I made a decision that I am going to use Linux from now on and removed all Microsoft crap from my machine. Took a month to get used to but finally done. I am enjoying this :) No more boltware. Machine is working as it is after months of heavy usage - no sign of slowdown :)

2008 could be the Linux’ happy year as it has reserved the green grass of a land.

A condition has to be mentioned:
Both Linux and Windows were created for the same newbies.
In Romania, Linux-based servers are popular. Teenagers “eat” Linux, bread and … edulcorates.
Windows or Linux, this is the “en-vogue” question !
A French proverb:
“L’herbe est toujours plus verte chez le voisin.”
Meaning: ‘The grass is always greener at the neighbours.’
Sincerely yours,
Dan Gheorghe
http://dansomnea.tripod.com/

In windows, there is a rare chance that users need to go to command line. But in linux, still command line rules the OS.So first preference to make linux on desktop should be devoted in developing GUIs for almost all of the functionalities.

Though linux can be accepted at workstation desktop, it might take some (may be long) time to replace home desktop. As I said, Multimedia, Gaming and device drivers are a big concerns.

I agree with Satheesh babu. Though unix studies are in universities, schools and colleges still depend on windows because their softwares are still in win. even c, c++ and java are taught on windows.

Ok. I had enough of views declared. Let me tell you that i have taken my first step in taking linux to home desktop. I installed ubuntu 7.10 on my home sys (dual boot) and will try to survive in that. I would also like to participate in ubuntu development, not as a developer, but as a frontend user and articulating what is needed further.

Manda Krishna Srikanth
www.krishnasrikanth.com

Hence I believe that the long term answer lies in schools. Get the kids to work with these systems, get them to love these systems and get them to ask their parents to buy them these systems! And make sure that the apps on Linux keep pace with windows!

Till then dual boot systems might be the best bargain that Linux market can hope for to get a significant footprint.

regards
satheesh

Ok let me tell you my linux experience. People, who told many good things about ubuntu made me download 7.10 a whole day. Later i burnt it on cd and restarted as the live cd.

1st restart - It was fine. I was able to see the desktop with all those window effects as in vista. I thought to install it, so restarted in windows and made some freespace and went back to ubuntu

2nd restart - this time i was not able to get the screen. Some strange color dots were displayed. So i restarted in safe graphics mode

3rd restart - this time i was able to login. i started to install. but in step 2/7 i found a bug. I am in India/Calcutta time zone, but my sys time was shown as african time, and changing timezone changed my sys time.

Laptop:- I have HP Pavilion, dv6516 with vista, and tried to run as live cd. But speakers, altec’s one, were not recognized, it was so calm. I could not dare to install ubuntu on that and loose vista on the whole. so went back to windows.

Manda Krishna Srikanth

1. Some media outlets have web-TV apps that requires a mixture of QuickTime, Windows Media Player and IE to work !!!

2. I use an excellent translationprogram called Babylon. It works by middle button clicking a word and a translation pops up in a sec. The greatest advantage is that if u have an idiom it “scans” to the right and left of the word and if it finds the word being part of an idiom it is translated !! Also they have a marvelous development tool to create your own vocabularies. Hitherto they have refused to port their app to Linux.

3. I’m using Skype and the Linux-version is substandard. Also so called Skaypecasts do not work.

4. The web cams I have, have no driver support for Linux.

These are the main issues intuitively forcing me to my MS partition instead of my Ubuntu partition every time I log on !!!!

Regards!

People are feed up with being jerked around by MS…(ME is still leaving a bad taste) … they are not willing to be beta testers any longer….they certainly do not want to pay for the privilege.

Imagine an organization so arrogant that they expect everyone to purchase a new router/firewall because they re-wrote their TCP-IP stack. This also requires hardware manufacturers to re-write their firmware. All this because Vista has fits when confronted with a SPI firewall. What happened to standards and conventions? Is MS now writing these?

I have over the years built Web, Mail, DNS servers using various distributions of Linux… some have run for as long as 5 years through upgrades etc without a reboot. Try that with an MS server of any sort. We have replaced numerous NT boxes with Samba Servers. Users have no idea any thing is different. Customer server support costs have been reduced as much as 50%. Linux and Samba are extremely reliable.

Enough ranting.

I jumped off the MS train completely three years ago. My office is Linux based. I run Slackware…old habits die hard…and Centos. There is nothing I need to do in my everyday dealings that requires any MS product. IMHO there is nothing “almost” any small business or home office really needs MS product for unless you require very specialized software ie. Solid Works etc. For Newbies it is no more difficult than learning MS Windows, Open Office is remarkable, Opera and Firefox are terrific, Evolution and Thunderbird work well. There is reasonable multimedia support and it is improving daily.

Linux is ready now depending on the “Distribution” and will only get better with time.

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.