[cumbria_lug] New distro advice

[Schwuk]

Michael Saunders said:
> But that's my point. You can't put a Linux distro on that machine that
> rivals Longhorn in featureset and capability! At best you could
> squeeze on Slackware, but X and even the lightest WM would thrash swap
> a lot, and finding appropriate apps would be a nightmare...

Neither can you put Longhorn (nor any version of Windows above 95 and
expect it to perform reasonably) on that machine.

Longhorn is years away - do you really believe they are going to be
supporting todays hardware as anything other than minimum requirements?
Longhorn will be (like all of MS' releases) more and more hardware hungry.
Your earlier comment about Microsoft "tuning, tuning, tuning" is only
partly right - yes Microsoft are attempting to address their security and
performance issues, but they are not really that interested in the upgrade
market, only in selling more licenses to hardware vendors who want to sell
new hardware.

> Besides, that spec is naturally too low.

No it's not - that machine (admittedly with more memory) will happily
become a thin-client. Or a firewall (to protect all those Windows boxes).
Or a mail router. Or home gateway (my home gateway/firewall is running on
a box not much bigger than that - P200/32MB/2GB running RH8). Try doing
that with MS.

> This was meant to be the liberating OS; the one for everyone.

It is - not everyone wants the same thing, nor does everyone want to do
everything. At least with Linux and FLOSS we have the choices to do what
we want, how we want, rather than what/how MS (and their partners) want us
doing.

The desktop market is not the only market out there, and is not the only
market "we" should be concentrating on, and don't forget the desktop and
workstation markets are two different things. Replacing all those Windows
servers with Samba/Apache etc. scares MS far more than losing desktops due
to the loss of the (artifically) high licensing fees - after all, Windows
is essentially 'free' (i.e. it comes with the hardware) - it's the CALs
you have to pay for. Until someone takes Linux and does an 'OS X' on it,
it's always going to be a square peg/round hole scenario using Linux on
the desktop.

For the record - I've (currently) given up on Linux for the desktop - I
replaced my FC1 install with XP before christmas and haven't looked back.
That said, as far as I'm concerned I'm just using as different WM, as I'm
still running FireFox, OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Gaim, XChat, VIM etc. I'm
going to be giving FC2T1 a try as soon as I get the CDs, but I doubt I'll
switch back just yet. Still running Linux happily on all my servers
though. Maybe a good topic for a future meet would be "FLOSS on other
platforms".

Cheers,
-- 
Schwuk