Letting a monopoly do exactly what it wants is hardly a remedy. So a comparatively small number of people end up using Linux - big deal.
I'm sure this attitude would be just fine with MS since they would have the vast majority of users locked into their platform buying their software, their music, their films, their e-books etc.
Besides which, Linux even after all these years is still not a viable consumer OS.
Maybe, but Red Hat 9 was a commerical product sold on the shelves of retail stores. Lots of people bought RH9 to play with at home and thus were able to personally recommend it at work. Who knows, perhaps even the CTO saw it while in the store and this was enough for him/her to authorise a few copies to be bought / downloaded for prototyping and it ended up with deployment of the Enterprise version.
But Red Hat have tossed all that brand awareness out of the window. Not to mention the revenue that RH9 brought in (which must have been substantial and certainly helped offset a lot of the cost of developing ES).
Now we have Fedora, which many will assume to be a Red Hat knockoff rather than a spinoff, and RH WS/AS/ES which many will assume is designed to work together, not standalone, or to be pigeonholed to certain roles and not as flexible as RH9. Red Hat will have to do a lot to correct these misconception, but the end of the day I reckon it was a dumb move.
Now instead of getting some money as they did with RH9 (even if a lot of people downloaded it for free), they get none at all. But they're still going to have to fund Fedora and reap little in return. Their brand awareness is going to go down the plug hole, and many of the home enthusiasts are going to jump ship to SUSE / Mandrake / Debian.
Eh? If you read what I said properly you would see I am suggesting running VMWare on Linux and using Windows as the guest. VMWare runs on Win32 and Linux, and in the high end server versions you would probably be running it on Linux.
For companies keen to go Unix, they can host their legacy stuff in VMWare and reduce their TCO at the same time (e.g when one box does what three machines had to do previously etc.). In other words it is an escape route and potentially a money saver.
Whereas Virtual PC isn't even out on Linux. To use it you must have either Windows or a Mac. And the Mac version has such awful performance that it automatically rules itself out as an escape route. Hence the reason Microsoft would dearly love to see VMWare go out of business - they represent a way for people to leave MS, not to mention they're 'stealing' business from the MS / Citrix thin client market.
Hence a cynic might reason that Virtual PC has just had a drastic price cut in order to drive VMWare's margins into the ground. And if VMWare does go to the wall I wonder if we are seeing the start of another anti-trust lawsuit.
Actually there is a lot they could to break it, starting simply from not fixing bugs that only affect Linux, through to emulating hardware that Linux traditionally has a problem supporting. Think winmodems and the like. It could be rationally argued that a virtual machine shouldn't emulate actual hardware but implement thin custom drivers that handle calls natively on the other side of the emulation. This would allow for tighter integration with the guest OS.
For example, VPC traditionally emulates an S3 graphics card which makes it somewhat simpler to get something going than VMWare. In VMWare you start of in VGA-16 and then run the VMWare tools to get X up and going at the resolution of your choice. What is to stop Microsoft going the VMWare route, shipping VPC tools but inconveniently failing to supply them for Linux? So you're stuck with VGA 16 mode.
Now do the same for sound, the NIC, and perhaps throw in some wacky chipsets for fun and Linux is hobbled and all but useless for QA testing and everything else.
I think Microsoft would like to see VMWare die horribly so they need all the support you can give them. VMWare represents a working and proven escape route from the Microsoft world, allowing companies to move over to Unix, running any vestiges of Win32 legacy crap under emulation. People should be in doubt who the real target was when they bought out Connectix.
There is nothing to lose by supporting Linux as a guest OS - Microsoft sell more copies of Virtual PC, they harm VMWare, and at the day you have to be running XP or OS X anyway to use it anyway.
But don't hold your breath expecting to ever see it run on Linux.
The bigger story here is the vaunted price cuts for this software. I'm sure they're not trying to drive VMWare out of business or anything. No indeed.
It was pulled because it was at best misleading (there are PCs that have comparable performance to a G5 at the same price, even before it was released) and at worst, it is a bare faced lie. Zealotry has nothing to do with it I'm afraid. I own a Mac and a PC and I considered the claim highly dubious even as soon as it was made. It was doubly dubious in fact that it was touted as a 64-bit machine, failing to point out that nearly all of the OS and all of the software was still 32-bit rendering the claim rather specious and misleading.
