On Mon, 1 Sep 2003 19:32:19 -0700, Marc Wilson <msw@cox.net> wrote: > Uh, no, what's keeping Linux away from the desktop is the lack of > APPLICATIONS. Joe Public couldn't care less about X, or anything > else, as long as it works. The idiot gamers aside, X is plenty for > what Joe Public needs in a graphical environment as long as he can > move windows around and open and close them when he needs to. Yeah, but if the hardware isn't well supported, it doesn't matter what applications exist, because you can't use any. It's impossible at this stage for a typical user to go out, buy a copy of Red Hat, and install it on his system with the guarantee that his hardware will work out of the box. At least with Windows, that guarantee is there. And because hardware often times is only supported with proprietary drivers, there's no guarantee that your component will work with all distributions of XFree86, all kernels and all libraries. All of those individual traits make up the distribution and operating system, and with Windows, there's only one that hardware manufacturers have to abide by. And personally, I think the application support is there. With desktops like Ximian and Red Hat *already* being accepted into corporate environments where hardware purchases are made in mind of what software is going to be used, with adequate research by a professional department or consulting team, this has already been proven. It'll just take hardware support, for when this transfers to the home. -- Scott Christopher Linnenbringer [sl@eskimo.com] http://www.eskimo.com/~sl/info.txt [sl@moslug.org] [NOTE: THIS MESSAGE IS DIGITALLY SIGNED WITH GNUPG/PGP]
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