under the GPL while GTK+ is dual licensed under the GPL and LGPL. So, QT free(as in speech & beer) for GPL apps but not as in beer for non-GPL apps and while this is fine and dandy for community projects corporations will never pay a 'gatekeeper' if they want to release applications for the 'standard' desktop(even Mickeysoft doesn't charge that.. let's ignore MSDN for now).
--
But I'm going to keep scratching my head until I find a site dedicated to Linux improvements (from our, the users, standpoint). If you've ever been to kde-look.org you should have a pretty good idea about what I'm talking about. Slashdot is a great forum for commenting on exactly what it is you believe 'Linux' needs (or why it sucks), but that isn't its purpose and it doesn't collect or organize this information so Red Hat execs can skim through and see just what the uncleaned masses are griping about now..
Quack, quack.
I'm a died-in-the-wool Windows sysadmin (7+ years), just new to Linux (Libranet 2.8.1, Debian + extras) and in the middle of the learning curve (so take my comments for what they are worth -- probably not much), but already I think the great virtue of Linux/desktop is the organic, user-driven nature of development. It's not corporate-driven (that is, tied to quarterly project planned) milestones, but rather user-determined utility. This requires TIME. Linux is on a different schedule and that's fine. It will win the race against Redmond in the long run. The current drive toward the desktop stinks of corporate expediency. I can't fully articulate my concerns, but it's something like "wolf in sheep's clothing"...
Sun just scored a 1M+ desktop agreement with China, which wants Gnome/Linux, not Windows or Solaris/CDE. Novell's got Ximian's Evolution, which offers a low retraining barrier-to-exit for Windows/Outlook users. Gnome's got the initiative right now. It's in RedHat's interest to make the Gnome/KDE interoperation barriers disappear, bringing together a unified desktop strategy for the growing Linux platform. Therefore, it's in Sun's interest to work on that convergence; likewise Novell. In fact, everybody is best served by converging to one basic desktop, perhaps with addon features specific to KDE, Gnome or others. Sun would be the last holdout, but that China contract might have finally convinced them that people prefer Linux on their desktop to Solaris, at least for now. By going along, Sun gets to sell them on Solaris for the server, which much better supports enterprises, especially distributed ones.
--
make install -not war
Certainly the competition between the two has created some "drive" in the projects but even if one of them were to recede there are still at least two other significant desktops with which to compete, Windows and OS X.
The fight for the open desktop is a tiny battle compared to the fight for all desktops. Perhaps KDE and GNOME have reached a maturity where greater focus on the large battle might be beneficial.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
No.
We don't respond to foreign inquiries.
Seriously, though, why do languages take on any nuances? Spit is just as acceptable as spat, although there's a future perfect implied, as in, "I would have spit" versus the standard perfect "I almost spat".
Americans typically like to talk present tense so it would sound odd to use a present tense form of a verb in the past tense, completed sense.
As for petting vs. patting, petting connotes a caring, loving manner (http://m-w.com) while patting connotes merely showing approval. Again, cultural interpretations put a broader sense on these nuances, however slight.
Do return the favor and tell me why you use the form 'USians'. US is not a geographical area, nor is it a regional declaration. It is a political delineation, however, its principle stands on the unification of distinct and disparate elements. (Remember, the US was and is conceived of nations forgoing sovereignty to better guarantee their liberties.)
Personally, I find the term a show of ignorance and derision, but I'm sure you have better reasoning you could provide.
Thanks.
The opposite of progress is congress
My take as a sysadmin/user.
;-)
I think the KDE desktop is more easily configurable, but Gnome (GTK-2) apps are nicer.
Certain KDE components-- like Kate, Konqueror (as file manager and browser), Kasbar and Konsole are more elegant and utilitarian than their Gnome counterparts. That said, many utilities written for Gnome, but not necessarily part of Gnome are nicer than the Equivalent KDE third party apps--by this I mean Things like Gaim, Pan, and (this is a stretch) GTKed Firebird. Gimp's superiority goes without saying.
I was a long time KDE user but the need for speed and elegance caught me. Now I use Fluxbox because all is available from the right mouse button, and any app can be "tabbed" with any other. I find myself using the aforementioned Gnome/GTK2 apps, konqueror and quick show for occasional file browsing/image viewing, and aterm.
I just wish some how Exposity would work with Flux...
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
We are an educational environment, so we have to prepare them for what they use when they grow up...
By the time they get to the business world, will win2k be that applicable either? It seems to me that kids will pick up on it faster (particularly then the 55 year old grandmother you mention above), and when they do get into business, maybe they will have more of a clue and won't be "average (read as DUMB) users".