Apple have a long and illustrious track record of stretching the truth and this time they stepped over. I don't see what the fuss is. If they can't make claims are backed up by impartial facts and reality they deserve to be yanked every time.
Tourists can hire a phone at the airport, or buy a prepay card, or use a coin box, or use the the hotel phone, or just buy a normal prepay phone.
Besides which, if tourists are their market, it kind of runs counter about all the bullshit about it being recyclable. How many tourists are going to get the $5 back on their phone if it means posting the thing off and getting some silly rebate cheque?
This is a symptom of a society which thinks devices with artificial lifetimes is a good thing. Think of the mountains of AOL cds, junk mail, disposable cameras, disposable print heads, disposable tapes / DVDs etc. Is it any wonder that the US & Europe consume most of the worlds resources?
It's not like the thing even does something you can't get now. Europe (and I hope the US) sell prepay and full featured phones starting from 50 euros - not just some crappy box that doesn't even have a display. So what is the point of this? I seriously doubt that this device is that much cheaper, and considerably more restricted in features and lifetime.
The $5 deposit is just a sop.
It's not like phones are the best devices from an environmental point of view (think of all the needlessly different battery and adaptor types), but at least they're not meant to be tossed away after so many minutes. In fact, most shops often have trade-in schemes for old models and pass them on to charities for refurbishment for third world countries. So some good comes from them.
The thing with the NGage is that it's just too bloody big. On the positive side, the screen is very high res, the games look impressive (all three of them or whatever tiny number it is) and Nokia phones are very user friendly.
But unfortunately as a phone it's as portable as something from 1995, as a game station the buttons suck, the cartridge slot is under the battery (doh!), and as an MP3 player... well did I mention it was big? Or that other handhelds / MP3 players don't require you sign a 12 month contract to buy it at a sane price or play stuff on them?
I'm sure it will attract a band of raving fanatical zealots who'll defend it to the death, but I'm afraid it just doesn't work for me. The little squeaks from Nokia about total units shipped (not sold) also smack of desperation as reality kicks in. Perhaps sales really are as good as they'd have you believe, but I'm not convinced.
... that this mockup (and it's just a mockup) appears just as the NGage goes on sale. Personally I reckon the NGage is bulky crap having seen it working, but Sony looks like it is sowing a little FUD here.
Another japanese technological miracle. Stick one finger in your ear and talk to another and look like a complete twat to everyone within close proximity.
The tomato meter invariably goes down, not up with time. This is due to the number of overly enthusiastic / shill reviews that skew results at the early stages.
As the new Matrix flick already has over 60 reviews, it is way past that stage. So I wouldn't hold out much hope. It seems the verdict is in - it stinks.
The difference is simply that NVIDIA has competent driver writers. NVIDIA has a binary driver, with a very small source-based wrapper, and they wrote a simple installer that handles building it.
I would assume that most manufacturers have competant driver writers and they'd be made more competant if they weren't required to reinvent the wheel each time. The case of NVidia is interesting. It's good they offer drivers, but they are a major pain to obtain to obtain and require you have a clue about shell scripts and other technicalities (e.g. running as root, exiting from X before installing them etc.). Why can't they be shipped with the dist? And if that is not possible for one reason or another, why can't SUSE / Mandrake / RedHat hold your hand and take you to them once the rest of installation is done?
Even if they did grab the installer and run it for you, NVidia demonstrates another problem withthe 'roll your own' situation in Linux. Their installer didn't like my RH9.0 umask (set by default in the OS) and installed files with the wrong permissions. A standard and dist-neutral driver installer mechanism would obviate all these sort of pitfalls.
BTW, you don't have to patch your kernel to add new drivers, there are plenty of drivers distributed as source that will build against the existing kernel.
Which still assumes you have the kernel headers and a complete toolchain. This blows out of the water any chance your average Lindows user might have of installing whatever-it-is. Of course you might get lucky and find a binary module compiled against your particular kernel, but then again you might not.
