Microsoft's 'Hands-On' Linux Lab

aneroid writes "eWeek has a story on Microsoft allowing a third party to present a 'hands-on lab' that allowed attendees to play with a range of Linux desktop software at its annual worldwide partner show in Minnesota this weekend. It was run by Don Johnson (not the actor), who explained in true MS style how the things that are considered wrong with Windows are planned or an advantage. Whether it's for the desktop or server, wasn't clear. People did get to 'see the Apache Web server in action' and a KDE desktop.Is this more of a preemptive strike where the Linux experience is so bad (slow machines, old software) they wouldn't bother to check it out in the future, thus securing an existing partner/client? Or are they that confident people won't stray if they're invited to sample the competition? According to the Register, 'Microsoft is unlikely to stop developers moving to Linux and open source so its best hope lies in articulating a strategy of co-existence to limit the 'damage' to its business.'"

Comments

Positive press?

[antic]

Does the Slashdot membership's interest in any involvement of Microsoft with Linux further the positive press of Linux, Microsoft or both?

This is odd....

[Anonymous Coward]

So far the Microsoft anti-linux campaign has been driven by FUD. Mostly anecdotal claims to shield the real battle between Windows and Linux.

Now they seem to really believe that Windows is superior. They believe it to the point of "proving" it to the users. I'd be interested to hear the reaction from the attendees. My guess is that a few PHBs got a reality check, linux is actually better off than Microsoft claims. A gutsy move for Microsoft IMHO.

I refer to my boss as the typical PHB candidate. 5 years ago my boss boldy told me "we will never be a linux shop". Last week I got our 3rd RHEL server up in production, and he's loving the cost savings. What made him change his mind? Opinions of other IT directors were a good part of it, but Microsoft helped a little too. He realized that linux was a viable product as soon as Microsoft started their anti-linux campaign. For Microsoft to launch a campaign against another OS must mean it has the potential of market share. A free OS with market share is worth checking out in his opinion.

Re:This is odd....

[utlemming]

Here is the interesting thing about demonstrations: the people that are really interested are going to go and check out the competition. At work, one of my responsabilities is that of a buyer. I go to trade shows am charged with product selection. While I do take into account what I am told by the vendor, I actually have to see the difference. But one thing that I will do, if I am really interested in a product is to check out what the competition has to offer. I don't just make a major decision based on what a vendor has to show me. In fact, one decision that translated to nearly $20K was made over a series of months before I committed my company. Further, another decision to drop one product line for another, which is a $50K decision has been made over the course of a year. So while Microsoft may be moving around telling people about how Windows is better, it will only work for the causual shopper. For example, when I need something that I really could careless about, I am more apt to buy the big name brand. But the serious shopper for a server solution, and is not under any restraints that would keep them from adopting another solution will be more inclined to actually check out what the competiton has to offer. Maybe I am a cynnic, but every time a vendor has an example of the competition, I have learned that vendors rarely, if ever, compare their best to the competitions best. If Microsoft was really doing a best-to-best, and then even a worst-to-worst comparision, I would be really impressed. But the goal is to sell more Windows. There is going to be a bias no matter what. Anyway, the point is that most buyers know that when making a major purchasing decision, you have to verify the claims. Those who need to feel good about their Windows purchases will like the demonstrations, and those who want to make it look like they researched the options will like it. But the person that is serious about finding their best solution will be more apt to look past the demonstration, and find what they really want and really need -- whether it is Windows or Linux or BSD or Solaris or MacOS.

Microsoft and allies are wrong about experience

[einhverfr]

1) Johnson seems to feel that one must know the command line to use Linux....

My parents have used Linux since Red Hat 6.2 (what, 7 years now?) and have been quite happy with it.

They don't have to know how the command line works. If that is necessary, I will walk them through it (haven't had to in years) but I do the same for WIndows customers so that doesn't matter.

Of course if you want to run a web server, you might want to know the basics of the OS you are working on and be willing to learn the command line, but that is another matter...

