Asa Dotzler on Why Linux Isn't Ready for the Desktop

An anonymous reader writes "Asa Dotzler of The Mozilla Foundation compares the explosive growth of Firefox to the anything but explosive growth of Linux and what it needs to do to get there for the "regular user" AKA mom, dad and grandma Bootsie."

Comments

Don't Do It!

[timeOday]

Was the "objective" of Linux ever world domination?

I don't want Linux to become the leader.

I have a two-partition laptop. I run my office apps under VMare on the Windows partition. Lately the thing runs like a pig. The problem is, there's so much company-mandated anti-virus software, manditory patches, and software inventory scanning, that the computer just sits there and scans all the files looking for danger or rebooting all the time.

And besides being sluggish, just getting anything to work (like mounting a network drive) is a nightmare because of a locked-down firewall they installed. The thing is almost unusable. I can't even see which ports are blocked because the UI is a simplistic happy-face sort of thing consisting of big round green buttons and fake reports on how many "attacks" it has saved me from.

I've come to firmly believe it's better to stay a step ahead of the masses. If linux became #1 it would become the target for all this crap, and go into the toilet. I just want linux to become popular enough that it has drivers for everything, other than that I'm satisified.

Just look at Mozilla's popup blockers. For the longest time they worked perfectly. Then it got popular, and now it's been circumvented.

Re:Am I the only one

[hdparm]

No, you are not.

Sulli I'm trying to get your attention (off topic)

[jfmiller]

This is compleatly off topic

Sulli,

I read you journals for a while now and thought you whould be interested in this Summery Article in the CS Monitor I whated to post it to a journal, but you've restricted replies to them.

I hope you will add it to you collection of links in your journal.

JFMILLER

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0718/dailyUpdate.htm l