On Wed, 2002-10-30 at 11:26, Dmitry Melekhov wrote:
Including Crossover is completely wrong decigion - it is unstable and has problems with fonts (at least with cyrillic ;-) ). IMHO, this desktop project will fail completely.
Not sure it will fail but its the wrong approach IMHO. It will take a community effort backed by UnitedLinux, RedHat, Mandrake and even IBM to put together a true wine compatibility layer for windows apps so distros do not have to rely on other companies to give people the safety net of running windows apps. I am afraid that too much of the progress in regards to wine is going to end up being owned by transgaming and CrossOver (please correct me if I am wrong this is a perception only). Even with OpenOffice there are people who are going to need run win-only programs like Visio and MS Project as two examples. Linux distros need to stop thinking of the total package only being the OS layer. Like other OS makers we need to start thinking about the final product in regards to three layers: OS layer -- kernel, shell, gnu utilities and services GUI layer -- X, window managers, desktop and user apps. Compatibility layer -- windows compatibility through wine. Some of this with the move toward desktop Linux is being addressed but we as a community have to be careful not to base our efforts too heavily on proprietary solutions to our problems. -- Johnathan Bailes BAE Systems ESI "UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things." - Doug Gwyn ---