I'm one of those sys admins you speak of, and you're correct. There is nothing more I'd like to see than Linux becoming a usable (and already stable!) desktop system that my users could handle. It would certainly make my life easier, from installing software to preventing users from mucking up the system components like they can with Windows (without some serious tweaking on my part). I've been able to setup NT workstations in a way that makes my life much easier than dealing with Win9x machines, but there's still something missing. My users end up running downloaded screen savers, etc. that crash NT. Sure, I could format their disks with NTFS and prevent them from writing anything to the system files, but then I'm limiting myself in recovery options and making things too restrictive for my users. Linux is definitely my preferred option.
How embarassing! I missed the "from the... department" line and read it thinking it was news. Of course, I suppose the fact that M$ was doing actual ground-breaking research should have been an immediate giveaway that something was amiss with this story. Not that M$ doesn't have a great track record for innovation or anything;-)
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I'm one of those sys admins you speak of, and you're correct. There is nothing more I'd like to see than Linux becoming a usable (and already stable!) desktop system that my users could handle. It would certainly make my life easier, from installing software to preventing users from mucking up the system components like they can with Windows (without some serious tweaking on my part). I've been able to setup NT workstations in a way that makes my life much easier than dealing with Win9x machines, but there's still something missing. My users end up running downloaded screen savers, etc. that crash NT. Sure, I could format their disks with NTFS and prevent them from writing anything to the system files, but then I'm limiting myself in recovery options and making things too restrictive for my users. Linux is definitely my preferred option.
How embarassing! I missed the "from the ... department" line and read it thinking it was news. Of course, I suppose the fact that M$ was doing actual ground-breaking research should have been an immediate giveaway that something was amiss with this story. Not that M$ doesn't have a great track record for innovation or anything ;-)