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OSDL Announces Desktop Initiative
rhetoric writes "Earlier today at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in New York, nonprofit Open Source Development Labs announced the creation of a "Desktop Linux Working Group initiative focused on greater use of Linux on desktops throughout the enterprise." A press release is available on OSDL's website, in addition to this Register article." It's all part of their non-secret plan.
Sun recently sent me a CD with their Java Desktop on it, which for anyone who doesn't know, is a slickly-packaged Linux distro with a very user friendly interface, Sun's excellent StarOffice suite, Mozilla, etc etc. I've been having a play with it (I use StarOffice on Windows anyway) and I'm quite impressed. It's all nicely integrated with a mostly consistent look and feel, for the end user there's no messing around, anyone who's familiar with Windows and MS Office could pick this up in a day and be productive. As an old-skool Unix user, I'd personally prefer a NeXTSTEP or IRIX desktop, but as a normal Windows user, JDS is impressive.
That's the way to do Linux on the desktop - it has to be as near as possible seamless. Someone who knows what they're doing has to sit down and make it all work. Bundling together a package here and a package there as Red hat does just isn't going to cut it. If the objective is to actually get Linux on the desktop, then OSDN should throw its lot in with Sun. But it looks like this "initiative" is just bandwagoneering.
Linux is ready for the business desktop.
:-D
Until the hardware manufacturers put as much effort into Linux drivers as they do for Windows drivers then home Linux desktop pc's will be restricted to the geek community.
That and the old old topic of gaming support.
Worst
1. It doesn't catch all of the M$ viruses out there.
2. If it does catch a virus it will only blow away the user's account and not the whole computer.
3. User email accounts can be time limited to only send x messages per minute. This will further retard the proliferation of nasty email attached worms. (IP_TABLES LIMIT)
4. Software that is installed in a user's account runs with limited priviledges and is not going to muck up anything outside of the user's account. (It is also out of the reach of other users)
5. The installation and applications can be custom tailored to an organization so that there is no super-corporation dictating that ALL computers will have Winblows Media Slayer installed.
6. Trivial little things, like having the default search page be an internal corporate server, can be setup in a CD image so that everything is the way the corporation doing the deploying wants it and not the way some license agreement with Redmond mandates.
7. Documents will automatically be protected from other users by being protected in seperate home directories.
8. Usage of company computers would be limited to those people that have accounts on the computers.
9. ... etc. etc. etc.
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
Finally, OSDL already has working groups and specifications for Linux in data centers and in carrier grade facilities. It makes a lot of sense to get a specification for desktop systems as well. Thus far the only specifications Linux has had to brag about in Enterprise space is its comformance with the Open Group's Unix specifications. Meeting technical guidelines is great but that doesn't really demonstrate the practical ability of Linux in any environment.
A smart specification and reference implementation will let just about anybody with the know-how build Enterprise grade Linux systems. As such just about anyone will be able to compete in the business, not just the kids with big brand names.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
We're already moving all of our internal desktop users to Linux over the next two years. There will still be dual boot for those that need it but most corporate desktop users not needing another operatng system will run pure Linux for the daily chores of email and document exchange. All my product support work is done in Java, PERL, and scripting so I can be 100% Linux for all my activities now. The default window manager will be Gnome but you can use others as your taste dictates. Most interprise applications have already been ported and the rest will be. The elephant is not only dancing but leading the parade.
Too lazy to create a sig...
use last mandrake (some other distro have, I'm sure, about the same level of polish) :
You can change the display resolution quickly in Windows. : ctrl-alt-+/- on X, and next version with the xrandr extension (i think), will have a control panel for it in main desktops.
I can install items in Windows with a few point and clicks. : on mandrake, you signle clic on one item, dependencies are automatically resolved and the thing is installed. You just have to enter the root password.
For your modem, I don't know, but generally, yes h/w support is stilla pb on linux.
And that's true, snowboarding is hard on the beginning. don't give up, after the first day it'll be a bliss. Like Linux. Except linux has not been ported to a snowboard. yet.
I've not had X crash in a very long while (I can't remember offhand when the last time I had X die). I use X every day, I play games on the machine, I do development. I'm not just writing the odd letter in OpenOffice. X11R6 as XFree86 has been very stable on my current system (a P4 with a GeForce4 and the nVidia drivers).
I think X crashing has the same root cause as Win32 crashing (since Win2K) - bad hardware and/or bad drivers. Every time I've had a Windows crash/hang since using Win2K and WinXP has been either hardware or driver issues. The difference with X crashing and the Windows GUI crashing is that X isn't part of the kernel - I don't have to wait for the machine to reboot and all my daemons keep running. Have the Windows GUI crash and all processes are toast.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I'd consider crashing at all a serious problem, aking to a kernel panic in terms of badness. Fortunately X is pretty stable. Crashes in it are normally XVideo related in my experience.
Also, Desktop and icons must be files, and not stupid complex data-files, which is pretty hard to modify.
At least in Gnome 2.4 the "virtual" icons on the desktop are overlayed by the file manager and do not actually exist on the filing system (home, start here etc). The desktop is then made up from the files in ~/Desktop
But the problem with ctrl-alt +/- is that you only switch between predefined resolutions/coler-depths. And most users don't even know how to predifine theese. It took me over a year to find out how to remove all the 8/16 bit versions of all my resolutions. Now atleast I can just switch between resolutions widtout worry that it might only be 8/16 bit depth.
Martin Tilsted
Yeah, I totally understand. I have been helping my father move to linux and he always ends up back in windows (partially due to my brother trying to push him there). Part of the problem is configuration, but the other part is the apps. I have finally moved him the lotus suite to OpenOffice, but he still uses Lotus Organizer and Quicken. I thought that GnuCash was work for Quicken, but no. Interestingly now, he is considering moving to Outlook for Organizer and Money for Quicken.
The frustruating thing to me, is that I have taught at Intuit and know that several of the geeks ported Quicken and Turbo Tax to Linux (several years ago), but that the sales staff fought against it.
Likewise, IBM pushes Linux, yet All of the Lotus remains on windows. Sad.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.