Anyway I think the dist makers should band together and recognize this is a shared problem and produce the tools and testing labs which allow vendors to produce a single working, signed and tested driver that will run with one dist to the next. Kernel hackers might not care for binary compatibility but I find it hard to believe that such a thing is impossible for dist makers to add.
In other words, Linux is like a second run cinema. You get to see the film eventually, but only after the distributors have made their money elsewhere.
Perhaps Linux would improve the situation dramatically if it had a standardized (as in LSB) method for installing, uninstalling, signing, downloading and QA testing binary drivers which were guaranteed to work with any version of a major release, e.g. 2.4.x.
Aside from a few masochists who insist everything should be patched into their kernel and rebuilt, this is something that would benefit everyone and make Linux much more appealing to consumers which in turn makes it much more appealing to OEMs to support it.
The current situation where OEMs must cope with umpteen different kernels for umpteen different distributors is a joke. It must be a massive turnoff and frankly it's a wonder that the likes of NVidia even bother.
Would a green grocer act as his or her own shop fitter, plumber, electrician, carpet layer, estate agent, lawyer, accountant, car mechanic, etc? Yet it's expected to be possible for them to administer and maintain a complex machine.
Sorry but this a dumb analogy.
I don't know the first thing about my car or my TV which are both complex machines. I just expect the bloody things to have a simple interface and to do what I bought them to do. I don't expect wires to be hanging out the back, or to have to open the hood and work on it with spanners to make the bloody thing do what I bought it for. The same goes for a computer, doubly so when there are already competing operating systems which have no such requirements.
To stand on the soapbox and claim "Linux is a complicated machine so therefore it should not be made easier to use" (even when it can and should be) is both elitist and the very reason why Linux is not conquering the desktop.
Personally I wish Linux were as easy as Mac OS X. Not only would it be on millions more machines than it is now but the market for my computer skills would vastly increase and I would waste less time fucking around with config files and HOWTOs accomplishing what XP or OS X can do with a few mouse clicks. It wouldn't stop me playing around in a shell (as I so often do with OS X), but it would mean I don't have to.
Installing drivers or apps is not really a "user level" task in the first place. Would you ask the average user to take a soldering iron to a piece of electronics?
And would you call an electrician to install a toaster? I hope not. You would expect to be able to plug it in and begin using it. There is no reason that it should be any different for an OS. At worst the OS should bend over backwards to make the act of installing a driver for some new peripheral as painless as possible. Linux most certainly does not do that.
Meanwhile, nobody's forcing me to upgrade my Mac (this article is FUD).
Of course no one is literally forcing you, but are strongly coerced. You *have* to upgrade at least every other point release otherwise nothing new will run on your machine. To drive the point home, Apple all but abandons older versions and with them go the 3rd party vendors who are pushed enough to support the differences between the more recent versions.
I hate to cast Microsoft in a good light, but they at least care about backwards compatibility. So even now you can get updates for Windows 98 (which is just at the end of it's lifecycle) and a lot of new MS software & 3rd party stuff still runs on it. This is pretty impressive by any measure.
You seem to think 'office' equates to large scale corporations with an IT department and everyone running the same hardware. Clearly this is not the case, for the vast army of SOHO workers, legal firms, accountants, estate agents, shop keepers, electricians, printers, architects etc. There are enough of these people that Microsoft have seen fit to sell a small business version of Windows.
Unless Linux can install out of the box, either with the drivers or prompt them where to find them, and provide useful context sensitive help, and hide the advanced options and provide wizards for the everyday tasks, I would not consider Linux ready to replace Windows at all. The article makes it clear that even in a managed environment, Windows still has an edge, so obviously the situation is much worse when the environment is not managed. Now some dists are closer to this goal than others (I use Red Hat 9.0 and like it), but none has approached anywhere near the simplicity of XP or OS X. I would gauge RH9 to be on par with W2K at least on the config side of things.
As for your UT2003 remark, I see you have missed the point. Certain apps won't run without tinkering on Linux because the target OS was not installed in an adequate state in the first place to support them. UT2003 was simply an example of an app which won't run because no dist sees fit to ship a proper 3D enabled Xfree display driver. You could replace UT2003, with a video conferencing suite, or a CAD/CAM application, or a interior decorating app. The point is that if you have a 3d card, or surround sound, or a USB modem etc. (which you presumably bought to exploit), then the OS should install the proper drivers to support it or guide you through the steps necessary to get them.
