On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 02:34:22PM -0600, Rodd Ahrenstorff wrote: > I have not seen much talk on this list concerning the "growth" of Linux on > the home desktop. Can't speak for the others here, but Linux is on all my home desktops, and that's about all the growth I care about. I'll give you my thoughts on your questions, though. > How will the newest versions of > Linux (ie. Lycoris (Redmond), Elx, Xandros, and OEone) fare compared to older > favorites? Based on what I've heard about them, the newer distros don't really sound like they have much on the Red Hats, Mandrakes, and Debians aside from easier installation, primarily by way of better hardware detection. Any advantage this gives them will be fleeting for two reasons: 1) See the link posted yesterday to an article regarding Linux on the corporate desktop. It illustrates quite nicely that, as long as Linux is preinstalled, it's quite usable today. My experience in a company with ~85% Linux on the desktop agrees with the article. As more companies adopt Linux, more OEMs will be forced to offer it preinstalled and more home users, being used to it from work, will buy boxes with Linux preinstalled instead of Windows. 2) Some of the neodistros may be creating proprietary tools and enhancements, but a lot of the additions will be in the form of improvements to existing, already-Free code, and the existing community will be more supportive of neodistros which Free their new code as well. This will make the worthwhile parts available to more traditional distros as well. > I think most would agree that Mandrake and Red Hat hold the > majority of desktops for home users, with SuSe, Debian, Slack and Caldera > bringing up the rear. Will these distros lose market share? Do you care? As new players enter the market, they'll take some share from the established distros, naturally, but I doubt that it will be much. And I don't much care just so long as Debian continues to rock. > How do the "gurus" feel about the move to increase ease of use and the > similarities to the Windows "look and feel"? While I lay no claim to the mantle of guruhood, I think that trying to duplicate Windows will probably help market share in the short term, but is ultimately a bad idea. Windows is not the world's greatest user interface. Period. (No, I don't claim to know what the best UI is, I just know it ain't Windows.) It is the most _familiar_, which is why the common consumer will be more accepting of a Windows-like interface, but I think we would be better served to focus on designing a better UI rather than trying to achieve bug-for-bug compatibility with Microsoft. And don't talk about ease of use that way. Ease of learning and ease of use are not the same thing and typically come pretty close to being mutually exclusive. I'm not even sure that Windows has ease of learning and suspect that it just seems that way because it's already familiar to so many people. (Note the guinea pig user's response to KDE in the article I mentioned earlier - he was more familiar with Mac than Windows and really liked KDE because he found it easier than Windows to use.) > And lastly, have others on the > list tried these new distros? Nope. No real interest in them. > Although I am > slowly learing the command line, I have yet to need it using the Lycoris > distro. And in my opinion...thats a good thing. I won't argue with you, provided that the ability to manually alter settings with vi/emacs/whatever is intact. A good GUI configurator will preserve anything it doesn't recognize in the config file. A bad one will throw out anything unfamiliar or, worse, keep the 'real' configuration in a nonstandard place and completely ignore the contents of the config file, causing all manual changes to be lost. There are far too many bad GUI configurators out there... (Hint: Any time you see a config file with a comment along the lines of "This is magic. Don't even think about modifying it without using the GUI!", it was probably created by a bad tool.) Yes, bad GUI configurators are a pet peeve. -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss