[techtalk] Desktop OS?

[Michelle Murrain]

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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