If Windows can do it, then so can Linux. If Mac OS X can turn a bear like BSD (arguably much rougher in any incarnation to install and use than Linux) into a pussycat then so can Linux.
I started with 10.1 on my machine, which is all but obsolete. So I upgraded to 10.2. But now with 10.3 just out I already feel like I'm on borrowed time. Because Apple have the none too subtle strategy of simply dumping support for older versions quick time, no pun intended. And with Apple go the vendors who have enough trouble supporting the differences between recent point releases.
Why don't Apple just be done with it and call it OS X subscription? After all, I bet most of their customers are paying $120 every 12-18 months anyway just to keep their machines current. So why not be honest about it? And this on top of the premium for the hardware.
Concerning Linux being as easy to use as XP, I would say some dists are close but not there yet.
The article confirms that. It is comparing a preconfigured desktop, presumably with all hardware drivers and networking in place. This might be true of an office environment, but certainly not in the home.
I wonder how Linux would fair if they asked a user to install a driver for example. Or get UT2003 to work.
Personally, the nearest I've seen to XP levels of usability is RH9.0 which is on par with W2K - a good and solid set of admin tools - and an attractive and sparse desktop. But it is pretty weak on the novice / consumer side of things and didn't even install a 3d driver for my NVidia. Particularly weak for all dists is the help system and installing a driver is a joke - if you're lucky you'll get a script to run (assuming you know what a shell is) and if you're unlucky be ready to rebuild kernels.
If OS X can tame BSD so that most people wouldn't even know there is Unix running underneath, then so can Linux. It doesn't stop the pros from firing up a shell (as I do on OS X), but there should be absolutely no need for mere mortals to ever have to touch the thing.
My experience (most recently with 9.1) is the opposite. The desktop is a dogs breakfast - cluttered menu full of Ks and Gs, duplicate K & G apps that do the same things, homegrown tools that get confused at the drop of a hat, painful support for PCMCIA and laptop networking, an awful updater and help nowhere to be found. I've grown to hate that updater, which will sit there for ten minutes over a modem not responding or painting at all while it downloads some package list. That was after spending ages trying to get devfs to show the modem that I knew was there so kppp would let me dial out on it.
I honestly do not believe anyone in Mandrake pays the slightest bit of attention to usability. Ten minutes with Mandrake would yield a list of significant and obvious improvements that could be made. It does not have to be this way. Red Hat shows you can produce a very slick desktop - if you try - and Mandrake really needs to learn this if they stand the remotest chance of attracting novice users.
Which is a shame. There is a lot under the surface to be proud of, but they absolutely have to clean up that desktop.
Yes they are, as is AOL communicator which was/is some kind of mail client. But I suspect you're looking at the grand sum of usage of Gecko in the whole of AOL, ever.
It would not surprise me if AOL for OS X suddenly flipped to the webcore component for its next release, not that it would gain anything from it. As for AOL communicator, I haven't used it so I can't say, but with no Netscape engineers I find it hard to believe AOL have any long terms for Gecko, Mozilla or Netscape anywhere.
Seeing as AOL sacked all the Netscape developers, my money would be on the service being some cut down AOL dialler with an AOL / Netscape branded version of IE.
I know it's sounds too perverse to be true, but AOL really does have its head up its arse that far. Even when they had their own open standards compliant and cross platform browser, arguably much better than IE, they still used IE in their products. I guess they really do like being firmly grasped by the balls by their largest competitor.
If that isn't the definition of short sighted fuck wittery I don't know what is.
I used Mandrake through 6.x to 8.x and I thought it was pretty stable using it for years it as a very solid and dependable server.
But as a desktop and as a demonstration of usability it sucks bigtime. In the same 6-8 time period I thought the UI got increasingly bad becoming nearly unusable by the end. I picked up 9.1 and my opinion hasn't changed much. They still ship a nearly generic KDE with a bunch of slapdash tools with the result that the desktop looks like a cluttered mess.