2) Integration of user experience: Both KDE and GNOME offer this sort of integration to a large degree. Larger OSS projects like OpenOffice also offer such integration within themselves.

3) The flexibility of Linux does NOT just come from the ability to tweek and recompile the software. Instead it is the fact that you have a lot of pieces that do things well and can easily strung together (by someone know knows the system) into more complex systems. There is no reason I could not write a Perl/GTK program that could take a large number of programs and automate them behind the scenes. For other examples, see FileRoller, SimpleCDR-Tools, and a number of other packages that can make people's lives a lot easier when it comes to Linux. But this is more of a RAD environment than a user environment.

Re:Microsoft and allies are wrong about experience

[propellor_head]

Well, unfortunately he is right. I just did a fresh install of Fedora Core 4 and had to drop to a command line and edit config files for a number of things. Now, previously I had been running Red Hat 8.0 and have played quite a bit with other Linux distros so I have a fair idea what I am doing. Sadly, I would expect a newbie to have to spend hours searching online to be able to do some of this trivial stuff.

Very basic example: I prefer to use KDE instead of GNOME - no biggie, just select KDE when logging in. That works fine, but when I go to log out I only have the option to 'Log Out', not Shutdown or Reboot. Having dealt with this problem before, I knew there was a config file I had to edit to use the KDM display manager instead of GDM. A bit of searching online showed me what to edit so I did that fairly painlessly.

Now that I've got KDM running and the Shutdown and Reboot accessible from the K menu, I want to customise the login manager. I go to the Kontrol Centre and try to edit the Login settings. Clicked on Administrator access, but after much frustration was still not able to save the settings. The bright red text hinted that perhaps I should look at the Help pages, which said something about the Kontrol Centre always having to be started as root for this to work. Right click on the icon and change the 'run as' to root and eventually got this working.

OK, great... now the settings are being saved, but logging in every time doesn't look like the settings have applied at all. Much searching online and finally figured out that I had to hand edit a text file and remove the option to use a Theme for the login manager.

This example may be long and boring, but it highlights the kind of polish that the Linux desktop experience is missing. Imagine a complete newbie, just trying to get their photo to come up when logging on to their new Linux machine, then tell me that you don't ever need to touch a command line.

Re:Microsoft and allies are wrong about experience

[catscan2000]

To paraphrase a past president, "I feel your pain!"

I recently upgraded the laptop I'm typing this on to Fedora Core 4 by wiping Windows XP and Fedora Core 3, which worked well, completely off the drive first to ensure a totally clean install. Fedora Core 4 installed properly, but I could not get the wireless card to work with my 128-bit WEP network to save my life. It worked in FC3, but not in FC4. Oh, and don't get me started with all the other hardware and software that I would have to get working in FC4 manually, including the soft-modem, sleep mode, RealPlayer, DVD playback, and Java. I use FC4 at work and it works well, but getting FC4 working on a laptop made me so frustrated that I ultimately destroyed my FC4 DVD on a mad rampage and then discarded it.

Looking for a replacement distro, I decided to give Novell SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 a try through its free FTP-download-based installation method.

Until Fedora Core gets its act together, I'm not going back after having the extreme pleasure of installing and using SuSE Linux Professional! Really, it's that much better. SLP 9.3 and Fedora Core aren't even in the same league. Seriously, it's like comparing Windows 3.1 in all its AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, and WIN.INI glory with Mac OS X, with FC being Win 3.1 and SLP 9.3 being Mac OS X.

Not only did SLP's YaST, the system's comprehensive configuration management tool, detect _all_ of my laptop's hardware, it noticed that my eth1 was a wireless network card and graphically prompted me for the WEP settings. And it worked! No futzing with /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 files and the like! It also noticed that I had a softmodem, installed the proper software to control it, and proceeded to the modem's configuration screen. It even installed a ThinkPad control panel (I have an IBM ThinkPad) without me having to do that manually! Sound, video, 1394, even Bluetooth were all set up without me having to futz with any configuration files. As a very pleasant surprise, and something that James Gosling can appreciate, "the lid works!" (sleep mode and hibernate)

I believe that I have finally found an OS besides Mac OS X that I can recommend to others. I was previously a FC fanboy, and I still like FC3, but I could never recommend FC to others, and I certainly cannot recommend FC4, especially on laptop computers.

