Dan Gillmor Reconsiders Linux on the Desktop

Cyrus writes "Influential San Jose Mercury News tech columnist Dan Gillmore has reconsidered his stance against Linux. He now says it's rapidly converging to a viable desktop OS for the masses. "While I wasn't paying sufficient attention, the proverbial tortoise has been playing some serious catch-up.""

Comments

who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

why is this slashdot worthy?!

Tuesday's celebrations

[mao che minh]

I couldn't think of a good, stellar troll with which to contribute to Troll Tuesday this April the 6th, 2004. So in its stead I provided you with this short, albiet pointless crap flood.

Cheerio.

Nice to hear ...

[Hekatchu]

It's all about tortoises! So welcome into our happy family once you get here, Dan! :)

what kind of girlie-man

[budhaboy]

speaks of Linux without mentioning redhatsusedebianmandrake?!

Oh... Right, he favors a mac... never mind.

Re:Well duh.

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE? Oh yeah, the K stands for Krap.

Re:Let's talk about that tortoise analogy for a se

[Anonymous Coward]

In response to your sig, But lately girl ya get your kicks from just a moddin' me down, down, down, down, it's not that people get their kicks from it, you just bring nothing useful to the conversation. You managed to fill 8 lines on my screen, yet have absolutely nothing insightful, witty, humorous, relevant, or interesting to say. Your comment is not worth the electrons needed to push it onto the Internet.

Good Show! You're below the trolls!

Re:linux on the desktop

[Trigun]

I want a way that'll work with all distro's ./configure && make && su -c "make install"; su -c "ldconfig"

an easy way to do it at the command line
modprobe *

easy way to remove programs that I've installed.
rm -rf /

There's all kinds of easy ways to do it. To do it right, however, takes class.

Please try harder!

[Anonymous Coward]

hint:(Genesis 11: 1-9)

1. Un iaith ac un ymadrodd oedd i'r holl fyd.
2. Wrth ymdeithio yn y dwyrain, cafodd y bobl wastadedd yng ngwlad Sinar a thrigo yno.
3. A dywedasant wrth ei gilydd, Dewch, gwnawn briddfeini a'u crasu'n galed. Priddfeini oedd ganddynt yn lle cerrig, a phyg yn lle calch.
4. Yna dywedasant, Dewch, adeiladwn i ni ddinas, a thr a'i ben yn y nefoedd, a gwnawn inni enw, rhag ein gwasgaru dros wyneb yr holl ddaear.
5. Disgynnodd yr Arglwydd i weld y ddinas a'r tr yr oedd meibion dynion wedi eu hadeiladu,
6. a dywedodd, Y maent yn un bobl a chanddynt un iaith; y maent wedi dechrau gwneud hyn, a bellach ni rwystrir hwy mewn dim y bwriadant ei wneud.
7. Dewch, disgynnwn, a chymysgu eu hiaith hwy yno, rhag iddynt ddeall ei gilydd yn siarad.
8. Felly gwasgarodd yr Arglwydd hwy oddi yno dros wyneb yr holl ddaear, a pheidiasant ag adeiladu'r ddinas.
9. Am hynny gelwir ei henw Babel, oherwydd yno y cymysgodd yr Arglwydd iaith yr holl fyd, a gwasgarodd yr Arglwydd hwy oddi yno dros wyneb yr holl ddaear.

Re:first!

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason his asshole is tight is because of his massive hemorrhoids.

If KDE has "won the day", then Linux is lost

[Anonymous Coward]

I am satisfied to have KDE and Gnome competing on the Linux desktop. At least then, we have competing two free desktop development platforms, namely, GTK+, and the GPL'd version of Qt.

But if, as you say, KDE won the day, then that would make Qt the default development platform for desktop Linux.

Which means that all proprietary Linux applications, if they wanted to fit into the default object model for the Linux desktop, would be forced to use the _proprietary_ version of Qt.

Which would mean that all proprietary applications on Linux would be locked in to Trolltech, just as all Windows applications are locked in to Microsoft. Note that the _proprietary_ version of Qt has only one supplier, Trolltech, and it can't be forked.

And if Trolltech controls all proprietary development for Linux, then Linux is no longer free.