Linux on the Desktop: More Balls Through Windows

doom writes "There's a story up in the free area of The Economist site about 'Linux on Desktop PCs' called: More balls through Windows. Pretty much the same old stuff, but if you wanted something new you wouldn't be reading slashdot, eh?" Cynic.

Comments

Another journo that can't use Google

[Sanity]

Software to manage personal finances or organise digital photos is also missing [from linux].

Um, yeah, unless you type personal finance linux into Google, or organize digital photos into Freshmeat.

Re:Who is saying it?

[Otter]

From 1998: Linux at the Economist

They've been running this exact story (Dell! Sun! HP!) for at least four years. The new article even starts by acknolwedging that.

Re:Stupid statement

[stephenbooth]

The way I see it the key factor for getting Linux onto the desktop as a consumer OS is that I should be able to walk into a high street electronics shop, buy a digital camera (or printer, scanner, video digitiser, graphics tablet &c) and have it just work when I plug it in to my PC. At most I should have to put a CD in the CD drive which will automatically start up the driver installation program which will require no more than clicking next a few times and deciding whether I want an icon put on my 'Start Menu', Desktop or both.

People are used to the Windows way of doing things. Whilst the Linux drivers for a lot of devices are becoming more common that level of ease of use is not currently available with any distro I've come accross.

Fortunately there is a project (Project Utopia) aimed at providing that. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of publicity about it outside the blogs of the authors and a few forum posts and geeky website articles. Last night I atteneded a Linux user group meeting in Birmingham (Eric Raymond was due to speak but got called away at the last minute so someoneelse delivered the talk), of the 70 odd people in the room only two or three had even heard of this project. Hopelyfully this will change as one of the developers will be speaking at OSCON about it this year.

Stephen

Re:I _hate_ OSX

[rampant mac]

I don't have a fix, but I run a crontab nightly with:

find . -name .DS_Store -exec rm "{}" ';'

At least it gets rid of the damn files.

Re:I _hate_ OSX

[zulux]

Try the veto files directive in Samba

veto files = /._*/

in you smb.conf files.

I used veto files before to geep you the pesky "My Music" folder that windows plops down when it thinks a smaba share is a "My Documents" folder.