It's really hard to describe the awesomeness that is SuSE Linux Professional 9.3, so try it out for yourself! Go to http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/d ownloads/suse_linux/index.html , scroll to the bottom, and read the instructions for the "SUSE LINUX 9.3 ftp version." One caveat that I must mention is that the autopartitioner, at least on my system, didn't automatically create a /boot partition at the beginning of the hard drive. Depending on your hardware, you really should ensure that a ext2 (or ext3) /boot partition is created at the beginning of the drive (100MB should work fine). Otherwise, GRUB might not be able to load SuSE (that was actually the only problem that I ran into, which is more of an installer issue than a system issue). Other than that, everything should "just work" :-).

Oh, and SuSE includes Sun Java 1.4.2 and 1.5, Java Eclipse (not a buggy GCJ compiled version), Macromedia Flash, RealPlayer, Adobe Acrobat 7, and other goodies built-in; no hacks or editing of files /etc/yum.repo.d required. If you want DVD playback and Windows Media Codec support in Kaffeine, the media player, follow the easy instructions (even all-GUI) at http://www.plainfaqs.org/linux/dvdplay/ . Every Windows Media Player movie that I opened with it worked (I believe it's using official Microsoft DLLs coupled with winelib, and Wine is also built into SuSE), and every DVD that I tried worked prope

Re:Microsoft and allies are wrong about experience

[Osty]

2) Integration of user experience: Both KDE and GNOME offer this sort of integration to a large degree. Larger OSS projects like OpenOffice also offer such integration within themselves.

I don't really follow the "integration within themselves" point. What good is that? KDE gets it with KParts (or whatever they're calling it these days). Konqueror is like Explorer in Windows. It's essentially a container for KParts/COM, which could be anything from a KWord/MS Word document to a filesystem view to a web browser. That is integration, the ability to interact with different programs in a standardized way (COM's IDispatch interface in Windows, KParts in KDE, even piping in bash). I don't care that I can integrate a chart from a spreadsheet into a document in my word processor. I want to be able to generate that chart programatically from a web page (Office Web Components), script, or application (Office COM integration). I want to be able to hook Word's spell checker for use in my own application (Office COM integration again). I want to have a standardized way of exposing the capabilities of my application so that others may reuse my components with relative ease (COM's IDispath interface again). I can embed IE in my own application (wrapping Gecko isn't as simple, but there's a wrapper that let's me use the exact same code as I would to embed IE to embed Gecko with just a guid change in my code). And I can do all of this without having to reparent windows as in X. That is the integration they're talking about.

3) The flexibility of Linux does NOT just come from the ability to tweek and recompile the software. Instead it is the fact that you have a lot of pieces that do things well and can easily strung together (by someone know knows the system) into more complex systems. There is no reason I could not write a Perl/GTK program that could take a large number of programs and automate them behind the scenes. For other examples, see FileRoller, SimpleCDR-Tools, and a number of other packages that can make people's lives a lot easier when it comes to Linux. But this is more of a RAD environment than a user environment.

That same level of flexibility is available in Windows. In fact, in some respects Windows is even better about this. Take a scripting example. In Linux, you have many little executables that all do one thing, and can interact via stdin and stdout. The limitation is that your interaction is limited to text streams. What to grab a certain field out of a ps listing? You can pipe in into awk and grab the right column, but if the input options to ps change the column number might change (or worse, the information may no longer be there). In Windows, automation is done through objects (COM, and soon .NET with Monad). If you want to get a certain field from the process table, you write a little vbscript that instantiates a WMI query object, query for the process you want, and read the field off of the returned process object. It's a different approach that may be unfamiliar to people who've cut their teeth on *nix, but to imply that Linux is more flexible because of piping just shows your ignorance of the Windows way of doing things.

