[dundee] Linux on the desktop

[Jonathan Riddell]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 08:54:06AM +0000, Mark Harrigan wrote:
> Although the following article is about Mac OS X it does make some
> points relating to Linux on the desktop that I think are very
> important for the Linux community to think about when trying to
> compete with Windows.
> 
> http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/conclusion.html
> and 
> http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/conclusion_trap.html

He seems to argue that choice is bad because you would have to spend a
long time deciding which libraries to use if you were writing a
(presumably proprietry) application.

" Which toolkit(s) would you use? Which desktop environment would you
integrate it with? Which distribution would you target it for? How do
you know what you "like" is "right"? Which all libraries would you
leverage so that you don't reinvent the wheel? How would you ensure it
works seamlessly on a random installation? "

Well you either use GTK, if you think object orientation in C is a
nice idea, or Qt, if you want to make life easy.  Or for more
integration and less operating system portability you use GNOME libs
or KDE libs.

On the other page he moans about how you have to endlessly tinker to
get things working which is probably entirly true but he gives the
example of a camera that wasn't supported by the Linux module so he
had to edit the source to get it working.  But in a similar situation
on Mac OS if your camera isn't supported there's nothing you can do
about it because it's proprietry software and you arn't allowed to
change it (apart from some of the very low level Darwin bits).  
Just seemed like a strange example, being able to fix a problem.
Other Mac restrictions include not being able to play DVD videos out
of your local region and not being able to burn DVDs using the drive
of your choice.  Plus their rediculous interface patents listed
somewhere on http://jriddell.org/patents.html

Somewhere along the way he makes the point of it being hard to
configure and of course it is a shame that there are two different
desktop environments with much the same goals (one day those GNOME
people will see sence :).

There are loads of things which Mac OS does better than GNU/Linux
distributions but surprisingly my mum, who has had both forced upon
her, asks just as many difficult problems with Mac OS X as she did
with SuSE (only some of which are due to the lack of features in
AppleWorks).

Jonathan Riddell