I’ve always been, well, skeptical about the Linux desktop. Now, I use one myself, KDE on top of SuSE Linux 8, thank you very much, but then I know Linux.
I’ve always been, well, skeptical about the Linux desktop. Now, I use one myself, KDE on top of SuSE Linux 8, thank you very much, but then I know Linux.
I mean, come on, I was using Unix before Linus looked at Minix. I’ve been perfectly happy with interfaces like the C shell. For that matter, I still am. I spend a lot of my computer time in terminal windows using bash, with vi as my text editor and elm as my e-mail client. But how many people are like me?
Well, if you’re reading Linux Magazine, you probably don’t go back as far as I do with *nix operating systems, but chances are you are comfortable with a command line. Outside of Linux fans, though, there are whole generations of users who’ve never had to use a command line.
And you know what? On modern Linux desktop systems, you don’t need to know shell programming 101 or even how to grep your way to a text string. In fact, you don’t even have to know what grep is, for that matter.
Easy to use Linux distributions like Lindows, Xandros, and Ark are making it possible for anyone to sit down at a Linux machine and become as productive just as quickly, if not more so, than if they had sat down to a Windows or Mac OS computer. Indeed, with Xandros, I’ve set Windows-using friends in…
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