Sure Linux still isn't (yet) the mainstream solution, and you would be considered a bit of a vanguard, but is that so wrong?
If nothing else, having a mixture of OSes for students to learn on, including MS if you will, would be very advantageous to students, and I think would give them a much better education, allowing them to adapt easier to change, as they would understand concepts better, instead of relying on rote (?) memory.
And for those that excel in computer sciences, in particular, you would be doing them a great service, as I think they would stand to learn much quicker than being boxed into one way of thinking and doing things.
By limiting their choices for them, I think you are limiting their opportunity to learn.
Just my 2 red pennies...
JWall: GUI client for IPTables
They refuse to realise that targeting all aspects of PC usage is necessary to unseat the giant in Redmond.
I think the vendors could care less in the long run about unseating MS. Unseating MS is an idealist's goal not a business one. As long as they make enough money to justify what they're putting into Linux then they'll be happy. Taking a few percent of MS' markets would be serious money to all of these companies and MS could still claim victory. I don't see MS going away anytime soon. I'd love to see it happen but it won't.
The worst case scenario for MS is diversification from Office/Windows. In the long run, it's better for their corporate survival anyway. They'll still be around 10 or 20 years from now. They probably won't be the company everyone loves to hate either.
I had been (still am on other machines) a long time RedHat user, but was asked by my boss to check out other distros, due to RedHat's licensing changes. So I chose to try both Mandrake and SuSE. I should also mention that I too am a Gnome user. For all intents and purposes I've gone completely SuSE on my desktop and laptop (with no plans to switch). Gnome is quite polished in this distro. Quite happy with it. Fedora's nice in that it continues RH's Bluecurve, but the whole licensing thing has left a sour taste for all of us.
Actually for corporate / enterprise level workstations acrobat, java, flash and everything along those lines are essential for the freeflow of information through a company.
Someone earlier said, ... "make the Gnome/KDE interoperation barriers disappear" ...
This is very, very true. In my case, I am presently using both Gnome and KDE apps - and the XFCE WM. If Gnome & KDE would stabilize on a common underlying data model (be it XML or whatever), then I could keep the same address book in both. I could use whichever calendar I wanted at the moment. And, because these two dominate the Linux desktop now, sooner or later all the other WM and desktop environments would probably migrate there too.
Perhaps these desktop groups could actually meet online or in San Diego, or wherever, and decide to agree on data formats and communications / object protocols!!
Even groups who went their own way could develop a mapping from their way to the common lingua franca.
One of the big advantages of open source software is that proprietary considerations take a back door to improving the breed. And all it takes is agreement at the bottom level.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I think getting a standard desktop is a good thing. Not only will it bring more development to the standard platform (ability to write more code, revise it, analyze it for security issues, etc..) but perhaps a lot of duplication effort will be reduced and those developers can focus on innovative features, new areas of development, etc.
As a KDE user, I am slightly sad to see these corporations favor Gnome, but I would have to imagine that the features that I really like in KDE would find their way into the standard Gnome desktop (if that ends up being what happens) becuase lets face it -- the FOSS that is developed generally mimics the users of that particular FOSS.
It will be very interesting to see what type of inroads will be made in 2004.
The Enemy will never let the penguin come to the thorwn of the desktop.
The war is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last.
"I see it in you eye's, the fear of spending too much on software. A day may come when our servers may fail, y. When we forsake our code and break the GPL, but it is not this day. This day we fight!.
[echoing voice]All you have to decide is what to do with the hardware that is given to you[/echoing voice]
"We shall see the commandline again"
You gave away your root password, I can no longer protect you anymore.
"We cannot win this by source code alone."
Not for ourselves, but we can give GNU a chance...
*Followed by several quickly flashing scense of battle slowing as the string section in the back ground retards*
"NOOOOO!!!!!"
*black with titles: Lord of the Desktop: return of the command line.
Oh, wait, I thought this was the review of RotK...my bad...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Was going to implement RH9 to showcase Linux in our data center(Oracle on one and Network monitoring on another). Well EOL on RH9 was announced and my boss asks "what the hell am I doing showcasing on an OS at EOL?". After a few months of back pedaling I finally get the green light on Linux again. Do you think it will be Redhat? Hell no. You only have to burn me once. Matthew Szulik does the double speak almost as well as Darl Mcbribe. The guy has come off sleazy in his defense of the asinine decision to stop workstation support. ass talking like a jackass
The greatest advantage about Windows/Solaris server is that admins can run the same environment on their desktop. The same process of installing apps on the server is mostly the same for the workstation. RH had this advantage before but sadly not for a very long time. The EOL on RH9 was just a post mortem. When RH separated the workstation and server lines I was so pissed I started working with SUSE and Mandrake but unfortunately my hardware was not as compatible with them as RH out of the box and it was just too time consuming to track down all drivers and dependencies so back to Redhat I crawled like the unwashed admin I was. Now though both SUSE and Mandrake are on par with Redhat's server product and workstation. So I am moving on. No Redhat on my workstations no Redhat on my servers and I feel fine. How are you feeling Matthew? Nervous I bet.
The truth suffers more from convictions than from lies.
While all residents of North and South America could conceivably be called Americans, it would not be accurate in many contexts. When someone is referred to as African, Asian, or European, it's often in regards to ethnicity, not political citizenship. There are people who are ethnically American, usually called Native Americans, or the unfortunate name American Indians (a misleading name that stuck since some early explorers thought they'd reached India).
However, the only country with America in its name is the USA. People from Canada are Canadians, and people from Mexico are Mexican; so people from the United States of America are American.
One of the definitive factors are dictionaries. For example, if Webster's authors decided something, everyone else followed.
Even in 1913 ( dict.org ), "spat" was marked archaic, and "spit" was suggested.
I've only run into Qt lightly, and while I've worked on a number of GTK apps and used glade, have never done more than tiny apps purely from scratch. However, here's an attempt at some comparisons:
* Qt has good C++ bindings. Better than GTK, though GTK does have gtkmm.
* I'm not sure whether it's possible to do Qt in C. If so, it would be quite ugly. If you are otherwise entirely neutral as to choice of toolkit and desktop, C fans (traditional UNIX folk) are probably going to prefer GTK, and C++ fans (generally Windows folk) are going to prefer Qt.
* GTK is more widely used and supports more languages outside of C and C++. There are no Qt ocaml bindings, for instance.
* GTK uses less memory and is faster.
* Currently (and according to Qt/KDE developers, due to linker deficiencies), Qt apps launch more slowly than do GTK apps (both toolkits do too damn much init-time processing IMHO).
* There are tearable panes in either KDE or Qt...not sure which. This is a very nice feature that GTK does not do.
* GTK allows (though with GTK 2, a config file option must be enabled) the user to easily rebind key combinations associated with a menu choice. Qt does not do this.
* Qt currently has good support for small framebuffer-based devices. I do not believe that there is as much work on GTK for this (though GTK can go through the framebuffer instead of X).
* Qt is "commercially supported", FWIW.
* GTK is currently more widely used.
* Qt provides more *things* than GTK does (Note: this is based on my experiences, which are biased towards GTK 1 instead of 2). I suspect that you could write an app entirely within Qt -- GTK is designed to supplement the existing UNIX APIs.
* If you're into the ideology, the FSF/GNU people have tended towards supporting GNOME rather than KDE.
* Qt has been around for longer than GTK has.
* Qt widget engines support fading menus. I do not believe that this is currently the case for GTK.
* You may prefer using various apps associated with either GTK or Qt. Features aside, I find that Konqueror feels more like a "native" app to its widget set than does Galeon, but on the other hand, GTK has GIMP and a number of other programs that I use.
* No matter which you use, either API is modern, and light years ahead of Win32 or the Macintosh Toolbox. Programmers who have worked with these in the past are in for a big, big treat. It's *much* easier and faster to write code for common cases, and a lot of neat debugging code is present.
* Qt is better documented. The core GTK functionality is well documented, but some more esoteric GTK or GNOME related libraries have very little documentation.
* GTK's license is LGPL -- frankly, this license is much more generous and gives a good deal mroe freedom than Qt's license, which is GPL at best and commercial (and costs $$$) at worst. Since the core widget set for a platform is a pretty crucial element from a licensing perspective, it's awfully rough to try to force every GUI developer to use a particular license or pay a license fee.
* Both have RAD GUI design tools. I'm unfamiliar with Qt's. GTK's is called glade -- it has a rather awkward interface, but works reasonably well, and has plugins to export to a number of the GTK-supported languages.
* (A bit of a digression) GTK uses glib. Glib is really, really, really cool. Any C programmer out there will *drool* at the idea of having glib's functionality available to their programmers, even if they like Qt (as a matter of fact, KDE now uses glib, IIRC). Not a huge deal for C++, but glib provides some functionality that C could really use, when aimed at application development.
I'm going to digress a bit from Qt/GTK to KDE/GNOME, since your choice of widget set also affects your desktop environment.
In general, from a user perspective, I've found that GTK/GNOME apps tend to be a bit more oriented towards the hacker, and Qt/KDE apps tow
May we never see th
I would personally love 2004 to be the year of the open source desktop, but I fear the CIO et al management of many large companies is totally closed minded on the subject.