I'm not saying one approach is better than another (okay, maybe I am -- I like the idea of working with objects rather than parsing text with awk or cut or perl regexps). They're different, but the capabilities are the same. However, as you mentioned, this is more developer-oriented than user-oriented. The average joe user of Windows or Linux (well, maybe not Linux yet, but it's the ultimate goal as I see it) doesn't care that his CD burning tool is a script meshing several discrete applications or a stand-alone program interacting with COM-provided services. All he cares about is that he can easily burn his CDs.

Given, then, that both Windows and Linux have rich and robust automation capabilities, I'd say that the last remaining win for Linux is exactly what was pointed out in the article -- much of the software (including the kernel) is open source, and thus you could modify and recompile if you so choose.

Re:Microsoft and allies are wrong about experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you don't really have a clue.

First - Monad is hardly a replacement for a CLI. It's basically a scripting language tied into .Net. Nothing really that amazing, and it's considerably more complicated than a Unix CLI. It's more a replacement for VBScript / JScript scripts than a full-blown CLI. It just happens to have a command-line interface to it. I wouldn't want to use Perl or Python as a CLI, and I certainly wouldn't want to use Monad.

Second, Windows really only gives admins one toolset. The GUI. If you can't do something from there, you might be able to hack around with the registry, but that's never a good idea. It's too easy to break things.

Third, not all Linux systems are created equal. Systems like Gentoo, Debian, Slackware, or whatever aren't going to provide you with graphical tools to set things up. They're targeted more at experts that wouldn't use them anyway. If you want to compare fairly, take a look at RHEL. That provides appropriate GUI config tools. So does SuSE. They're at least as easy to use as the equivalent Windows tools (especially YaST).

The whole "I demand serialization to disk!" attitude is just dumb. First, serialization is a great way to break things as soon as the software changes even slightly. Providing some way to access the config files for an app directly (without having to parse them) is a good idea, and would make writing configuration tools considerably easier.

However, that has to be done at a system level for it to be useful. That's why nobody has done it - nobody has the ability to force an entirely new configuration system on everybody. It's possible, and the code already exists to do much of it, but it'd be a massive undertaking to integrate it with everything else on the system, and impossible to do without the cooperation of every single upstream developer. And it'd break any backward- or cross-platform compatability instantly. Do you think that other Unix systems (the BSDs, MacOS X, proprietary Unixes) are going to change the way they do things just to match Linux? Dream on.

KDE and Gnome would never write GUI config tools for things like webservers. They're supposed to be portable, and they run on a lot more than just Linux. There are a lot of things that they could do, but don't because they want to maintain that portability. That's really the job of distributions, because they're the only ones who could possibly know how everything is going to be set up.

Finally, would you really trust a webserver set up by a small-office manager? There's no way they'd get it set up correctly and securely, no matter what software they're using. As soon as they hit something they don't understand (which will happen the instant they try to change anything, with IIS or Apache), they won't be able to proceed.

Re:Microsoft and allies are wrong about experience

[Burz]

Are you kidding me?

The Monad-enabled shell will have many of the familiar 'short' commands used in system admin. Plus the OO paradigm provides assurance that services and subsystems can be configured just as with the GUI. And THAT is Windows' second toolset.

Now, if you overlapped Ruby with a sort of bash environment that would be something to compete with Monad.

"Third," the distro-specific config GUIs are very uneven in their completeness and reliability. Each group will have a different approach and certain lack of understanding where the subsystem's idiosynchracies are concerned.

The whole "I demand serialization to disk!" attitude is just dumb. First, serialization is a great way to break things as soon as the software changes even slightly. Providing some way to access the config files for an app directly (without having to parse them) is a good idea, and would make writing configuration tools considerably easier.

Serializzation can take many forms, even an ASCII conf file. That said, your paragraph contradicts itself.

Your comment about massive "system level" integration makes no sense. Either Apache understands their server and their conf file enough to manage it programmatically or they don't. I say they do, and that they are just abdicating responsibility in this area. If distros received this functionality from Apache, they could overload and extend it where necessary to interoperate in the desired fashion with other components.

