I really hope to see the same high-grade content by you later on as well.

In truth, your creative writing abilities has encouraged me to get my own blog now ;)

Also, I agree with your trickle-up point about Linux. The Android phone sdk release from Google along with other open-source phone initiatives, make Linux the logical OS for smart mobile devices. Both Sun ( for a Java licensing run-around) and Microsoft ( for missing one of the few growth markets available) are going to take a hard blow if this continues. I don’t know about Symbian.

John

Its penetration of The Userland of the Unwashed will also be gradual, insidious, inexorable, and largely unnoticed. Eventually we will observe that a lot of people seem to be using it. “When did that happen?” we will ask ourselves. Even now GNU/Linux boxes are snapped up at WalMart at a savage rate. Where do they go? Who uses them? Do they keep the OS or slap on a pirated Windows version? Is Microsoft quickly buying them all up and dropping them in the Ocean? Who knows.

At my humble home, we are finally migrating away from Windows. All new boxes, starting with one I built last weekend, will run only Ubuntu. This will not be easy, as I have already found that TurboCAD and Cossacks Expansion do not run under Wine. Negative points there. We all have little boxes full of software CDs that only run on Windows. Making sure they are still useful will be necessary for the migration to be truly successful. At the moment some work, some don’t.

Marketing is the problem. American consumers have to be told what to buy, and no one is telling them to buy Linux operating systems because there is no money in selling something that is free. Computers are much to complex to have an instinctive appeal. The average person has to struggle to learn how to use one. Each person needs a supporter and a teacher. So, the OS that has the most number of users is going to spread among the home users simply because there are more supporters and teachers of it, ie. Windows.

Market forces are spreading Linux into the server area, where competent system administrators understand the value of Linux, and the cost of commercial server software is a negative inducement.

Linux use could spread in other niche areas. Computer clubs are helping with their install-fests. It could be a good system in academic areas. I wish k-12 teachers would get with it, and it is great for universities. It is evolving so fast that I believe that most people don’t understand how good it has become.

Ordinary commercial consumer marketing is not going to take Linux anywhere. The profits of Linux go only to the user not to the marketer. I think that experienced Linux desktop users should tell people how good it is, because they will eventually appreciate this information.

So I’ve installed Umbuntu 7.10, which is a slightly better install and use scenario than Fedora. Unfortunately, the fonts are still a bit off. Luckily, the KDE “add new fonts” works finally, but still the anti-aliasing isn’t as good as Vista, and the default sans (which comes up on Web pages frequently) is a jaggy, badly kerned disaster. I know many may consider fonts just eye-candy, but it’s one of the most important things about the UI experience. And not until fonts look and work smoothly will Linux be ready for prime-time…IMHO.

Come to think of it 2008 could be the year of “Everything Linux”, not just the Desktop. Linux as the Desktop replacement has been talked about forever, but this time around you could come true.

Let’s look @ the fact that Vi$ta is going nowhere fast, and is a resource hog. Then comes the MAC flap over too many up-dates. Well, harden my arteries with some AppArmour, and give me my Linux.

There are too many companies now shipping Linux Boxes, even Wal-Mart has an offering. Then comes all those server offerings with certified Linux systems.

I’m glad that I was an early adopter

Happy New Year – Linux.

JJMacey
http://www.jjmacey.net

Moving Linux to desktop has these drawbacks, as far as i see.

1) Newbie CANNOT survive in linux
In linux, it needs some learning before understanding the system. and a new bie, as i was, cannot understand it quickly. It needs passion in you to learn it and use it.

2) Multimedia support is almost invisible
Major desktop purpose is playing MP3s, MPEGs and other dvd movies. Browsing, office suites etc are after that. All (i can say all) distros have removed this support. Though i install via RPMs, 80% is a failure.

3) No single distro to follow.
Linux has about 100 distros each offering unique functionality. I want all of them but cannot have them. M$ windows consolidates all features into one and I can use them.

4) Solving a problem is a bit pain
If i have problem in linux, i need to go through some hundreds of incomplete forums, each specifying to use a particular distro. Methods there work for me only 20%.

5) Updates are very frequent.
Linux distros release new versions every 6 months. If they go on releasing new versions, which one should i decide to go. Plus, There is no service pack kind of mechanism followed, where in i can get a single consolidated update file and install it, as windows has.

Hope fully, these issues SHOULD be solved, before declaring that linux can fit as desktop.

