Linked by Sean Oliviero on Wed 28th Jul 2004 05:54 UTC
The promise of Desktop Linux (DL) has been long coming. It's made significant progress since the mid-90s when GNOME and KDE came out, giving Linux users a somewhat modern desktop to work upon. However, it's been 7 years and DL hasn't progressed much at all since then. Today, DL is still nothing more than a UNIX-clone with a task bar, a start menu, and a desktop with some icons on it. But why has DL evolved at such a glacial pace?
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My first computer experience (1982) was on a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer. Starup consisted of flicking a few switches and it was command line only from there.
My first computer was a Commodore 64 in 1983.
Some other "fun" experiences - using a teletype terminal on a HP 300 mainframe and a Sanyo desktop running MSDOS 2.0 (I think) with a single 360k floppy and no hard drive.
I'm always amazed by people who seem have to have only being using computers for 5 or so years saying that something isn't ready for use. If you were properly taught to use a CLI you would probably think a mouse and GUI was a a silly way to operate a computer. "Desktop readiness" is mostly a matter of familiarity with the OS.
I switched from MacOS 8.6 to Win 98 and found the experience strange for a few months until I became familiar with windows. The same thing when Itried Linux- once I became familiar with a system it was desktop ready.