Linked by Mystilleef on Mon 29th Sep 2003 06:30 UTC
Linux will become ubiquitous in the year 3000. Okay, that was a horrible joke. Linux is just a kernel, the engine that runs an operating system. By itself, it is essentially useless. Kernels shouldn't be discussed or noticed by normal users. And as such when providing these users with reviews, previews and "professional" opinions, computer consultants, computer reviewers and computer journalists should not spew headlines like "Linux is not ready for prime time", "Linux on the desktop by XXX", "Linux to takeover Windows", "Linux is not ready for desktop" and so on.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Good points in the article though nothing really new.
Open source software is usually developed by voluntary developers for themsleves and their kind = for expert users. Usability, from a non-expert point of view, is only a secondary goal. That has been changing a bit with such OSS projects like Gnome, KDE, Freedesktop.org, Open Office.org, Mozilla etc. (that deserve all the support they can get) but it is basically still so that OSS is not usually developed for non-expert users, and maybe that's just the nature of open source in general(?).
I doubt if such classic open source OS projects as FreeBSD, Slackware or Debian could ever produce a main stream OS for the masses, that is just not the nature of those projects, as excellent sofware as they producce for experienced users, though. It seems that often there needs to be a commercial company that takes open source software, modifies it and makes it friendly enough to the masses.
Commercial companies like Xandros, Ximian, CodeWeavers, Lindows, SuSE, Vector, Libranet etc. take usability and ease of use - from a non-expert point of view - seriously. "Geek users" should really see the value of those commercial companies better. Despite those companies may (have to?) use some proprietary components, may have to charge money for their products etc. (just to make some profit), in the end they usually only benefit the open source world & developer community too by introducing more people to open source software.
If e.g. Linux has future as a main stream OS, it is companies like the ones mentioned above that make it possible. The same with open source software in general.