- Manda Krishna Srikanth
http://www.krishnasrikanth.com/

To ggoodspeed: GNUCash is an excellent replacement for Quicken, and can even import quicken information. I also have an HP all-in-one and the “HPLIP” toolbox has absolutely no problems with it. Not sure about drawing and desktop publishing software, as I don’t do that (I know they exist under Linux; just not sure how good they are)

To Krishna Srikanth: I couldn’t disagree with point #1 more. If you sit someone down who has never touched a computer before (i.e., a “newbie”), learning Linux is absolutely no different than learning MS Windows or MacOS, for that matter. It’s the learning curve of going from one OS to another that is hard. Point #2 about multimedia support also could not be any more wrong. Amarok, MPlayer, Xine, Xmms… all *excellent* media players, as good as, if not better, than anything on MS Windows or MacOS. For point #3, what sort of “functionality” is missing from one distro to another? They all do email, web browsing, multimedia; what more are you looking for that one distro has and others miss? I can agree with you on point #4, but the support I have been able to get from newsgroups and mailing lists is generally far better and more helpful than any paid-for support I have ever sought. Point #5… why do you need a “Service Pack” type of rollup? My Ubuntu checks for updates daily, lets me know when they’re available and I say “Yes” to download and install them; sounds just like how they do it on MS Windws to me. Other distros have similar update mechanisms.

I hereby declare Linux more than ready for the desktop.

Linux is here and has been for a while, it is already on the desktop, of a few of us, the question is will 2008 be the year of mass desktop Linux adoption? I think the answer is ‘very probably’ the price of the hardware will be the driving factor and this is the authors key argument. However MS won’t take this lying down it can’t afford to, the eeePC is going to have an XP version and MS could start selling an obsolete XP OS/office bundle to OEMs tailored for low end hardware at a give away price, the devil you know to the devil you don’t, the average user faced with such a choice will sadly go the MS way.

BUT I hesitate to say that Linux will ever take over the desktop whilst the majority of the banking community stay tied to Explorer for online transactions (which is the case here in South Africa) – a MS presence is required for banking & credit control funtions. I don’t regard Wine as the answer as you end up with a “neither fish nor fowl” solution with its own inherent problems – not ideal.

I sometimes wonder what licensing discounts the financial sector receive from MS.

Is anyone going to explain why Tiger orders 4,000 Linux boxes, sells them out almost instantly and then doesn’t reorder?

And when will the Linux core grow up? Try to post a bug re Konqueror’s rendering, but I can’t. “Version not late enough.” Can I DL the latest version? Nope. “DL the sources” and build a new one. As long as the community is run by “DL the sources” insiders, Linux isn’t happening on the desktop.

The technology is there. The attitude is not.

Here are the hurdles I see to your average computer illiterate user being happy enough with their Linux box to go brag to their friends about the great deal they got.

1) Linux is not a “free version of Windows” it’s another OS. No one should expect a Linux box to behave like a PC any more than they would expect a Mac to behave like a PC (thank God!). If you are used to another OS there will be a leaning curve. If people know this going in they will be less upset when they find it to be so.

2) Multimedia support. Yes Linux does do a great job in supporting all kinds of media. I’ve yet to run across anything I can’t play (something neither windows or OS X can claim) , but I had to spend some time on the web figuring out how to get this to work. Someone needs to figure out how to get around the legal hurdles for bundling standard media CODECs into the pre-installed commercial Linux boxes. If this has been done mea culpa. I build my own boxes and do my own installs. I did once pay for a commercial copy of Suse thinking it would come with multimedia support and save me time. It didn’t so I’m assuming the preinstalled boxes don’t either.

3) Kernel updates screw up many drivers compiled against the kernel. On several occasions I have installed a “security” update to the kernel only to have it kill my X server. Fortunately I keep a copy of Nvidia’s shell script in my home dir and can rerun it from the command line. I’ve also had kernel security updates kill my LIRC controlled remote, and reak havoc with VM player’s ability to see USB devices. I’m used to this and now know not to install kernel updates (or “security patches”) when I won’t have a few hours to get things straightened out afterwards. But I shudder to think of the vapor lock it would cause the average Joe.

4) It is still way too dependent on the command line and hand editing *.conf files. Now we’re starting to approach the power user (hence this is at the bottom of the list), but it’s one of my biggest gripes. It seams like every time I want to start doing something out of the box (like say a home network), every solution I find starts out with “open a command line and type sudo vi /some/ conf/file”. First, stop telling people to use vi. Anyone who didn’t grow up with it is just going to get frustrated with it. Second, there should be a GUI for that. Also each distro should bundle all of those GUIs into a single administration application. Suse does a reasonable job with YaST, but then there’s still the KDE admin console (both of which I use for SAMBA along with a third independent app smb4k and I sill find my self occasionally hand editing smb.conf and fstab to get things set up and mounted.

I don’t see any of this as insurmountable, but I’m not sure if it will happen in time to make 2008 “The year of the Linux desktop”

Krishna Srikanth
The different Linux distros (at least the main ones) all offer different looks and feels but roughly the same functionality in terms of available applications. Find one you like and stick with it a while I’d recommend openSuse or Ubuntu.

Your software installation problems sound like dependency issues. You generally shouldn’t be grabbing and installing individual packages. You should use a package manager pointed toward full repositories of RPMs to get your software. The manager will see the other required packages and fetch them from the repository.