Usability is definitely Mandrake's weak spot. It's a shame because otherwise it is pretty solid.
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I'm sure this attitude would be just fine with MS since they would have the vast majority of users locked into their platform buying their software, their music, their films, their e-books etc.
Besides which, Linux even after all these years is still not a viable consumer OS.
But Red Hat have tossed all that brand awareness out of the window. Not to mention the revenue that RH9 brought in (which must have been substantial and certainly helped offset a lot of the cost of developing ES).
Now we have Fedora, which many will assume to be a Red Hat knockoff rather than a spinoff, and RH WS/AS/ES which many will assume is designed to work together, not standalone, or to be pigeonholed to certain roles and not as flexible as RH9. Red Hat will have to do a lot to correct these misconception, but the end of the day I reckon it was a dumb move.
Now instead of getting some money as they did with RH9 (even if a lot of people downloaded it for free), they get none at all. But they're still going to have to fund Fedora and reap little in return. Their brand awareness is going to go down the plug hole, and many of the home enthusiasts are going to jump ship to SUSE / Mandrake / Debian.
For companies keen to go Unix, they can host their legacy stuff in VMWare and reduce their TCO at the same time (e.g when one box does what three machines had to do previously etc.). In other words it is an escape route and potentially a money saver.
Whereas Virtual PC isn't even out on Linux. To use it you must have either Windows or a Mac. And the Mac version has such awful performance that it automatically rules itself out as an escape route. Hence the reason Microsoft would dearly love to see VMWare go out of business - they represent a way for people to leave MS, not to mention they're 'stealing' business from the MS / Citrix thin client market.
Hence a cynic might reason that Virtual PC has just had a drastic price cut in order to drive VMWare's margins into the ground. And if VMWare does go to the wall I wonder if we are seeing the start of another anti-trust lawsuit.
For example, VPC traditionally emulates an S3 graphics card which makes it somewhat simpler to get something going than VMWare. In VMWare you start of in VGA-16 and then run the VMWare tools to get X up and going at the resolution of your choice. What is to stop Microsoft going the VMWare route, shipping VPC tools but inconveniently failing to supply them for Linux? So you're stuck with VGA 16 mode.
Now do the same for sound, the NIC, and perhaps throw in some wacky chipsets for fun and Linux is hobbled and all but useless for QA testing and everything else.
I think Microsoft would like to see VMWare die horribly so they need all the support you can give them. VMWare represents a working and proven escape route from the Microsoft world, allowing companies to move over to Unix, running any vestiges of Win32 legacy crap under emulation. People should be in doubt who the real target was when they bought out Connectix.
But don't hold your breath expecting to ever see it run on Linux.
The bigger story here is the vaunted price cuts for this software. I'm sure they're not trying to drive VMWare out of business or anything. No indeed.
Apple have a long and illustrious track record of stretching the truth and this time they stepped over. I don't see what the fuss is. If they can't make claims are backed up by impartial facts and reality they deserve to be yanked every time.
Buy a tri-band phone then. Most 'business' GSM phones support tri-band so they should even work in the US.
Besides which, if tourists are their market, it kind of runs counter about all the bullshit about it being recyclable. How many tourists are going to get the $5 back on their phone if it means posting the thing off and getting some silly rebate cheque?
It's not like the thing even does something you can't get now. Europe (and I hope the US) sell prepay and full featured phones starting from 50 euros - not just some crappy box that doesn't even have a display. So what is the point of this? I seriously doubt that this device is that much cheaper, and considerably more restricted in features and lifetime.
The $5 deposit is just a sop.
It's not like phones are the best devices from an environmental point of view (think of all the needlessly different battery and adaptor types), but at least they're not meant to be tossed away after so many minutes. In fact, most shops often have trade-in schemes for old models and pass them on to charities for refurbishment for third world countries. So some good comes from them.
Such functionality already exists. It's called a PDA.
But unfortunately as a phone it's as portable as something from 1995, as a game station the buttons suck, the cartridge slot is under the battery (doh!), and as an MP3 player... well did I mention it was big? Or that other handhelds / MP3 players don't require you sign a 12 month contract to buy it at a sane price or play stuff on them?