KDE and Gnome would never write GUI config tools for things like webservers.

KDE would, given the chance. It could take a while for the KPart to be officially accepted, but thats par for the course.

Finally, would you really trust a webserver set up by a small-office manager?

For doing small office things I would. Snob. In fact, anyone with a PC on their desk should be able to 'publish' web pages to the rest of their LAN as long as a sysadmin hasn't specifically disabled such services.

Smart move, indeed

[vhogemann]

This way, Microsoft can show their strenght.

Windows administration is all about graphic tools, integrated with the interface. Personaly, I don't like them... but there are people who find them usefull.

I know that KDE has pretty advanced frontends to configure stuff, but they're not as "easy" as the Windows ones. For instance, there is no frontends readly avaliable for Apache, LDAP administration, DNS, DHCP and others...

While I know that tools like Webmin exists, and are very capable, an average person will expect something integrated into KDE.

Also, there are dozen of minor fauts, and rought edges on a default Linux/KDE installation that can be used by them to show Windows still has "superiority" on the desktop.

Re:Smart move, indeed

[Kjella]

While I know that tools like Webmin exists, and are very capable, an average person will expect something integrated into KDE.

I always thought it might be a good idea to create some form of text -> dialog parser, with basic structure data in the configuration file. Something kinda like doxygen except with support for some basic elements like checkboxes, radiobuttons, drop-downs, spinboxes and the like, as well as grouping elements like tabs, groupboxes etc.

#[Download]
#T: Foo means it will do foo, bar means it will do bar.
#C: With foo
foo = 0
#C: With bar
bar = 0

And then you'd get a dialog with a "Download" box, with text "Foo means it will do foo, bar means it will do bar." and two checkboxes "With foo" and "With bar". As they are checked/unchecked the text file is updated.

If you're editing directly in the text files, simply don't touch that. If you're editing in the dialog mode, you can't touch that. That could hopefully become a standard, using either a GUI or TUI (text UI, for SSH and the like). That way noone would really need to see the junk.

That way, you could also dress it up natively any way you want it.

Kjella

Daniel Robbins at work?

[Ingolfke]

I wonder if this is the first wave of the new ideas Daniel's got for the Microsoft crowd. (see here for the backstory)

most people would chose msft in that situation

[walterbyrd]

JMHO.

I run various versions of linux, and windows, on the same PC all the time. Franking, in a 5 minute demo, I think windows would win. Especially if viewed by a total newbie, or somebody who only knew windows.

Windows has a sharp, snappy, display. Plenty of eye candy. Applications launch fast. Linux is okay, but I think windows would win *that* sort of comparison.

After a few months, of going back and forth between both systems; I think a lot of people would chose Linux. With Linux you don't get the software rot, or the adware/spyware/viruses. Also, once you learn a little bit about how to use linux, it's more powerful and flexible. And with Linux, you don't have msft on your back.

Again, all totally based on my guess.

Makes too much sense for MS to work with Linux

[bigbinc]

This is one of those stupid manager decisions that we can watch first-hand. Microsoft "not" adopting a serious Linux(open source) strategy will just make them look silly. They won't lose money, but I know they could make some serious money-making technology.

Microsoft should get in bed with Linux and go to work. They keep trying to play with it. Microsoft could clean up if they had a Microsoft desktop environment or something similar. They did it with the Mac? With Office, why not write software for Linux?

They are acting like a bunch of babies, "We are Microsoft, we are better, so we won't worry about Linux.". What a bunch silliness. Same thing happened when they didn't take Java seriously. What JVM does Microsoft support, version 1.1? A 10 year-old could write an update to date virtual machine. Microsoft, get a clue.

Just in case...

[Eric Damron]

"Is this more of a preemptive strike where the Linux experience is so bad (slow machines, old software) they wouldn't bother to check it out in the future, thus securing an existing partner/client?"

