[NCLUG] Debian Question

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2008 at 12:24:13PM -0700, David Braley wrote:
> Warning!!! I am a bit grumpy, so I might sound like I am trying to pick a 
> fight!

For safety and sanity sake, you can just warn me when you're NOT grumpy.
:-)

> You are sooooo funny. I wonder how surfing the net would look from a system 
> with no X?

The point I was trying to make is that there are tradeoffs that people are
willing to make about functionality versus boot time.  It was meant to be a
point leading into the rest of the discussion.

> well. But it makes me feel that Linux is still not focused on people other 

Fedora Linux may not be.  SuSE Linux may not be.  Dan's RootBoot is focused
on the minimal environment more than you're willing to accept.  This is the
beautiful thing about Linux, there are thousands of distributions that
serve different niches and even within something like a Fedora the level of
customization available is, I think it's fair to say, unprecedented.

As far as mainstream OSs, I think Linux is amazingly capable of serving
both the minimalist and the maximalist...

> That is not true! Very few groups are making a version of Linux that is for 

I don't know about that.  There's Xandros, of course.  I really don't
honestly know much about the Linux desktop other than that people keep
saying "N+1 is the year of the Linux desktop".  Then, of course, there's
the XO OLPC laptop which runs Linux on a very desktopish sort of system...
They're rolling out millions of those...

> Linux will never go main stream on the desktop until someone rolls one that 

Yeah, but who cares?  I have no interest in pushing to make Linux go
mainstream.  Because the mainstream users don't care about the OS, they
care about the applications, and Microsoft has those locked up.  Users
don't care that Linux has OpenOffice and that you can create your documents
on it in something that looks similar to Microsoft Office.  They care that
they can take the discs for what they use at work, or what their friend
uses, and install it on their system.  They care that when their friend
sends them a trojan-laden animated greeting card in e-mail, they can view
it.

I don't honestly care about Linux going mainstream.  I care about it being
usable when someone decides that Linux is a good match for what they want
to do.  Whether that is run it as a desktop machine, which I do, or that
they want to run it as a server, which Linux is great at...

It's a losing battle to try to fit Linux into the mainstream desktop, so I
just don't care about it.  The people who want Linux are the people I care
about.  <shrug>  That's just me.

Ok, so I just asked my new employee, who has been using Linux on her laptop
for her third day now and I asked her what she thought about it.  "It's not
too different from what I'm used to.  Nothing has really tripped me up so
far.  I think I could probably be making better use of the desktop, but
that's something I'll learn more about."  This is coming from someone who
is not a technical person.

Linux not being ready for the desktop has little, IMHO, to do with Linux
itself.

Sean
-- 
 Your e-mail has been returned due to insufficient voltage.
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability
      Back off man. I'm a scientist.   http://HackingSociety.org/