I'm sure it will attract a band of raving fanatical zealots who'll defend it to the death, but I'm afraid it just doesn't work for me. The little squeaks from Nokia about total units shipped (not sold) also smack of desperation as reality kicks in. Perhaps sales really are as good as they'd have you believe, but I'm not convinced.
... that this mockup (and it's just a mockup) appears just as the NGage goes on sale. Personally I reckon the NGage is bulky crap having seen it working, but Sony looks like it is sowing a little FUD here.
Another japanese technological miracle. Stick one finger in your ear and talk to another and look like a complete twat to everyone within close proximity.
As the new Matrix flick already has over 60 reviews, it is way past that stage. So I wouldn't hold out much hope. It seems the verdict is in - it stinks.
I would assume that most manufacturers have competant driver writers and they'd be made more competant if they weren't required to reinvent the wheel each time. The case of NVidia is interesting. It's good they offer drivers, but they are a major pain to obtain to obtain and require you have a clue about shell scripts and other technicalities (e.g. running as root, exiting from X before installing them etc.). Why can't they be shipped with the dist? And if that is not possible for one reason or another, why can't SUSE / Mandrake / RedHat hold your hand and take you to them once the rest of installation is done?
Even if they did grab the installer and run it for you, NVidia demonstrates another problem withthe 'roll your own' situation in Linux. Their installer didn't like my RH9.0 umask (set by default in the OS) and installed files with the wrong permissions. A standard and dist-neutral driver installer mechanism would obviate all these sort of pitfalls.
BTW, you don't have to patch your kernel to add new drivers, there are plenty of drivers distributed as source that will build against the existing kernel.
Which still assumes you have the kernel headers and a complete toolchain. This blows out of the water any chance your average Lindows user might have of installing whatever-it-is. Of course you might get lucky and find a binary module compiled against your particular kernel, but then again you might not.
Anyway I think the dist makers should band together and recognize this is a shared problem and produce the tools and testing labs which allow vendors to produce a single working, signed and tested driver that will run with one dist to the next. Kernel hackers might not care for binary compatibility but I find it hard to believe that such a thing is impossible for dist makers to add.
Perhaps Linux would improve the situation dramatically if it had a standardized (as in LSB) method for installing, uninstalling, signing, downloading and QA testing binary drivers which were guaranteed to work with any version of a major release, e.g. 2.4.x.
Aside from a few masochists who insist everything should be patched into their kernel and rebuilt, this is something that would benefit everyone and make Linux much more appealing to consumers which in turn makes it much more appealing to OEMs to support it.
The current situation where OEMs must cope with umpteen different kernels for umpteen different distributors is a joke. It must be a massive turnoff and frankly it's a wonder that the likes of NVidia even bother.
Sorry but this a dumb analogy.
I don't know the first thing about my car or my TV which are both complex machines. I just expect the bloody things to have a simple interface and to do what I bought them to do. I don't expect wires to be hanging out the back, or to have to open the hood and work on it with spanners to make the bloody thing do what I bought it for. The same goes for a computer, doubly so when there are already competing operating systems which have no such requirements.
To stand on the soapbox and claim "Linux is a complicated machine so therefore it should not be made easier to use" (even when it can and should be) is both elitist and the very reason why Linux is not conquering the desktop.
Personally I wish Linux were as easy as Mac OS X. Not only would it be on millions more machines than it is now but the market for my computer skills would vastly increase and I would waste less time fucking around with config files and HOWTOs accomplishing what XP or OS X can do with a few mouse clicks. It wouldn't stop me playing around in a shell (as I so often do with OS X), but it would mean I don't have to.
Installing drivers or apps is not really a "user level" task in the first place. Would you ask the average user to take a soldering iron to a piece of electronics?
And would you call an electrician to install a toaster? I hope not. You would expect to be able to plug it in and begin using it. There is no reason that it should be any different for an OS. At worst the OS should bend over backwards to make the act of installing a driver for some new peripheral as painless as possible. Linux most certainly does not do that.
Of course no one is literally forcing you, but are strongly coerced. You *have* to upgrade at least every other point release otherwise nothing new will run on your machine. To drive the point home, Apple all but abandons older versions and with them go the 3rd party vendors who are pushed enough to support the differences between the more recent versions.
