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Desktop Linux Survey Results Published
An anonymous reader writes "The Open Source Development Labs has published preliminary results from its desktop Linux survey, which had 3,300 responses. The month-long online survey focused on determining the key issues driving Linux on the desktop, as well as the major barriers to Linux desktop adoption. 'What was most surprising to us was probably the top two reasons given for deploying Linux on the desktop,' OSDL's Principal Analyst Dave Rosenberg said. 'It's not TCO (total cost of ownership), or security, or lack of license fees. It was 'employees requesting Linux (user demand)' and because 'my competitors have successfully deployed Linux,' he added."
Ok, this is what's happening:
my parents are out with friends, and they'll be back any minute so I REALLY need your help.
Heres some backround:
I volunteer on my sister's softball team, and so yea, whatever I meet this girl, her name is Michelle, and we've been going out for a while. We have a lot in common..... anyways....
So she came over like an hour ago, and I really want to lose my virginity, so I ask her to have sex.
She said: "No, no I can't it's not right" but I told her "Don't worry I know what I'm doing, plus I'll give you two n64 games if you say yes."
So I gave her Donkey Kong Racing, and Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, and then she goes to my room. She's a bit confused and scared.
Then I think to myself "I need lube, right? I heard some guys saying you have to lube up or else it might not fit properly..
So I have no lube, but I really want to lose my virginity. I grab some butter from the fridge, but it's cold, it won't melt, so I microwaved it for like 5 minutes and i put it in a glass and poured it on her cooter, and now she's saying I burned it.
I don't know what to do, my parents are going to be back any minute and she's in the bathroom crying. Please help I am really really scared. Any idea how to shut her up? Should I give her another n64 game?
As a former contributor and developer on the GNOME architecture for many years I can say that GNOME is in no way ready to serve as the corporate desktop. There are simply to many issues inside and around the entire GNOME movement that should be mentioned here.
First of all GNOME has a very broken development framework with a lot of fragmentation. A lot of libraries are not working properly enough even in stable releases to give users a full working desktop environment. A lot of stuff are simply not working properly and a lot of stuff simply look too far disharmonic to be usefull. Not to speak about the poorly written third party applications that exists that don't serve any corporate needs.
From a developers view I believe that GNOME has reached a dead end where scalability isn't possible anymore. People have realized that with the C languge there is no progress and thus decided to code under Python, C++, Java, Ruby or MONO. But personally I believe that having a mature GNOME desktop these days require you to have Python, MONO, Java running next to your regular application, which makes it hard to have all of them incooperate correctly (to work correctly). This is not the problem of having different languages laying around or running in the background but more architectual nature as soon as it comes to bugtracking, feedback, expandability etc. Many bindings are not well implemented and have a lot of attributes not correctly defined which makes applications look and behave differently.
As example I always get back to the legendary Toolbar issues that I like to explain. I do explain it because it's the by far easiest thing people can test on their own system.
When looking at this legendary example picture:
http://img234.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screensho t34ji.jpg
You see a bunch of GNOME applications showing different types of Toolbars. I don't want to speak about the images inside the Toolbars but rather how they look. They all look differently, behave differently, react differently, some toolbars are higher than others (a few pixel) others have a drag handle, others show icons only, then others again show text below icons. There is no common approach of doing this correctly. Sure some people say these things are not important. But from a developers point of view - they are. It only shows in what bad shape GNOME really is even today with latest CVS you see the same issues still present. It should give the beginner and advanced users an impression what's wrong. A Desktop Environment should provide a consistent API and framework to do these things correctly. Please load up GNUMERIC, Abiword, Evolution, Evince and a few others and go through your "Menus & Toolbars" capplet (control center) and change around the values and you see that the majority of applications bundled in the corporate GNOME desktop do not react on these changes. Personally I consider these things to be a bug. I already reported many of these issues and recently my toolbar bugreport to gnumeric got closed as NOT A BUG with some random intransparent excuses why the HIG cant be applied to gnumeric. This is quite frustrating since the applications look bad that way (only the aesthetic view that GNOME always wanted to lay big values on). There are so many other areas like button padding, button padding between other buttons and and and.
It's a never ending story. Also I ask myself why tools like Evince or Epiphany (both part of the GNOME desktop) come with an own Toolbar editor while other applications don't support that. From a developers point of view this should be part of the GTK+ Toolkit and made available default to all apps or everything that uses the Toolbar.
Thats the big disadvantage of writing apps in C without proper object orientation (yes I know GNOME has some sort of object orientation). If we look over to KDE for example then we see that every application that uses a Toolbar (not all apps need
Or a figer. Pretty much the coolest animal, bred for its cool powers.
My girlfriend wanted to try linux after her winXP machine kept on getting slower and slower to use. We burned Mandriva 2006 and installed it to the machine.
...) could be started up. I tried installing the dlls indirectly but the number of GUIDs and their variances kinda defeated that plan. So we gave up and reinstalled winXP back on to her machine.
Everything worked great, until we tried getting Adobe Premiere and after effects working on the machine. Then it all went to shit. Premiere 6.0 installed and ran fine but since wine doesn't support directshow and it's impossible to install the official directX onto wine, none of the directshow dlls (quartz, qdv,
Please support directshow in wine!!! All of the editors in the world will start using linux then!!
Cheers,
Ben
What general user of windows would ever be subject to a Linux forum? I hope that my employees (on ms software) are trolling the net for reasons to say that they could be more effective on open-source rather than M$.
The general user is really heated about this MS v. Open source issue, every day someone has come in early to put a flaming Office 2003 cd on our office's front steps and then demand that we hire a whole new staff to support linux. We get shit when we upgrade from one version of Office to another because it LOOKS different, not even because it ACTS different, and we are a HUGE company (the HUGE was only to show that we are not a 10 person organization working on eBay... you have definitely heard of us, we are "Kind of a big deal" -- always funny)
Who wouldn't support linux\oss becoming the standard? Or anything that is ubiquitous and user friendly... Hopefully the next volume of "The Tipping Point" re-addresses this issue. Won't be long before Microsoft pulls their head out of their ass or O.S. just blows them out of the water.