[Colchester] The future

[Wayland Sothcott]

Toby Whaymand wrote:
> The following is what I put on my Facebook page hence the type of wording.  I know you guys know more then me but I need to keep it clear for non-computer geeks anyways this is what I wrote it sure is interesting:
>
> Brazilian schools are moving to a Debian standard OS but they have not published which OS it going to be yet... Let Hope it's Ubuntu!!!
>
> What we do know that they going to be using KDE - Kool Desktop Environment.... Kubuntu runs on KDE...
>
> Debian itself give you the option of KDE or GNOME...
>
> 51 million kids are going to be using Linux. With the French government using Mandriva and a huge number of American businesses moving towards SUSE Enterprise... The future is looking real bright for Linux!!! Oh Yeah
>
> -----------------------------------------
> Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email
> Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Colchester mailing list
> Colchester at mailman.lug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/colchester
>
>   
Toby,

That one lapop per child project was going to deliver Linux. It was 
started under the Linux mindset of freedom as a Linux project. It has 
now been switched to Windows with the reason given that the 'kids' 
prefer Windows. That maybe true if you have been brought up on Windows 
but the point of these machines was that they went to people who had not 
had their own computer before. Clearly the Windows camp were very 
worried what this might mean. Windows is popular because thats what you 
find on your first computer. The entire 'success' of vista is down to 
loading by default onto new computers. There would be very few who would 
upgrade to it based on it's features. In fact my only reason for moving 
from Windows 2000 to XP is that it was already on my Laptop. I try to 
avoid operating system specific stuff. Linux tries to be an operating 
system that runs anything. Windows tries to be an operating system that 
only runs windows programs. Precious few programs require a specific 
version of Windows, those that do are usually something to do with 
Microsoft. I like it that most Linux programs are available for Windows, 
that does not help force people into Linux but it does allow them to get 
familiar with programs that they will use on Linux. Wine allows many 
Windows programs to run on Linux. What would be good is to have Windows 
developers test their own programs on Wine. I expect they could make a 
few minor tweeques which would make them more Wine friendly. They could 
still use their Windows programming skills but be actually writing cross 
platform programs.

Wayland.