[cumbria_lug] Lurking too long.

[euan.hogg at cumbria.ac.uk]

Hi,

> Ian Linwood wrote:
> For it to take off, we need a Linux (mmm, I mean integrated) GUI....
>
I'm not sure about a few things here, in what context do you see linux not 
taking off?  It its many guises ( distros ) it is being used for 
everything up to and including enterprise level platforms and clustering 
with some big names putting a lot of investment into levering it in the 
business market.  In many cases a GUI is irrelevant as it is after all 
only an application, just as explorer.exe is on win32 platforms.  Much of 
what needs to be done is done with scripts and I find I only need a GUI 
these days as some software needs the libraries.  More often than not I'll 
drop to a terminal window or wont start the xwindow in the first place and 
log in to a $>.

> Lets face it folks, if you are not IT competent - it's a NON STARTER.

I agree to some extent, as each distro tends to do things different ways, 
whether system V ish or BSD ish or hybrid.  But a GUI just prevents you 
seeing whats under the hood. You still need to know about processes, 
threads, logs, buffers, blah blah, etc. and thats where many GUIs fail. 
And with the vast majority of the world using the Windows/Explorer GUI it 
would take some special kind of marketing for those people to want to 
change.

Perhaps Ian, you could explain what you mean by 'an integrated GUI'.  As 
opposed to a disintegrated one, perhaps?

Kind regards,

Euan