I hate to cast Microsoft in a good light, but they at least care about backwards compatibility. So even now you can get updates for Windows 98 (which is just at the end of it's lifecycle) and a lot of new MS software & 3rd party stuff still runs on it. This is pretty impressive by any measure.
Unless Linux can install out of the box, either with the drivers or prompt them where to find them, and provide useful context sensitive help, and hide the advanced options and provide wizards for the everyday tasks, I would not consider Linux ready to replace Windows at all. The article makes it clear that even in a managed environment, Windows still has an edge, so obviously the situation is much worse when the environment is not managed. Now some dists are closer to this goal than others (I use Red Hat 9.0 and like it), but none has approached anywhere near the simplicity of XP or OS X. I would gauge RH9 to be on par with W2K at least on the config side of things.
As for your UT2003 remark, I see you have missed the point. Certain apps won't run without tinkering on Linux because the target OS was not installed in an adequate state in the first place to support them. UT2003 was simply an example of an app which won't run because no dist sees fit to ship a proper 3D enabled Xfree display driver. You could replace UT2003, with a video conferencing suite, or a CAD/CAM application, or a interior decorating app. The point is that if you have a 3d card, or surround sound, or a USB modem etc. (which you presumably bought to exploit), then the OS should install the proper drivers to support it or guide you through the steps necessary to get them.
If Windows can do it, then so can Linux. If Mac OS X can turn a bear like BSD (arguably much rougher in any incarnation to install and use than Linux) into a pussycat then so can Linux.
Why don't Apple just be done with it and call it OS X subscription? After all, I bet most of their customers are paying $120 every 12-18 months anyway just to keep their machines current. So why not be honest about it? And this on top of the premium for the hardware.
The article confirms that. It is comparing a preconfigured desktop, presumably with all hardware drivers and networking in place. This might be true of an office environment, but certainly not in the home.
I wonder how Linux would fair if they asked a user to install a driver for example. Or get UT2003 to work.
Personally, the nearest I've seen to XP levels of usability is RH9.0 which is on par with W2K - a good and solid set of admin tools - and an attractive and sparse desktop. But it is pretty weak on the novice / consumer side of things and didn't even install a 3d driver for my NVidia. Particularly weak for all dists is the help system and installing a driver is a joke - if you're lucky you'll get a script to run (assuming you know what a shell is) and if you're unlucky be ready to rebuild kernels.
If OS X can tame BSD so that most people wouldn't even know there is Unix running underneath, then so can Linux. It doesn't stop the pros from firing up a shell (as I do on OS X), but there should be absolutely no need for mere mortals to ever have to touch the thing.
I honestly do not believe anyone in Mandrake pays the slightest bit of attention to usability. Ten minutes with Mandrake would yield a list of significant and obvious improvements that could be made. It does not have to be this way. Red Hat shows you can produce a very slick desktop - if you try - and Mandrake really needs to learn this if they stand the remotest chance of attracting novice users.
Which is a shame. There is a lot under the surface to be proud of, but they absolutely have to clean up that desktop.
It would not surprise me if AOL for OS X suddenly flipped to the webcore component for its next release, not that it would gain anything from it. As for AOL communicator, I haven't used it so I can't say, but with no Netscape engineers I find it hard to believe AOL have any long terms for Gecko, Mozilla or Netscape anywhere.
I know it's sounds too perverse to be true, but AOL really does have its head up its arse that far. Even when they had their own open standards compliant and cross platform browser, arguably much better than IE, they still used IE in their products. I guess they really do like being firmly grasped by the balls by their largest competitor.
If that isn't the definition of short sighted fuck wittery I don't know what is.
But as a desktop and as a demonstration of usability it sucks bigtime. In the same 6-8 time period I thought the UI got increasingly bad becoming nearly unusable by the end. I picked up 9.1 and my opinion hasn't changed much. They still ship a nearly generic KDE with a bunch of slapdash tools with the result that the desktop looks like a cluttered mess.
Usability is definitely Mandrake's weak spot. It's a shame because otherwise it is pretty solid.