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Desktop Linux Summit Highlights 416

Posted by timothy from the no-joke dept.
mo writes "The Desktop Linux Summit has just concluded in San Diego. There were a number of exhibitors, including Novell, AMD, and Mozilla. I've put together a summary of some of the more interesting announcements and booths at the conference. Highlights include a Linux-only 3D game, DRM-free music services, and a new Asterisk GUI."
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Desktop Linux Summit Highlights More

Desktop Linux Summit Highlights

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  • great timing (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ginotech ( 816751 )
    considering i just started using Linux more than i use windows, and I'm a gamer, i'm particularly happy right now ^_^

  • Games. We need more Games (Score:4, Insightful)

    by KrisCowboy ( 776288 ) on Sunday February 13, 2005 @10:32PM (#11664221) Journal
    Beyond doubt, we need better and more 3D games to attract a normal Joe towards using GNU/Linux. Even I reboot to winblows for the games. First step would be to port the existing games to Linux, but this cannot be done by the community. We need help from the gaming companies and I am are more than willing to pay for some nice games like Counter Stike, Half Life and NFS Underground.
    • Normal Joes do not play computer games. They use computers to do things like work and communicate with friends and family. When the time comes to have fun, normal Joes turn off their computers and play tennis or go camping or walk the dog.

      If you want to attract people who play computer games to use your operating system, that's great. But do not assume that these people are normal Joes. Do not assume that they make up anything other than the tiniest niche market.
      • OK. May be I was taking into considerating only the India market. And now I rephrase, "we need more 3D games to attract a Winblows user". But did you get my point? Linux does lack some serious games.
      • I was at the summit, and spent a bit of time talking to the Garage Games guys. It turns out that the normal joe is the fastest growing market segment in gaming right now. Now stay at home moms are downloading simple "casual games" from places like gamehouse.com, and playing them. Guys are coming home from their accounting jobs and having a quick puzzle game to decompress. So, evidence is contradicting your assumption that only an elite few basement rats play games.
        • possibly, but you miss the part about attracting 3d-gamers to Linux... Puzzle games and "casual games" on linux already exist...

        • Re:Games. We need more Games (Score:4, Insightful)

          by KrackHouse ( 628313 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @01:35AM (#11665214) Homepage
          I totally agree. I think open source 3D gaming is entering a new era with the release of OGRE 1.0. Game development in the past consisted of trying to learn OpenGL then trying to learn how to code physics which can take a couple of years for professional looking results. Now you can just download Open Dynamics Engine, OGRE3D and SDL and bang out a decent looking 3D game in a few months. The emphasis is shifting to content creators.

          2005/6 will see the first real competition for the EAs of the world. I'm going out on a limb and predicting that Open Source 3D games will be the killer app for PCs. If you can buy a game at CompUSA loaded with a ton of high quality PC games or buy a PS3 for $350 with no games people may begin to think twice, especially with the emergence of HDTVs and the home theater PC.

      • Re:Games. We need more Games (Score:5, Insightful)

        by OneArmedMan ( 606657 ) on Sunday February 13, 2005 @10:48PM (#11664319)
        From some sources the PC gaming industry is rated at being over $35 Billion in value, i'd say thats a fairly large *niche* to be aiming for.

      • Re:Games. We need more Games (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Savage-Rabbit ( 308260 ) on Sunday February 13, 2005 @10:59PM (#11664373)
        If you want to attract people who play computer games to use your operating system, that's great. But do not assume that these people are normal Joes. Do not assume that they make up anything other than the tiniest niche market.

        True, games are a niche market, although an important one. The best ways for the likes of Suse, RedHat, Mandrake &Co. to get regular users to use Linux is firstly by developing it's desktop capability to the point that one can convince corporations to use it on workstations. That basically means (this will horrify pruists) idiot proof Linux distros that offer all the same software and functionality as the normal Windows workstation plus the same kind of easy intuitive integration into Windows networks as you have got with OS.X. Secondly it would be important to ensure it has a sigificant representation in the student workstation pools of educational institutions from primary school upward. Which is why Microsoft donates computers and software to schools all over the place, they get to look like philanthropists while securing their market share. The 'normal user' will use at home what he/she learned to use at school or uses regularly at work.
        • That basically means ... idiot proof Linux distros that offer all the same software and functionality as the normal Windows workstation plus the same kind of easy intuitive integration into Windows networks as you have got with OS.X.

          Have you actually tried Suse? I can't speak for the other majors, but Suse already offers everything you describe.

