Speakers and attendees at the open source events of Portland’s InnoTech Conference last week concurred that Linux was at home in the enterprise, handling heavier database demands and other workloads and proving itself on a number of platforms.They also anticipated that Linux would finally hit the desktop in more significant increments, but not until open source developers deal with some obvious deficiencies.
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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They forgot to mention the problems of GUI speed and graphics drivers. I love Linux and use it intensively but the quality of the graphics drivers still lags quite a way behind that of their Windows equivalents in many areas. Installing, upgrading and configuring them are also a still a nightmare — particularly if you want to get things like 3D, dual monitor support or TV out working. I know it’s all possible if you work at it, and I know that there are very good reasons the drivers are not all that good (lack of specs, lack of vendor support), but the bottom line is the fact that they’re really not all that good, whatever the reasons. And using them is just not smooth and transparent enough for the normal user.
The GUI — I use KDE and can’t really comment on Gnome — is also still subjectively much more sluggish than XP on the same machine, and the rendering of its elements, particularly fonts, is still subjectively inferior in many situations. I can live with it, but I still don’t like it.
I know the latest version of KDE combined with kernel 2.6 is supposed to bring major advances in these areas but I haven’t seen them yet…