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Desktop Linux Is Dead
digitaldc writes with this quote from PCWorld:
"It kills me to say this: The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead. Despite phenomenal security and stability — and amazing strides in usability, performance, and compatibility — Linux simply isn't catching on with desktop users. And if there ever was a chance for desktop Linux to succeed, that ship has long since sunk. ... Ultimately, Linux is doomed on the desktop because of a critical lack of content. And that lack of content owes its existence to two key factors: the fragmentation of the Linux platform, and the fierce ideology of the open-source community at large."
However, what is up with the obvious story troll? Are the /. numbers low today?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Ain't
Gonna
Happen
Get over it
Give it up
Me too. I recently upgraded to a 4-core, 64 bit processor, and I can't even get Windows XP (neither the installed copy nor the setup disc) to boot on the machine. I haven't put a lot of time into it, though, because Linux works so well.
The FOSS has never produced a creditable office suite that can even begin to compare to Microsoft Office. The best it has been able to muster is a poor clone of Office 97. That, combined with the extreme fragmentation of the *.nix / *BSD family does not bode well at all. FreeBSD has their heads so far stuck up their ass that they will not even accept a perfectly good product if it has a GPL license. *.nix just doesn't seem to have a clear idea of where they are going. In both cases, and especially in the case of *BSD, the need for modern, quality drivers is a must. Without modern and fully functional device drivers, nobody is going anywhere. A perfect example is FreeBSD. They do not even support modern wireless "N" chips. Pathetic does not even begin to describe this situation.
Pigskin-Referee
Linux: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow
Don't
Need
to
Worry
About
it
Get over it.
We're not going away.
Shut the fuck up.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There aren't any business databases available for either [Windows or GNU/Linux]. [...] We need something that those who know the business rules can use to implement said rules, and do it easily.
[The makers of Oracle Database and MySQL] beg to differ with you.
But what Oracle middleware product do you recommend for easy translation of business rules into SQL code that runs on an Oracle DBMS?
Oddly enough, the sorts of people that us Linux already would probably still continue to use it as all of the grannies try to shoehorn their usage patterns into things like the iPad.
The Linux Desktop isn't going anywhere. It was never forcibly foisted upon anyone for whom it was grossly inappropriate.
If the desktop is dying then it's Windows that's in jeopardy for being a dinosaur and MacOS for being controlled by a jerk.
If anything, I worry about MacOS being going away. It's a reasonable middle ground. It should be preserved. Although I think Apple will ruin it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Maybe you had better hardware than I was working with. The last "PC" laptop I had would only get about an hour and a half running Windows, and was much worse with either Linux (tried slackware, fedora, centos, and ubuntu) or FreeBSD (also including PC-BSD). When I get a new job that payed more, I rewarded myself with a Macbook Pro and quite frankly, have no reason to ever really want to go back. I can always just go into VMWare if I have to.
What Linux is lacking is major studio games.
Major studio games
CAD software
Speech recognition (Dragon Naturally Speaking)
Video editing
Office suite that is compatible with the other 98% of the world
Video chat
Web browser that works on "just that one site" which the user needs
Support for the webcam or printer that the user just happens to have
Skype with Paypal integration
Accessibly and usability issues
These are examples from just the past few weeks of supporting desktop Linux installs (well, the game wasn't). Linux advocates can toss the blame elsewhere ("The government website _shouldn't_ require IE") but the fact still remains that Linux (I currently support *buntu and Fedora/CentOS) lack the last 10% that users need and expect.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Tablets are a fad and won't even be around in 5 years. The suckers that believe Steve's BS already have one the rest of us have moved on already. And the ones that did buy it even admit now that it's a toy and they don't really use it much. After they showed up at the coffee shop and could not figure how to hold it and nobody told them how cool they were for having an iPad they are ready to move on too.
You'll play it on a gaming console.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
The one where commands to the browser are given textually, line by line. It's not that hard to figure out. I've admitted from the very beginning that there's a set of visually oriented tasks for which a GUI is the natural choice. It is in no way hypocritical of me to use them where appropriate. Nice try though.
You know this whole conversation is pointless considering the above and this:
It's also only a few lines of AppleScript, or JScript or VBScript.
Which are also command line environments.
Yes, they're command-line environments, but they don't have command-line *interfaces*. Which, you may recall, is obstensibly what we were fucking talking about!
So you consider *everything* a CLI, even if it's just a CL. Proving one of two things:
1) You're not making any statement about CLIs, you're just talking about preferring text to other types of input.
2) You don't even know what CLI actually is.
If applications that let you type script (into a GUI window) and execute it (using a GUI IDE environment) counts as a CLI, well, then ... so does pretty much everything! Hey, you can type commands like "=lorem(100,100)" into Word, therefore Word's is a CLI application!! You can type formulas into Excel, therefore Excel's a CLI application!
Seriously, man. WTF is wrong with you. What a waste of both our time.
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