The article didn't say but just in case this is what they are up to, I think real Linux users need to show up at these things with well configured modern laptops running the latest versions of Linux.

That way if Microsoft tries to "prove" Linux is inferior by running old and misconfigured versions we can say "And here's what it looks like if you don't try to screw it up."

Driver Issues?

[csharp_wannabe]

From Article

"Device drivers are also problematic for Linux, Johnson said, because while there are several hardware vendors committed to Linux solutions and to releasing device drivers, a lot of this device driver support lags for Linux and is often almost immediately available for Windows, he said."

I believe that this is a falicy. I feel that sometimes that Linux-based Operating Systems (Especially Ubuntu) do have the same, if not more, hardware support. I have Ubuntu 5.04 and it picked up all my Centrino hardware, which pleased me to no end. XP picked up the hardware, but did not configure it correctly as Ubuntu did. I mean honestly, the balls on Microsoft must be big to say such a statement without checking out the competition thuroughly.

My 2 cents, take it or leave it...

Re:Not for the AVERAGE USER

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why was Microsoft showing it, why was Microsoft, the behemoth with $50 billion in the bank, Microsoft with a 95% market share, Microsoft with millions to spend on marketing, why do they feel it necessary to show everyone how bad it is?

Because it is starting to make a dent in their sales.

Apache literally has cleaned their clock. Anyone who does web servers has either looked at or run Apache. KDE was shown in the same context.

The Linux Desktop has officially arrived.

Congratulations to all who have worked so hard to date.

Derek

MS Windows VS Linux Anecdote

[glamslam]

I just installed Linspire for my father (57 years old, non-technical) after his PC went down due to virus/spyware infections.

Regardless of your opinion of Linspire as my choice, he prefers it to windows. He loves the Click-and-Run. According to him, "it has EVERYTHING you could possibly want to run".

I like the fact that he's much less likely to get viruses and spyware.

True, he only uses it for surfing the web and playing solitaire, but still... Linux on the desktop is going to make a bigger and bigger splash.... no matter what Microsoft does or doesn't do.

Re:the fog of war

[zippthorne]

Why is it ok for linux to include everything but the kitchen sink (and beta drivers for that too), but microsoft is evil if it includes a web browser?

Re:Userfriendliness (Windows is not)

[cgenman]

I feel compelled to point out that the solution to the opaque "magic box" is not to make it more transparent, but to make sure it doesn't break down. Most users could care less about exactly how the system is doing what they want it do to, they just want it to do it. This is in exactly the same way that most programmers don't give a shit about exactly what registers the system is using on which of the designated processing units, just so long as it executes your code flawlessly.

And processors basically do operate flawlessly, because we demand that from them. But Operating Systems and other pieces of software do not. Values are not checked for ranges, inputs are not checked for validity, dependencies are not maintained, unnecessary components are kept around, etc.

I like to think of my palm pilot as the perfect black box operating system. I don't have any idea what it's doing under the hood, but it always does what it's supposed to do, and I don't have to worry about it. If I want to delve into 68k hacking to get the thing to do special stuff I can... but the choice is mine, not the operating system's.

That kinda defeats the point...

[rsilvergun]

since 90% of what Windows has on Linux happens before the two are fully configured. What Microsoft brings to the table is an OS that can be admined by $12 dollar/hr employees instead of $50 dollar/hr ones. With hardware so cheap (and with value added upgrade cycles so short) this makes perfect sense.

Re:Maybe they should look at their past too

[Coryoth]

I think you missed my point. Since 1998 Microsoft has made small incremental improvments to Windows (okay moving to the NT line with Win2k was useful, but from an end user perspective...) Since 1998 Linux has gone from a desktop OS only a devout hacker could love to something almost on par with Windows. That says to me that in 5 years time it will be Windows playing catch up to Linux on the desktop, not vice versa.

Jedidiah.

Changing Definitions

[ezraekman]

From the article:

"Linux runs on just about anything, whereas Windows has a targeted platform focus," he said, adding that one of the main reasons people started looking at Linux was to avoid vendor lock-in.

