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Linux Desktop Summit 2004 Review
An anonymous reader writes "I had the experience this week of attending the Linux Desktop Summit hosted
by Michael Robertson's Linspire, Lindows, or whatever you want to call it these days. Irregardless of what you call it, it's Linux, and the general
consensus from vendors and attendees was, "We're here to stay."
I have to say that this was an interesting convention. Keeping in line with the Linux community, there was more of a sense of community rather than the
typical "Choose our product" ambiance, With a few exceptions of course."
I've been to several conferences in the past few years and have noticed a huge reduction in the amount and quality of conference swag. In the heydays of 1998 and 1999, you could come away with enough clothes to last you all year without washing (about 5 or 6 t-shirts), but nowadays you'd practically have to kill some booth babe to score a pen or mousepad.
This guy says Novell is giving away t-shirts again? Does this foreshadow a return to the heady days of the dotcom boom? Buy tech stocks, folks, it looks like we've got ourselves an upswing in the making!
I have been pwned because my
Slightly OT, but I can't resist ...
... (they have a GUI front-end for everything, CUPS, Samba, even VPN!!) It probably beats the crap ot Linspire anyday of the week.
... this rant was OT and morely for my fellow Mandrake users ...
There is no denying it. Mandrake is a lovely 100% GPL user-friendly distro, that seems to be rather popular
But even without knowing much about this meeting, I'm pretty sure that Mandrakesoft wasn't there. Why? because Mandrakesoft does a crappy job of MARKETING. And its getting really annoying too watching crap distros like Linspire get so much spot-light.
Like I said
Sunny Dubey
the article was kinda lacking in the way of telling us if the particular printer being raffled could print on a *nix! I would be downright hilarius/evil if it was XP only.
YES, Novell gave out a SuSE/Novell/Ximian shirt.
I also left with a Real Helix shirt
A PC Club shirt
And the Desktop Linux Conference shirt
If you were lucky, you got one of the shirts the mozilla guy raffled out. (I saw him just *give* one to Nat Friedman, but thats ok) I was lucky to grab a nice CD 'n' sleeve of mozilla goodness.
Seagate gave out the trippiest pen I've ever seen.
DeviantArt gave out nice stickers.
Sun gave out CDs of StarOffice and the Java Desktop
Some random mousepads.
PC Club gave out a coupon for a free case/powersupply with a purchase of $200 or more
The prize goes to sub300.com. They gave out little bottles of maple syrup. there were so many after the conference they were handing out extra ones whether you wanted them or not.
I'm yet to have pancakes or french toast, so i can't comment on them. They say 100% pure, so it should be pretty good.
religion != morality
I apologize for the off topic comment, but this is something that I think gets censored or at least ignored too often on this site.
Correct grammar and competent editing by Slashdot editors in general is important for at least two reasons I can think of off the top of my head:
You are what most people here would call a troll, but I'm going to respond to your statements. In reverse order. If you are indeed a troll, MS is going to have a lot of fun with your abuse of their certificates, but I doubt you are one.
First, let me explain my personal POV: I use Windows. I see that Microsoft is the de facto standard and respect them for making good, usable software products. I do support Free software because I think it's "cool", but some of the stuff is just a pain to use.
GFDL licensing: About the most anyone would want to copy is the facts, which aren't copyrighted. Besides, you need to post a copy of the GFDL to use it (yuck); you may be better of with Creative Commons, if you're going to license your posts at all (which no one I've seen here does, despite their love of free licensing).
Torvalds the hacker? He uses hacker in a different sense, admittedly not the mainstream sense. He avoids using the word "hacker" in published news articles because his interpretation of the word is a positive thing (one who, like you, enjoys coding wiht computers), rather than the common sense of one who breaks into computers. I really wish they'd pick another term for computer/programming enthusiasts so as to avoid the negative connotations.
I would question why you trust a company that is profitable; it just shows they have business sense. Torvalds on the other hand releases all his code for public review. Who would you trust more: a company with a profit motive, or a programmer whose code has been widely peer-reviewed?
Besides, as he readily admits, he isn't writing the majority of Linux code these days, and anyway he only writes the kernel. Most software that's called "Linux" is really just random free software that happens to work with Linux.
And Linus Torvalds is an employee of Transmeta, a well-known CPU maker.
Red Hat is a marketer, not the server. I assume Apache is the server you're using. I'd like to see your data, because the setup may not be optimal; open-source servers normally come configured for development, not deployment. Besides, the times for static content may be so small that a millisecond difference may amount to 276%.
Windows admittedly installs a heck of a lot faster and easier, but none of the software comes with it, and it's hard to configure. Linux solutions offer much more customizability and power at the expense of user-friendliness.
What is "development costs"? Cost of paying employees? They may be better qualified. Besides, J2EE isn't really open-source, it's probably just espoused by the radical (non-evil-)hacker community for being "not Microsoft".
IIS and Apache (I don't know what you mean by Linux 7.0, I assume you mean Red Hat 7.0, an older version that is based around a Linux 2.x core and probably includes Apache) don't put any particular constraints on costs; after all, if it's the same web page you're hosting, it's the same amount of data being sent.
Windows is more well-known, and training Windows is much cheaper, I'll grant you that. I wouldn't recommend Linux-based desktops for the average employees, simply because they have most likely been born and raised into the Windows culture. However, if by LinuxOS you mean LindowsOS, I'll give you my opinion of that: dirty marketer taking free Linux, adding pretty colors, and overpricing everything. There's no need for Linspire to cost more than Windows itself.
Imagine yourself as an impartial viewer: would you trust someone with Microsoft certificates giving facts in support of Microsoft products? I wouldn't even trust Linux people if they claim their product is better than MS's with just statistics. (For example, MS Office on the Mac is native. OpenOffice.org uses X and takes way too long to load. I believe, however, that OOo will at some point pass up Office, so I'll use it if that happens or seems close to happening.)
Bad karma: Don't attack Linux viciously, Slashdot people are touchy. Post your statements as a question, and pretend to want to be converted, and they won't hate you.
(y35, I |n0w 3y3'v3 1ik31y b33n +r0113d, but one can dream, no?)
I use Mandrake 9 myself, and I'm no marketing genius, but I have to say this was not exactly the best way to build any confidence in the future of the distribution.
You're declaring an economic upswing of dot-coms because Novell is giving away free t-shirts?
Actually, I'd disagree on both points. Most people wouldn't notice if you swapped Windows XP and XPde on their machines until they realized that their desktop had been running for a couple of months without a virus attack bringing their system to its knees.
Yeah, until they went to Wal-mart, brought home a printer, and realized sticking in the Autoplay installer CD does nothing.
Or they tried to install the latest Sims expansion.
Or they wanted to fire up Yahoo Messenger, so they go to the website and download it, unable to install it and blaming it on Windows.
Or they look for "My Documents" or "\Windows\System."
Or...you get the idea. Hell, Linux doesn't even have a binary installation/uninstallation API for its desktops. I don't want to have to rely on GUI hacks like Synaptic or xterm "apt-get" solutions. Give me installer APIs! Why the hell is this being overlooked in favor of more sidebar buttons for KDE or redesigned file selector dialogs in GTK?
You know, this sort of rhetoric isn't really helpful to any debate about the merits of different operating systems. In a professionally managed environment, it's relatively simple to prevent viruses. This sort of statement is about the same as "GPL is a cancer"