          Secondly it would be important to ensure it has a sigificant representation in the student workstation pools of educational institutions from primary school upwa
      • Of course normal joes play games. Who do you think buys all those Xbox's and Playstations?
        Some of those normal joes need to use computers. I'm sure it would be appreciated by them if they could use the same hardware to play games and work. Though they'd probably still by the console players.
      • Maybe that was true in 1989, but PC gaming is now a multi-million (if not billion) dollar industry.

        The fact is that most PC owners do play computer games (not all 3D, but games nonetheless), and if they don't, their kids do.

      • Lets be realistic here. The normal "joe" might not be a computer gamer, but most likely the normal "joe"'s son will be.

        They have to accomodate for the whole family.
      • Normal Joes do not play computer games.

        You're right. These are the Game Joes. But they don't stop being Joes after all. Being a nerd or liking games doesn't make you a linux uber-genius automatically.
      • I don't doubt that you're correct, but ISTR that games grossed more revenue than movies last year--they're obviously a major market.
      • I do not know a single PC owner that does not own at least a single game for that PC. Go into a local electronics store. Compare the number of game titles versus other softwares. How can you see this and not know that games are the single biggest software market right now. The fact that most of the games market goes to windows is a huge reason that people use it instead of Mac or Linux.
    • Uh, Linux already has NFS..

    • Re:Games. We need more Games (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Trouble is, while those who know and love Linux would kill for games like Counter-Strike, a lot of people used to the latest and greatest (?) would look at games like that as passé. I had a discussion with someone over this a little while ago, who was fairly obsessed with WinXP and all its amazing features, and I told him Linux was every bit as polished and easy to use, and on top of that more secure, etc. etc. He didn't care, because you can't play HL2 on Linux.

      Not one to give up easily :) I showed h

      • Re:Games. We need more Games (Score:5, Insightful)

        by johnlittledotorg ( 858326 ) on Sunday February 13, 2005 @11:11PM (#11664441) Homepage
        AC's comments are pretty accurate. However, the Linux gaming market has improved significantly in the past couple of years with offerings from companies like TransGaming and more native Linux titles popping up. Granted it isn't perfect but A LOT more gamers could make the switch than people realize.

        I haven't tried services like TransGaming's Cedega but I am finding that games like Enemy Territory and UT2004 are running significantly better on my formerly Win2k hardware. Is it Linux or the Nvidia Linux drivers or both? I dunno but it's just another reason that I'm glad I switched back to Linux.

        I'm posting a few details on my experiences with games and the switch in general at http://www.johnlittle.org/ [johnlittle.org] in an effort to sway friends and family and lure them into the open source light.

        And that concludes my first /. post after too many years of lurking.

    • Argh!!! There are PLENTY of games (2d/3d alike) (Score:5, Informative)

      by aendeuryu ( 844048 ) on Sunday February 13, 2005 @11:38PM (#11664585)
      Unreal Doom3 HalfLife2 Enemy Territory Cube Savage Stratagus Freeciv Wesnoth NeverwinterNights Tribes2 Vendetta YohohoPuzzlePirates Civilization AlphaCentauri FrozenBubble Pydance Teg DeusEx BZFlag XPlane Flightgear Torcs Scorched3d Pingus Lincity Tuxcart Torcs Quake 123 VegaStrike Railz LBreakout Armagetron PPRacer Vendetta and [ucalgary.ca] there [wildfiregames.com] more [sourceforge.net] impressive [worldforge.org] titles [sourceforge.net] under [eternal-lands.com] development [sourceforge.net].

      Here's my opinion. What "we" need are fewer people saying we need more games, and more people recognizing some of the excellent offerings we have right now. If we support these games (even with nothing more than just a little recognition), the companies WILL notice, see us as a market, and want to cater to us.
      • The problem is with a lot of those games there is no official support for Linux and the executables don't come on the disc. Not to mention games like BZFlag (and a lot of other homegrown Linux games) don't really stand up too well when people see screenshots of the latest Windows games. There is no way you are going to convert Joe Consumer if he has to go searching for an executable or having them run an emulator (i.e. HL2) to play.
    • The key to having portable games is OpenGL.

      Since you can't use the "Well, Direct3D is better than OpenGL" argument, they've started using the "Oh, well Direct3D is more high-level than OpenGL."

      Get them to write in a cross-platform API, and porting games becomes economically advantageous.
    • I am are more than willing to pay for... Counter Stike, Half Life and NFS Underground.

      Bah, Linux has had NFS for ages. The latest Fedora even comes with version 4!

