[techtalk] Desktop OS?
Michelle Murrain
michelle at murrain.net
Mon Jun 4 11:09:15 EST 2001
Hi folks,
I don't want to start a flame war, but ask a serious question. This
is not a troll! I promise.
I've been running various strains of Linux on my laptop for about 6
months (Tried RH, then spent several months using Linux-Mandrake, now
I'm on Progeny Debian), and although I've *loved* it as a web
application development environment (it's nice to have all of the
development tools at my disposal - I don't have to be on line to
code), I frankly have *not* liked it at all as an everyday tool, it's
been surprisingly hard to get simple things to work, and the fun
component is definitely hard to find. Part of this certainly is the
laptop itself - sound still doesn't work, of course the internal
modem is useless, and the internal NIC card, although I've gotten the
drivers, I can't get that to work either. That's part of the problem,
though - hardware compatibility.
I've spent now about 3 months with MacOS X, which I've been working
with some on the command line, and am working on getting most of what
I'm interested in (PostgreSQL, apache, perl) compiled and working - I
know that all of those things can work on OS X. And, of course
everything works just fine. No, not everything is OS X native - most
of my software I'm running in the blue box. It seems to run at the
same speed, although starting up applications is a bit slower than it
was before. And some things (like burning CDs, and a few others) I
need to boot up OS 9 alone to get working. But I know that will
change (quickly) with time.
OK, so I like GUI - I spent a lot of time working on Macs. I've come
to like KDE quite a bit, actually.
I've also been reading a bit, and it seems there is this buzz around
about whether or not Linux will make it as a desktop OS - and that
the lack of good, solid apps (like an office suite) is limiting it's
adoption. Linux is a no-brainer on the server side - but will it
survive as a desktop OS? I'm really having questions. If I, who
describe myself as a total geek, and feel really positive about Linux
am generally not happy with it as a desktop, what about people who
aren't as geeky? Is there hope? How many of you don't use Linux as
your sole everyday desktop OS?
(I don't know whether this is better discussed on issues or techtalk,
so I sent it to both)
Michelle
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