"But the different Linux distributions, particularly those from Red Hat and Novell's SuSE Linux, also essentially lock them in as switching from one to the other is by no means easy, although probably not as difficult as migrating from Windows to Linux. But it is a lot more difficult than many of the distributors allow users to believe," Johnson said.

What?! How on earth is the difficulty of installing a new operating system IN ANY WAY comparable to the difficulty of being physically prevented from doing something because of vendor-installed hardware, or even just vendor-installed proprietary software? Much of the vendor-installed software is specifically engineered to make it more difficult to alter or remove it. Unless I'm mistaken, no one in the Linix distro world does that... not even Apple. Is the author of this story changing the definition of "vendor lock-in" now?

Re:Maybe they should look at their past too

[drsmithy]

That says to me that in 5 years time it will be Windows playing catch up to Linux on the desktop, not vice versa.

What it should say to you is Linux had a lot further to come.

Improvement rates tend to slow dramatically as the product reaches the "good enough" point. Another example is OS X, which for a few years had very quick releases with major improvements - but the flipside is it had a lot further to go. OS X's release rate has slowed dramatically as less things have needed improving. The same will happen to Linux.

Re:RTFA

[ssj_195]

It's brief, but it fairly states the differences between Windows & Linux. Those are: integration vs. flexibility

Is it just me, or is this something of a false dichotomy? For example, let's pick, say, KDE. Now, here we have an absurdly flexible environment (there's a kind of joke that is sometimes crops up whenever someone asks which DE he should choose out of GNOME or KDE: roughly paraphrased, it goes like: "Imagine a taskbar clock that has four tabs worth of configuration options. If you think this is a good idea, use KDE; otherwise, use GNOME"), but, it is also astonishingly well-integrated. K3B not only has the familiar Konqueror file manager KPart (with all the options for file-management, detailed/ thumbnail view, etc) embedded into it, but also integrates well with Konqueror itself (i.e. right-click on an .iso file, get a "Burn Image with K3B" pop-up option). The Kwallet password manager can be used by any app (e.g. Zack Rusin was going to integrate it into Firefox as part of the Firefox KDE integration, which sadly has yet to see the light of day). KGPG is integrated into Konqueror and presumably KMail also. The Konsole KPart (providing a complete UNIX shell) has been dropped into text editors like e.g. Kile.

I'm going to stick my neck out and say that the "K" desktop environment could well be (or at least, has the potential to be) more integrated than Windows is, whose legendary integration tends to be confined to integration between the few Microsoft apps, whereas with KDE (and open-source software in general), "third-party" apps tend to become integrated better. I'm not fully sure why this is, but I suspect that it is due to a) use of open standards; b) "automagic" enforcement at the API level [KDE's APIs evolve far more rapidly than those of Windows) and c) the fact that it is harder to "orphan" F/OSS apps - if the maintainer dies (or something!) before some new "integration enabler" becomes part of the API, someone can pick up and incorporate this new feature, binding the app further to the other apps so that they work together more seamlessly. If the maintainer of a project isn't interested in taking advantage of new opportunities for integration, someone else can write a patch which can be added by the distro packagers, etc.

And of course, through open protocols, Linux can "integrate" with other UNIX-y based operating systems, unlike Microsoft who, for all their touting of "interoperability", remain resolutely an outsider in may ways.

Anyway, there's just a few random and ill-researched thoughts that occurred to me :)

Re:Maybe they should look at their past too

[cuantar]

But there's a difference -- Apple and Microsoft exist to (supposedly, anyway) cater to their customers. They're in it for profit, whereas Linux developers code to improve the software. "Good enough" simply means enough people are buying the product to keep the producer in business. As long as there are people who are unhappy with the alternatives, I can't imagine Linux development slowing down -- clearly not the case with Microsoft.

Re:Maybe they should look at their past too

[toddestan]

We all like to make jokes about Windows ME, and ME was terrible at its release date. But if you install it now and apply all of the patches, ME really isn't that terrible. Though I consider 98SE to still be superior.