Linus Says 2004 is the Year for Desktop Linux

lca writes "Linuxworld Australia has an interview with Linus Torvalds about the current state of the Linux desktop and where it will go this year among other things. Also discussed are topics such as hardware support, the SCO issue, and whether or not he will be moving to Australia."

Comments

Gentoo, Portage, Python

[relrelrel]

2004 will be a year when many corporations, especially those who will try to adapt Linux as a primary desktop platform, will recognize Gentoo for several reasons:

Please, explain to me why.

* Portage gives a corporate IT the most fine-grained dependency control protecting the consistency of installations within upgrades;

I don't agree with this one. Corporations that "roll their own" packages have the same advantage. Movifying SRPMS can acheive the same effect.

* Gentoo makes possible to compile everything from sources on a reference hardware, adapting by that to the last bit of any available performance optimization, and then distribute the compiled binares to compatible hardware cross the enterprise (using GRP for fresh installations and just shared /usr/portage/packages for already installed systems);

Normally I would respond to this one saying that most people who use CFLAGS to optimize binaries actually hurt themselves, but corporations would have people that actually know how to use them best (i.e. -Os over -O3 or even -O2). However, I don't think that this is really an issue for corporations.

* Gentoo (mostly thanks to Portage) represents really the next generation design of Linux distro;

How so, specifically? There is something to be said for having a dedicated box to building binaries for the whole infrastructure, but the idea that Gentoo can do this and no other distro can is rather ignorant.

Gentoo is a really cool distribution (no joke), but I fail to see any technical advantages it has over other distributions. It's real strengths are in how it brings a lot of advanced administration techniques down to the level of an intermediate-level user. Plus the forums are cool, and portage is really well maintained.

Trust me on this one, though, there's no actual technical superiority over other distributions.

By the way, can you do reverse dependency checking yet? Like uninstalling gtk, and having every app that builds against gtk also unistall? I'm not "knocking" it if it can't (this isn't too important to corporations anyways), I'm just curious.
Sick of gentoo zealots throwing plugs in completely unrelated topics? Me too!

Re:people say a lot of stuff

[74nova]

*assumes perhaps incorrectly that that wasnt a joke*
you seriously think they didnt just get rid of or hide them in the 12+ years they had to do so?

and for the on-topic part, mandrake 9.2 is getting darn close to useable for my mom. that is the measurement, my mother being able to use it. my wife can already use knoppix, so its getting close.