Curtis Rey wrote:
And after this, you're still calling yourself a "Linux expert" !?? :)
Alex
Excuse me for stating the obvious and inciting a flame war. But your statements seem blatantly eletist and a tad an the crass side. We are not talking about Sys admins, programers, devs, gurus, etc..... The very nature of this particular thread is What? Linux on the desktop in a CORPORATE ENVIRONMENT. It is not Linux on the desktop in the enclaves of a guru's dev lab. We're talking secretaries, accountants, customer service reps, nurses, doctors, lawers, marketing departments, sales officers, sales clerks, middle managers, upper management, people in accounts receivable, people in accounts payable, Home offices, Small offices, yada yada yada! And eventually home end users who figure out that theres is absolutely no reason to run dll as an app, have the OS contact M$ servers to "authenticate" the OS ownership or to match a table of hardware unigue identifiiers to see if it has been place on another machine, or to worry about having a redirect to a malicious site on a constant and ongoing basis because some M$ programming drones don't know what the fuck they have written into the umpteen millions of lines of code in their freaking OS because their division bosses are trying to meet deadlines rather then do proper testing to get the next product out the door to pump sales in order to jack stock prices to keep their share holders and boards happy with ever increasing revenue streams.
WE are talking about making it viable for a corporate environment with admins that have experience with Windows and need to come over to a safer, more effecient and cost effective altenative than being blackmailed into the next upgrade, series of time consuming, server crashing, hack ridden programs and patching tasks.
I'm cutting in on a thread that I haven't been too closely following, but I do have some observations that are contrary to your statements. Corporate Environment: No one installs their own software anymore. It's done by someone in IT who responsible for everything working out correctly. Therefore, the process of installation, finding all the dynamic libraries necessary, and configuration of the network, is all entirely left up to the experts in question. No Secretary is going to take on this job in Linux or Windows unless they have a personal interrest to do so. Home Users: I have not met a home user who is not quasi-sys-admin who is capable of installing very much on Windows. Have you recently tried to install a complete Windows OS without a ghost image? It's getting pretty damn difficult to accomplish! Furthermore, can you imagine a non-sys-admin type, who simply uses it for email and photos trying to install WindowsXP with all the fixings? There is a very distinct difference, even under Windows today, between the User and the Administrator. What you have missed in your arguement is that the User under Windows does not install anything. It comes that way, preinstalled, out of the box. If I could buy the same thing under Linux, then it would be a far cry easier to deal with. As for the User Interface. Windows is not a very good design, but we are all used to it. Personally, I use WindowMaker where I can because of it's exceptional speed and flexibility. I know that Suse is dominantly KDE, but the Desktop Environment is better appreciated on faster hardware than I have at my disposal. Changing that paradigm from Windows to something else as a GUI is going to be harder to accomplish than anything else. -- FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis