http://www.mythtv.org

Beryl is very easy to install from the available software repos using yum or apt-get (Fedora or Ubuntu) and will run quite nicely with default settings, but has far more options for eye-candy than Vista offers.

Fonts:
I agree with you fully about the fonts, but the default set in Gnome on Fedora 7 is more than adequate for most “normal” users.

Games:
I agree that it would be great to have more modern games be natively available, but as you sort of pointed out, that’s the game developers’ fault, not Linux’s fault. We dont’ have DirectX, but OpenGL works just fine on what are considered to be “gaming” video cards(a point proven by using Wine for gaming).

Media Center:
Ever heard of MythTV? You can build a pretty impressive media server with it as the base. Yes, you might need to get a little geeky to do it, but once it’s done, it can far surpass Media Center.

Support for Tablets:
I also don’t have much desire to own or use a tablet, but you can buy them with Linux pre-installed and configured for hardware functionality on Lenovo/IBM hardware from http://www.EmperorLinux.com (starting at just $2200). Just check out the Raven X61 Tablet.

ReadyBoost:
Windows needs REadyBoost, because they don’t give you the ability to run the entire OS from DVD, CD, USB, Floppy. Try grabbing one of those 4GB flash drives and installing the “Live” version of your favorite Linux distro on it. It’s leaps and bounds faster than the little extra “RAM” that ReadyBoost will get you. And that’s not nearly as geeky as MythTV. In fact, it’s quite easy to find a site that will hold your hand step by step through the entire 10min(not counting the ISO download) process.

iLife:
It’s a widely-known and accepted fact that if you want top-of-the-line multimedia, you choose Mac. I do agree though, that Linux needs more help here than Windows, although, I’d still recommend a Mac to anyone that wants a really top quality experience in this field.

Networking:
NetworkManager is coming along nicely, however, you have a very good point here about the need for more “Network” friendly tools that are readily available.

IT Management:
As a Systems Administrator at a medium-sized company, I actually much prefer third-party tools for managing hardware and software inventories and the like. Even if more tools were available in this area, I wouldn’t use them. Because most networks are vastly different from one-another, I much prefer using simple shell scripts that pull data to a single management/syslog server that essentially operates outside of the normal realm of daily activity.

Marketing:
Microsoft wins, hands down. It always will, because of it’s deep pockets and OEM integration. That’s just a sad fact that others have to work around. Hence the funny, Mac television spots.

Over all, I think this is a decent listing of things that could stand to see some more improvement. However, there is one very primary issue that your article seems to dismiss. Widows is designed, developed, maintained, and marketed by Microsoft. Macintosh is designed, developed, maintained, and marketed by Apple. That is what gives those operating systems the ability to stay focused and cohesive in rolling out applications that can stand out above all other that are available for that OS. Your article assumes that “Linux” is has that same luxury. I’m sure that you realize that, but your article fails to make that obvious. It’s because of that fact, that in a lot of categories, there is no stand-out package. Because of the strong development community for “Linux”, developers work on a large array of projects instead of a singular primary one. Should we want for that to be different? How would a more focused community of developers change the “Linux” culture?

Note: I put “Linux” in quotes because of it’s intended implication as a singular entity rather than typing out various GNU/Linux based distro names. “Linux” is a kernel, not an OS, I just didn’t want to seem fanatical.

No, better to support an OpenSource font design and editing app so that the starving hordes can flood the world with new fonts.

Your points on the cosmetic differences are not that important. I don’t think most users really care about them beyond a brief fascination with the novelty and show-off value. Once they realize they are a drag on the system, the honeymoon is over.

Regarding the useful tools available on Macs and the fact that Windows will likely remain the king of games, those are certainly issues that should be dealt with by any significant money being invested in Linux. Indeed, both Intel and AMD are making moves in the graphics hardware realm that push in this direction, so kudos to them. If Valve and a few others were to make cross-platform engines, that would also be a huge step.

Marketing Linux with paid advertising sounds premature at best, and frankly dubious. Precious funds that could be spent on improving Linux tools and components should not be wasted on advertising. Linux use is growing at its own pace. More slowly than a commercial product to be sure, but GNU/Linux is not a commercial product. It is an accumulation of empowering software technologies available to all who wish to acquire the competence to use them. Gradually, as they become more usable by the general public, their use will increase, as will their “market penetration.”

There is no hurry. It is happening at a reasonable pace now, and is quite possibly unstoppable. Let’s not play a game based on someone else’s idiotic rules that are unfavorable to us. Let’s be patient and allow our rules to slowly, insidiously drown theirs out.

well, I guess if I want it I have to built, but then that’s just the type of attitude that gets us in trouble :)

Way back before there was SCO Unix. They were in Santa Cruz where they did Unix-Zen. They had no real interest in grunt users; instead, they concentrated on the most satori-like Unix platform they could. The result was Microsoft blew them away, and Linux had to finally come to life to overcome the elitist, monastery-like attitude SCO and the other Unixae suffered from.

Unfortunately, much of that snob-monk attitude still prevails in Linux-land. Nearly all of the features you mention are of little or no interest to the Unix snob-monk. For another California analogy, consider the BMW fans: In Calif there is still a big population of BMW2002′s out there. Techincally they’re still “superior” to the modern “beamers”…so say some of the purists. The 2002 purist says his car is a “real” BMW. Sound familiar?

I know this sounds familiar because I’m an Emacs-for-everything/command-liner Unix purist. I’m also a huge 2002 fan. I would take a brand new BMW given to me and trade it in for a 2002! Every time I’m in a new BMW I feel like I’m being pandered to. Every time I use Windows I feel the same. The barebones Linux experience is an adult computer experience–same as driving a 2002.

Still your arguments are right-on for Linux as a desktop machine. I’d say, either get it in gear, Linux-land, or just give up on the desktop. I’m a very rare breed who doesn’t need the Mac/Win fluff, but again, I’m very rare….

“Your points on the cosmetic differences are not that important. I don’t think most users really care about them beyond a brief fascination with the novelty and show-off value. Once they realize they are a drag on the system, the honeymoon is over.”

I completely agree. The problem, though, is that by the time Joe Consumer realizes what a drag those features are, he’s already bought the computer, hooked up the wires, and thrown away the box. Now he’s stuck with the hardware AND the OS. And he’ll complain and whine about how bad Windows is or how expensive Macs are. But the deed is done!

Olwe Melwasul says he feels pandered to in a new BMW or using a Windows machine. True enough, but realize that Joe Consumer LIKES to be pandered to. Hence, all the new BMWs on the road.

Personally, I don’t like being pandered to, and I LOVE the power, flexibility, and downright fun that Linux gives me. But like Olwe Melwasul said, I’m very rare.

The important thing is that Linux gives us choice. Ubuntu is trying to make itself easy to use, add better support for (just about everything), and in effect pander to Joe Consumer. They’re trying to fix Bug Number 1.

Good for them. At the same time there’s Frugalware, KnoppMyth, PHLAK, and dozens of other distros I’ve never heard of. Good for them, too. They’re providing the choice, the vibrance, and the evolution which Raymond called “the bazaar.”

Even Vista fits into the bazaar. As much as I hate to admit it, Microsoft does some things right. (After all, 1,000 monkeys banging on 1,000 typewriters will eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare.) Yes, Linux should examine and improve upon a number of innovations from the monkeys in Redmond.

Nowadays, most of the people I know who enjoy the high-definition action games prefer the gaming consoles like the X-Box, PlayStation or Wi. These consoles are considerably cheaper and easier to use than high-end gaming PCs, so I think that the lack of action games for other operation systems is no longer an issue.

And gaming and 3D front should improve with
http://enterpriselinuxlog.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/05/09/amd-will-deliver-open-graphics-drivers/

And one major front where Windows really-really lack is my faith in it as a reliable version of DOS.

“No, better to support an OpenSource font design and editing app so that the starving hordes can flood the world with new fonts.”

The application is not the point. You can support as many apps you want but if no typographers are spending effort and time doing something nice, this won’t do anything. And all the nice fonts that are currently on the distribution are often donations from companies. Not art by “starving hordes”.

Concerning the desktop, I think this will change soon. Compiz is rather well supported (= one click on Opensuse no complex install) and its new version “compiz-fusion” is truely nice. It just needs a little more stability and integration with gnome and kde.

And Linux folks have to admit that Readyboost is a nice innovation. No matter how much you think the OS drags (I think a full gnome install can drag too) – using a usb key for caching is smart.
I bet that even on server apps this could help (like mysql/apache caching).

To finish, concerning MediaCenter, there are commercial linux alternatives. SageTV which has better capabilities than MediaCenter on many levels, is available on Linux.

Many Universities are buying Tablet PC’s for faculty to use in teaching. Linux, and Open Source, which are already BIG players in the Academic market could help stem that rising Tuition costs.

As Tablet PC’s get smaller, and smaller they will eventually reach the “small screen” market. There are already several hand held small screen tablets out there (Toshiba has one). Concede the market to Microsoft and Linux might well be “left in the dust”.

Vista have introduced new features and raised the bar. can that be achieved? .. I bet it can. Microsoft did it!. others can too, Apple did that even before.
regarding the UI candy you mentioned in the artical you should have done your home work Kido! Gnome have most of these sugger candy for you.

I agree 100% Linux need awarness and some bags of money to be thrown on marketing to some “Paid”or believer Journalists.
Will someone from Novell, Red Hat, or Canonical please pay this guy something?! I guarantee you he will write something better.

To be frank, they weren’t. Both of these systems were way over the top as far as requirements are concerned. A 2 GB dual core laptop — enough cycles to dispose of that it could have served my entire University a decade or so ago WHILE I was working under Gnome on GUI apps and reading my mail. Enough disk that yes, that would have probably fit too. Gigabit networking and (on the laptop) wireless as well. Both systems would have been considered munitions once upon a time and selling one without an weapons export license would have gotten you twenty-to-life.

Vista Home Premium, on both of them, managed to run. Like a pig. I haven’t experienced a UI that slow since I was working on a Sun 386i back in the late 80′s. I should say that NOT EVEN a Sun 386i (at 3 MHz CPU clock) was that slow. All of those nifty features like “transparency” just suck down CPU, and from what I’ve been told all that DRM crap that is built into Vista sucks down cycles in perpetuity as it constantly monitors hardware devices for possible DRM violations. Or maybe it is something else — I don’t know, nor do I much care.

The bottom line is that the systems were pretty much unusable. Software that worked under e.g Win9X or WinXP wouldn’t load correctly, or wouldn’t work correctly when loaded. Game software (touted as an advantage in the article above) ran so slowly that any number of games my kids tried to load on something that should have been the rippingest gaming system in the house (and we have some pretty nice systems in my house as I’m a beowulf guy and like/need fast computers:-) just were unplayable. Move the mouse. Wait. Oh wait! The pointer is finally moving! Type in some text. Wait. There it is appearing in the entry box!

To me this was a great mystery. Somewhere between 3 and 5 GHz of cycles on multiple cores, mountains of memory, running a game that ran fine on Windows 98 for gosh sake, and it couldn’t handle the real-time movement of a mouse? What was it doing in there, I wondered…

So I tuned, I turned off transparency, I optimized for performance, I shut down a lot of Vista’s nifty “features” (most of which I could care less about anyway) and — it still ran pig-dog slow, too slow for games, annoying just running the UI. And the “security” features include the world’s most annoying tell-me-twice. EVERY TIME you try to do something that could be “dangerous” to your system or “risky” on the network, you have to tell it twice. Sometimes every STEP of a SINGLE PROCESS you have to constantly reaffirm that yes, installing this software could cause your system to explode or grow a fungus, but amazingly enough you want to do it anyway.

So here I sat, owning two superfast computers that were by far the slowest in the house, unusably slow in the “gaming” system, too slow and buggy to be of use in the laptop I got for professional reasons. As I installed yet a third system (this one Vista home) and talked to still more sysadmins (including ones trying to e.g. get VPN software to work) I heard horror story after horror story. My kids, inveterate gamers and Windows lovers because of it, won’t touch a Vista box.

Finally, now that we’ve entered the New Age of Computing for real, and it is the Virtual Machine Age — all readers of this article should be aware that no version of Vista short of the business class is licensed to be run as a VM! That’s right folks. If you own a linux box, or for that matter want to run it as a VM in a business context but don’t feel like paying for a business class license because all your planned usage is well within its admittedly braindead and pig-slow capabilities, well, you’re SOL.

Our solution? To back install Windows XP. My son still had an XP home box set from his previous system that crashed. I discovered that I still had an unopened box set of XP Pro sitting in my office from three or four years ago when I bought it for a project that never came to pass, and since I basically “never” use Windows anyway unless I absolutely must I’d forgotten that it was even there. Both the systems in question were Lenovos, so an XP (Pro) “upgrade” from Vista, a few hours of mandatory updating (yes, I truly do hate the Windows updater and have interesting stories of Evil concerning it as well) and I had shiny new usable systems again.

XP, in my opinion, is still by far the best version of Windows ever produced — it is really pretty usable. Equip it with putty and/or cygwin (to get some sort of ssh client) and it can access linux systems adequately well to use as a management console in a linux-server environment. Run under e.g. vmware as a subtask under linux (my own favorite way to go) and it is even really nice. XP makes a simply lovely linux application on a server as a VM or on a desktop or laptop as a VM, and of course with 2 GB on this laptop and a dual core processor it is like having as many as 3 or 4 VM environments in one machine, all running simultaneously and none of them particularly starved for resources. Try that with Vista.

So Vista of Evil does not impress me — quite the opposite. The longest suicide note in history indeed, and not just for its DRM. As one person knowledgeable about its design pointed out, it makes a PC into a multimedia system that can also run Office, not a workstation that can also do multimedia. Microsoft has more or less blown off the workstation market (a fact that is also evident from the multiple price and capability levels of Vista) and has turned turned out a more or less crippled version of its OS for home use (where XP was actually damn near just as good as XP Pro — not differentiated enough to make it really worth getting for any reason except remote desktop access).

Regarding the rest of the “gingerbread” features that are touted as “advantages” of Vista — compared to Linux, some of them are definitely nice. Compared to XP’s similar functionality — I don’t see them as being big improvements. The BIGGEST obstacle to the linux desktop is not gingerbread, it is meat. Specifically two or three pieces of meat. Devices, devices, devices — on Windows they work, for WHATEVER reason, where on Linux they still just plain don’t. He says bemoaning the Broadcom wireless interface in the Lenovo laptop, which requires special scissors and firmware surgery from XP drivers to even THINK of running under linux…

Printer management is a second big one. It has gradually improved under linux, and in a linux-only environment run by sysadmins it works beautifully. At home or in mixed environments it still just sucks. And printers aren’t a minor issue — they are a CRITICAL issue for most computer users. They are a pain, to be frank, under Windows as well but the pain ultimately WORKS and produces a useable printer, often even if the installer is a near-luddite.

Finally, I totally agree with the article about the importance of advertising. Want to get broadcom to take linux seriously? Create a useable linux desktop, and sell it on TV. Sell, sell, sell. Demonstrate that Broadcom is losing customers to e.g. Intel because Intel’s wireless chipset works and theirs doesn’t. This has to be done as part of a bootstrap process, though, because frankly until you have the driver issue resolved, the only people that CAN sell linux desktops are companies that are willing to effectively pick the right hardware, e.g. Dell, IBM, HP, and turn it into an affordable package.

Gnu/Linux is perfect for working. Simply stated, the stability of the system plus the very light demmand that it puts on the hardware, make it the ideal working OS. Saddly, of course, there are many areas of the uman activity that haven’t realized that, and the lack of applications is because “corporea corporat sulvuntur”, the big Co support each other, and you should not expect Adobe or Macromedia spending efforts on making their software avaible to us.

Yes, Linux somethimes gives us more work than necessary (I have a Flash memory that doesn’t want to mount), but I run simulations writen in FORTRAN, browse the internet, listen to my rather big collection of mp3 in XMMS (again, I don’t need a program to organize it, I can do it myself) and watch DVD in Totem or mplayer. All of them simmultaneosly on a 32bit machine with 1GB of RAM.
And here, at the UNAM, the national university of Mexico, Linux will whipe the floor with Vista, because it is more than enough to work, and even to loose the time in a confortable manner.