I work for a Fortune 10 company and let me tell you how depressing it is... Their approved standards list has nothing but Microsoft products wherever possible. It would be not be an exageration to say the criteria for building this list was "Does Microsoft have a key product in this area? If so, that's our standard. Otherwise, we'll just choose whatever is most popular."
In many cases the products these IT desicion makers are choosing are unproven and unpopular even, but hey they're from Microsoft so they'll win eventually anyway. This includes...
- Microsoft Sharepoint (instead of industry leading Documentum)
- Microsoft Passport for authentication
- IIS (They catagorize Apache as "contain", meaning no new deployements should be done)
When asked about all this during a meeting at a local site, one of the IT corporate leaders said...
"Anyone here ever deal with Microsoft on corporate licensing"
[Silence]
"Well, let me tell you those guys play hardball. Unless you can convince them your heart and soul is behind them and their vision, they won't give you a good deal on the licenses you need like Windows and Office."
He then went on to describe how Microsoft was unhappy that our company was using certain competing products such as Lotus Notes. And that they told us they wanted us to get rid of those products as switch to Sharepoint etc or they would screw us on the Windows/Office licensing.
So I can't see us switching to Linux/open source desktops anytime soon, regardless of their quality or other compatibility issues.
The only good news is that Microsoft's actions in strong arming some of these big companies is likely polarizing: Either the company will embrace Microsoft or reject them. Let's hope they manage to piss enough big companies off with their actions.
Adobe Photoshop Album, among others.
How would you be able to tell a Qt app from any other Windows app? They both use the same visual elements.
Every week, Slashdot has a compulsory article about companies who are going to push Linux on the desktop... great... but, once again, the whole IDEA of Linux on the desktop is malformed. Why? Simple! Repeat after me as many times as it takes to understand the concept... IT'S NOT THE DESKTOP THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE, IT'S THE SOFTWARE. KDE, GNome, or even XFCE are great, user-friendly, nice-looking, eye-candy-stuffed environments. Breautiful. Now what? At the end of the day, people want to work. It's not the OS, it's what you do with it. What makes Windows so popular... it's not the OS itself, it's the tons of professional programs that run on it. Unless companies like Adobe, Macromedia etc start porting their apps under Linux, there won't be any wide adoption. Databases, 3d design, word processors (StarOffice IS the most significant thing that happened to Linux in the last 2 years), financial soft, etc - those are the only things that will make Linux a success Just my 2C
http://www.automatiq.se
I have moments of intense frustration, but I'm learning. And the things that are cool in Free OS's outweigh the things that suck (dependency hell). There just aren't any things that strike me as cool in the Windows world.
I don't want a teletubby desktop. I don't want arbitrary restrictions driving my costs. I don't want to keep track of licenses. The SPA tried to extort some money from us and the ensuing audit took many, many hours that could have been spent doing cool shit with our network. Figure that in the TCO. Figure end of life forcing an otherwise unecessary upgrade. RH pulling support for 9.0 is a bit of a problem, but I have learned to compile from source! I can even build an rpm. So I don't need Redhat to support my now-legacy servers. I can nurse them along until the pain of that outweighs the pain of switching. My call. Staying on NT 4.0? Not if you connect it to anything. Uh uhhh. Not your call.
It is cool to use stuff made as a labor of love, an act of generosity, or simple itch-scratching. We can go so much farther with the source!
Careful. They use the same theme, but so does GTK+ on Win32. The widgets are still different. The Qt widgets are deliberately designed to be close to the Windows native widgets but they are not the same, and there are plenty of subtle differences that you'd only notice if you worked with it day in and day out.
This year's pronouncement may not turn out to be the one, maybe not next year. But it's only a matter of time before the castle falls. The problem with being on the top of the hill is you only have one direction to go.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
>> But the nagging lack of applications for desktop Linux,
>> notably Microsoft Office, still hangs in the air.
Huh? Is it "Office" or "applications compatible with the inscrutable, obese, proprietary POWERPOINT and WORD formats"?
Why don't companies just stipulate "junk the proprietary formats"?
In my opinion, from there onwards, moving to alternatives to MS is a downhill race.
* Desktop behaviour is relatively easy to tune up.
* Dumping Outlook for Evolution by migrating the whole message and contact base AUTOMATICALLY is just a few scripts away.
* Office productivity functionality is basically there, 'cept a large number of baroque MSFT flourishings few will miss
- and BY THE WAY... I see it's only fitting that corporations and governments are beginning to bite: they may WANT a well targeted, limited-scope desktop for their worker bees to replace the MSFT bottomless gusher of uncontrollable, undocumented, unrequested, useless funkshownality.