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Linux, Inc.
An anonymous reader sends in a link to Businessweek talking about the business of Linux, and the increasing threat to Microsoft's operating system monopoly.
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While this article includes nothing new for any regular /. reader, it's still a really good one. It avoids the all-to-common journalistic practise of balancing one positive statement with one negative statement. This article doesn't serve as a bullborn for FUD, it's entirely positive wrt Linux and the open source model. And it's written in a way that any shmoe can understand.
So why would us slashdotters care about an article written for average shmoes? Well, because we can forward it to friends and family who have a hard time relating to this "Linux" thing they keep hearing us enthusiastically blathering about. I've already sent it to my friends and family, you should too. C'mon, get going.
No, I have no stock in BusinessWeek, don't be so cynical.
one point most people will agree on is that OS X and Windows are both more usable than XWindows...
XWindows, or more properly "the X Windows System", is not the desktop. It's a low level GUI API, not much different in purpose than Windows' own Win32 and GDI libraries. Except for one difference. I've programmed in both bare Xlib and bare Win32, and Xlib is by far the better library. It may take a bit more "scaffolding", but it's much more sensible and easier to use for the moderately experienced developer. (Ditto comparing Motif to MFC, the latter being completely unusable without the help of Visual Studio's wizards.)
Let's move up a step. You next mentioned window managers and desktops, so let's talk about them. The Windows desktop is perceived to be user friendly *ONLY* because it is familiar to people. The window manager portion of it is actually quite rudimentary and difficult to use. Usability features like snap-to and rollups are simply missing in Windows, yet standard offerings for even the most humble X11 window manager. Similar problems exist for on "desktop" side of things. Consider the "show desktop" button in Windows, which will minimize all windows, but tells usability to smeg off when it won't subsequently restore them. And where are the multiple desktops?
I haven't really used OSX that much, so I can't comment on it. But in comparison to Windows, Unix/X11 + [KDE|GNOME|XFCE] is far more usable and friendly. But people don't know it because they haven't been steeped in it like they have been for Windows.
I spent a couple of years using FreeBSD/KDE at work (until they forced me to stop). The phrase "wow, how did you do that" in reference to my desktop was often uttered in my cubicle. This wasn't in response to the "cool" stuff of KDE, but in response to the ordinary everyday things I take for granted. Such as multiple desktops, "show desktop" that also restores, snap-to windows, rollups, z-ordering, etc, etc.
As long as Linux/Unix has newbies from Windows-land, we will continue to hear whines of X11 being difficult and obtuse. But that's only because they refuse to learn the new culture. In many ways the X11 desktops certainly are difficult and obtuse, but they are a lot less so than Windows.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Not as bad as Indonesia. I have spent two months in Ecuador and the corruption there is NOTHING to what you see in Indonesia.
It is true, though that if you bribe the right people, you can usually get some traction. However, things have unpredictable consequences.
When I was in Indonesia for six months, there was a massive movement among businesses to switch to Linux. So, I wondered why, and I asked a few people. The answer really didn't surprise me, but it is of interest to this discussion.
It seems that the Indonesian Government had begun a serious crack-down on the distribution of pirated movies and software (apparently due to presure from the US). Now you couldn't get Windows for $10 anymore, and nobody wanted to pay for it, so they were adopting Linux wholesale.
So, in this case, you have to bribe a WHOLE LOT of people. And in the long run you still lose.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP