Linked by Barry Smith on Wed 26th Nov 2003 18:11 UTC
It seems to me that a lot of attention lately in the commercial Linux development area has concentrated on either large enterprise customers, or wooing the home user who can barely turn a computer on. Even distros claiming to offer the perfect solution for both ends of the spectrum don't quite seem to fit what I am looking for. 
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.
Which is that there's no such thing as THE desktop experience and that people will easily judge equal things positive or negative depending on the context and/or the previous events when or before they get confronted with dialog window Zeta.
I for one (and that's one of them BSD bastards) found this kind of review very refreshing and pretty entertaining. Sure it's not fair but what is?! The "cunsumer" surely isn't. All this "ready-for-desktop" stuff is sooooo subjective. That's the whole point. Now with MS most people have either gotten used to its limitations (including 3rd party apps there) and accept them as laws of nature or they are still stuck (the to be loathed section of the hobbyist to tech spectrum if you ask me) and others moved on and learnt to underatand and live with or perhaps even improve upon existing OSS software.
How long will this "review" period take? If I get, say 10 weeks, I'd happily send the guy an install CD that boots into and installs a reasonable cross section of OSS packages in a FreeBSD environment. Much of this is a matter of incentive and willingness to get rid of not just cruft but also equal packages-but-you-chose-the-other, then lumb together what's left.
It's not rocket science, even *I* could do it I believe. Maybe throw in some GUI-or-curses management tool. But there's always lines one draws be it from a managability POV or just because it gets too complicated otherwise (they're basically the same, no?) The real issue is where the line is gonna be drawn because 3rd party can never be easily maintained and fit into <dist>.
It's always going to be somewhere and well you can bitch about MS all you like but there the line is clear (everything that's not ours). And it makes sense.
If I made <dist> should I be supporting samba or should I make sure it runs and tell customer that samba support is available at samba?