[Wylug-discuss] Linux on the desktop (was [Wylug-help] Fw: Re: Installing a speedtouch modem)

[Rik Wade]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, Nik Jewell wrote:

> [lots of sensible stuff]
> Losin' my religion
>
> Nik

Totally agree. In the mid-late 90's the push for "Linux on the Desktop"
began and I believe the community shot itself in the foot with the KDE/GNOME
split. The enormous number of applications that appeared prepended with a
'g' or 'k' or both was (and is) astonishing. Why do people think it's
a good use of time to port an application that runs perfectly well in one
GUI environment to another. How many person-hours were wasted developing
two competing GUI environments and two sets of office applications
(neither of which is any realy use whatsoever in a production environment).

After all the effort of the KDE and GNOME teams, if I'm using Linux on the
desktop I've gone back to a plain Window Manager (whatever takes my fancy
from TWM through to Sawfish) and terminal text editors without the GUI
bolt-ons.

OpenOffice was the start of Good Things in that finally, one outfit was
producing a single, _coordinated_ attempt at the office productivity suite
problem. OpenOffice is good enough to use for production purposes, but
only if you really can't afford the Real Thing.

With RedHat canning the consumer version of their distribution, the
map for home user Linux users is certainly going to change. Personally
I gave up on RedHat a few years ago and have been using Debian and
*BSD wherever possible. My current preference is FreeBSD (I won't
go in to reasons in this mail).

I agree with previous posters. If you want to do "productivity stuff"
or do general computing on the desktop, MS Windows XP (for example) does
a much better job. If you fancy something with a bit more functionality
(stability, features, power), then I'd recommend Mac OS X. No, I don't
own a Mac but occasionally get to use my wife's (when I'm allowed).
--
rik