[cumbria_lug] Lurking too long.

[Dave Murphy]

Ian Linwood wrote:
> For it to take off, we need a Linux (mmm, I mean integrated) GUI....

To what benefit? What would an integrated GUI provide that the current
offerings don't?

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

Considering my kids and wife are at home as much in GNOME as they are in
XP, I'd argue against that.

> OK, we've stumbled along with xwindow, Gnome, KDE, Xorg. But are they 
> getting anywhere?

Have you tried GNOME recently? I can't vouch for KDE (Adam feel free to
step in here), but it is getting really good and with some of the new
stuff coming (NLD's customisations, compiz etc.) it can only get better.
Re-inventing the GUI now would be a terrible mistake, and kill a lot of
momentum.

> I'm going to kill my XP box. But it's not Linux that I'm going for - 
> Solaris 10 will be my friend.

No surprise there with you!

> Solid, Stable, Reliable. free (note lower case)

I can happily say the same thing about my Ubuntu box, except it's Free
(not uppper case).

> The only thing that, IMO, could compete, are the BSD's. My fav would be 
> OpenBSD, but unfortunately, the guy who runs that show is a prick.

How is *BSD or Solaris really that different from Linux? They're both
using window managers on top of X so what are you getting (apart from
less hardware support, and less availability of packages  - neither of
which can be construed as "pluses") from switching. If you want an
integrated GUI, why aren't you switching to BeOS? (Apart from the minor
detail that it's dead). Unless you can provide some constructive
arguments for your decision, it (to me) smacks of a bad case of "Linux
isn't 733t enough anymore".

Cheers,
-- 
Dave Murphy (Schwuk)
http://schwuk.com