“Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake and others are just starting to bless us with a new round of desktop-oriented distributions – aka “distros”. If you’re finally considering Linux as a desktop OS, congratulations! And don’t fret, we’re here to help.” Read Jim Lynch’s article for ExtremeTech.
Everything You Wanted to Know about Linux
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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How strange. I’d just rebooted one of these lab computers to linux and loaded up galeon (and OSNews 🙂 obviously) when the dude next to me goes “woah, cool desktop, what IS that?” and I go “It’s linux, obviously”. And then he’s dying to stop his work and reboot too. “So can it do everything XP does?” and I go “Yeah, everything, and it’s much more fun/stable too”.
And then things got bad, real fast. “Cool, so Word, Excel?”.. and I’m like “umm.. sorta”. (to put things in perspective, he’s using officeXP and I’m not so sure of its interoperability with open/star office)and then he gets back to his work on his XP machine. Curious, but not willing to ‘waste’ time. All I could do is point him to this article.
Sad but true.
Something strange happened to me too a few hours ago while i was checking osnews.com at the students room in university, the pc’s in this room are lined up in a desk that goes around the entire room (alternate monitor / case, monitor / case) and the guy to my righ pushed the reset button on the computer in his left (the one i was working on). These reset buttons should give electric shocks to anyone that pushes them
ooops, going off-topic… yeah linux uh uh errr… love that kernel
I’d pay money for a simple distro that could simply boot, connect to a dial-up isp, browse with the current Opera, simple notepad, simple xtree type file mgr. No ‘compiling’ etc. I’m sure the penguins that think an 800mb install is ‘minimal’ will just tell me I’m lazy or make irrelevant comparisons to XP something.
Some one need to make a Office (and other programs too)plug-in to read and write OpenOffice.org, Gobe, Abiword, ect formats from Office! Also, linux networking is getting good enough we might as well give up on Samba and write normal TCP network drivers for the Windows boxes to talk to the normal world like they should.
Then People will co-use Linux with MS Windows and realize linux/BSD/Apple/ect. is better and cheaper. The secret to Bill’s success is not so much new techology, but new technology made easy for the masses. Linux fans need to realize that easy is what people want if they are going to switch. Also, some Wine sticker program would be good. Offer to test Cheap-Stuff software under Wine to get a pretty sticker from the Linux Groups. Set up a compatibility suite so VB and VC++ users can just compile with a few features left out and work on linux too.
“Then People will co-use Linux with MS Windows and realize linux/BSD/Apple/ect. is better and cheaper”
Cheaper? Yes. Better? Well, that depends on what you’re doing, really. Linux can do a lot of things well, but it is not the ‘end-all’ solution for everyone.
well you know it depends. i use gnu/debian and my average installation is about 350 megs, this is pretty much gnome, gimp, mozilla, gedit, nautilus, xmms, xmovie, and some other small apps. course that’s just debian. i know that in mandrake that it’s about 300 just for gnome’s installation, and that’s basically just gnome and a few (very few, i remember that installation “where’s mozilla?”).
whoops. thought you ment something else humble joe.
but there are serveral distro’s that don’t include the “bells and whistles” as some do. debian is one of them. lycrosis is another, though debian IMHO is much better.
also if you want to search on distro’s go to: http://www.distrowatch.com/
o.O