Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
On Monday 05 January 2004 8:41 am, Jerry Feldman wrote:
The bottom line is that IMHO, Linux is ready for the desktop, but is lacking some of the major applications that are only available on Windows. Developers will port their products either to run natively or through WINE (compiled natively with WINE libraries) only when they perceive that there is a large enough (potential) market for their products.
Perhaps the WINE people will eventually be ambitious enough to make up a list of critical apps (including at least one popular Windows tax program, clearly) and get those to run. If Wine could run, say, TurboTax and QuickBooks, Linux on the desktop would be a more feasible alternative for a lot of folks.
Paul Abrahams
I agree. I run a dual boot system ( with System Commander) precisely because I need Turbo-Tax, Quicken to contact my bank, and I love to use Dragon Naturally Speaking to dictate my dissertation into. If I had those on Linux I would spend the time trying to make my 5 yr. old's games run under Wine or VMware. But since I have to be in XP anyway, I do not think the time is worth it. We need programs like those I and the previous writer mentioned it we are going to have a large number of Windows free desktops. IMHO. Cheers! Jeff Zents