Linked by David Adams on Mon 24th Aug 2009 09:21 UTC
A reader asks: Why is Linux still not as user friendly as the two other main OSes with all the people developing for Linux? Is it because it is mainly developed by geeks?
My initial feeling when reading this question was that it was kind of a throwaway, kind of a slam in disguise as a genuine question. But the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I felt. There truly are a large amount of resources being dedicated to the development of Linux and its operating system halo (DEs, drivers, apps, etc). Some of these resources are from large companies (IBM, Red Hat, Novell). Why isn't Linux more user-friendly? Is this an inherent limitation with open source software?
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Member since:
2006-05-30
Actually, no. I use KDE, and what the previous user stated regarding Gnome holds true for KDE. If an application is registered as the default in KDE, Firefox picks up on it. Firefox from Mozilla lacks integration with KDE file dialogs, but integrates nicely with all other KDE styles and MIME types.
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Unfortunately, Firefox does have some Gnome-based dependencies (at least on FreeBSD). If you're trying to make a system from scratch, clean of packages from the Gnome and KDE stacks, you'll want to avoid FF 3.5.x, since it'll drag in stuff like gnomehier and gconf2. FF 2 doesn't have this problem, but still uses GTK. Of course, most people could care less about this.