On Sun, 2005-03-20 at 05:02, Jeff Vian wrote: > BTW, I do not think of 'desktop computing' as a business workstation > but rather as home users. In the workstation (business) market Linux > seems to be taking market share from Windows at an increasing pace. The only difference here is what you can afford to pay and the availability of technical support. The usability issues are the same at home and at work. But, many of the Linux usability issues have to do with installing and trying to use the wrong tools for the job just because they are free. > You also seem to overlook the current state and the rapidly improving > user friendliness and utility for the Linux distributions that _is_ > starting to make it more acceptable across the board. > > It will be interesting to see where the status balances out. A large part of the problem is the embarassement of riches available in free software. Distributions tend to include a dozen different programs that do the same thing just because they can. Someone building a proprietary system would never do that because it would confuse the users and make support many times more difficult. What we need in the Linux world is some small number of people to act as the product manager for 'their' personal flavor of OS, so instead of having to choose among thousands of programs as you install and run them, you make one choice from a few dozen expertly tuned systems to pick the one that matches what you plan to do. You would still be able to add and customize programs of course but there would be no need to do so. The ubuntu/kubuntu distributions are headed the right way in my opinion, keeping a handy 1-disk install and a run-from-CD preview to make the split for Gnome/KDE. I'd like to see the same concept wrapped around a fedora/RH base with enough marketing to get the point across that they are not really competing distributions but expertly tuned installations for different preferences and uses. I'd guess that somewhere around 20 versions of these with concise descriptions by their maintainers could make about 90% of the users happy (well, at least within the same language...). It would be just like having your own personal system administrator to manage your home system. -- Les Mikesell les@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
