Slashdot Mirror
Ulteo Shows Linux-Windows Crossover Potential
An anonymous reader writes "With Wubi and now the Ulteo Virtual Desktop, we're starting to see examples of the potential 'cross-over' appeal of Linux to Windows users. Ulteo gets a nice look from Channelweb, which writes, 'Considering that this is not even a version 1 beta, we have high hopes for Ulteo Virtual Desktop. It allows Linux novices to dip their toes into the water without any fear, and lets Linux pros use their favorite applications when they are forced to be in a Windows environment.' This also seems to play into comments by Mark Shuttleworth, who has said the Ubuntu community may want to think about how it can start appealing to Windows users."
I know it isn't the norm to compliment Windows, but Windows has been solid since 2k (minus Vista).
Well, I spent 20 years as a network administrator, and while the NT-derived Windows has been pretty solid, it's never reached the point where I can say the only time I've had to reboot is to upgrade software, nor have I been able to treat the Windows desktops I've supported as cavalierly as UNIX. And, too, the deep security issues in Win32 haven't been seriously addressed yet.
In my new job attempting to remove Outlook and downgrade it to something that wasn't infested with the Vista cult broke my computer so badly I had to get it reimaged. Not only shouldn't this be rocket science, but I'm metaphorically a rocket scientist and it's still too hard.
I've seen this at home, too: my daughter's Windows 2000 desktop had to be reinstalled every six months because she broke something. She's gone about 3 years on her Mac mini without incident.
So.. granted, I personally think many of these applications run better and more naturally on Linux, but still it's kind of funny to see this list. (Not sure what will happen with the KDE applications.)
If they wanted to show off Linux applications that don't have Windows ports they might have chosen maybe "KOffice", or "Gnumeric", or "Evolution". I dunno.
I've been using andLinux for a while now, it's great for running linux apps under windows. Essentially it's a patched linux kernel that actually runs at the same time as the windows kernel, with a small manager which gives time to both windows and linux. Since it's not virtualized, performance is great. Display is done by running Xming, a win32 X11 server in rootless mode, which then connects over the virtual network to the linux host.
colinux itself is very user-unfriendly, but andLinux has a nice simple installer and launcher that lets you launch linux apps as if they were native windows ones. It's based off of an Ubuntu distro, so you can use apt-get and run pretty much any linux app. A few things don't work that well such as fast paced games, playing videos with mplayer etc, due to running over X11 over sockets with zero acceleration. But any standard desktop app should work fine.
From their site, Ulteo is also based on colinux, and it appears they go even further than andLinux in making it very userfriendly. But with userfriendlyness often comes with a lack of control, so if you are a linux power-user I'd highly recommend andLinux. It's great to be able to pull up a Konsole instead of having to use the lame windows command prompt (or the sucky cygwin stuff). The only thing that's really missing is being able to launch windows apps from a linux script, but that doesn't come up too often.
sig? uhh, umm, ok