    • Driving Simulator - Help Wanted (Score:5, Interesting)

      by KrackHouse ( 628313 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @01:24AM (#11665167) Homepage
      I'm working on a cross platform(Linux | Mac | Win) driving simulator. I'm confident it's going to be a success is due to our use of 3rd party libraries to aid in development but how long it takes depends on how much help we recieve. A lot of aspiring OSS developers aren't aware that high quality libraries exist to aid in development of increasingly complicated games. We get to focus on the driving dynamics and not arcane shader technology because our graphics engine simplifies it.

      Check out our image gallery [motorsport-sim.org] for a look at the shadowing capabilities we're taking advantage of. If you or anybody you know are C++ gurus and have a love for driving and/or Open Source Software please consider lending a hand. Say hi on irc... irc.boomtown.net #motorsport

  • Switchvox! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by IO ERROR ( 128968 ) * <errorNO@SPAMioerror.us> on Sunday February 13, 2005 @10:34PM (#11664234) Homepage Journal
    OK, Switchvox [switchvox.com] has got the nicest GUI for an Asterisk-based system I've yet seen. Too bad it only comes on their PBX systems [switchvox.com] (starting at $995). I'd love to have GUI-based software like that to go along with my home asterisk setup.
    • Too bad it only comes on their PBX systems [switchvox.com] (starting at $995).

      This really sounds like a commercial. Do you work for them?

    • Re:Switchvox! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by super_luminal ( 178357 )
      Thanks for the kind words about the interface. The problem we found with just selling the distro is that there's a fair amount of hardware out there that doesn't play well with the high interrupt rate of the telephony cards we use. By bundling it with the hardware we can guarantee that everything works, and we can work on shipping with the kernel tuned specifically for our hardware. However, we do get a lot of requests for different hardware, so it's very likely that we'll have a rackmount offering, and pr
      • we can work on shipping with the kernel tuned specifically for our hardware.

        Are the sources to this tuned kernel available somewhere? I quickly glanced at your website and couldn't find it. Thanks!

  • Cool -- ring me when they have an SOE I can sell. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nefarious Wheel ( 628136 ) on Sunday February 13, 2005 @10:37PM (#11664251) Journal
    The big firms will embrace Linux on the desktop when they can see network deployability and end-user configuration lockdown in an easy-to-buy solution. It's a pretty major acceptance criterion. Anybody focusing on that?

    • Re:Cool -- ring me when they have an SOE I can sel (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      >network deployability

      Ummm, people have been installing Linux over a network for over a decade. The old NFS installs worked just fine. You didn't even need a boot floppy if you had a boot ROM on the network card. Now I just do everything with a business-card CD of Debian, and download all of the packages, including our custom ones, from a central company server.

      > end-user configuration lockdown

      UNIX has had this for over 30 years, and Linux for over 13 years. When you don't give the end-users th
    • Yep. Linspire is working on an enterprise version of CNR so you will be able to deploy applications in a corporate network. For lock down there is the KDE Kiosk framework which is being worked on.

  • The 3D game in the summary isn't Linux only... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    it runs on Windows, Mac OS X and one flavor of Linux (Linspire).

  • User-friendly desktops are for wimps! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cyburbia ( 695748 ) on Sunday February 13, 2005 @10:42PM (#11664279) Homepage
    Where are the tubby bearded Unix gurus? The skinny, pasty-skinned, ponytailed technopolitical geeks with the long leather dusters? The thought of any "summit" where friendly user interfaces were highlighted probably scared 'em off.

  • How the hell did you leave out OpenOffice.org? (Score:5, Informative)

    by oldosadmin ( 759103 ) on Sunday February 13, 2005 @10:47PM (#11664317) Homepage
    The first half-day of the conference was an OpenOffice.org RegiCon (Regional conference), and yet there was no mention of them in the article? That's a HORRIBLE summary of the DLS, coming from someone who was there every second of the thing.
  • That mp3tunes reminds me that the guy who started easyjet and easycafe started a music download service. Don't think it's been covered here. It'd be nice if one of the European readers found out more and tried to get it on /.'s main page.

  • Real unveils features of next version (Score:5, Informative)

    by AlexJeff ( 777401 ) on Sunday February 13, 2005 @10:59PM (#11664371)
    I was there as well and Rob Lanphier, Real's open source guru, unveiled the next feature set of the Helix Player (https://player.helixcommunity.org) and the Linux RealPlayer. The three features I wrote down were: - Subscription radio - Commercial Free - YES!!! - Reduced start up delay - whatever that was - Automatic bandwidth detection - for better roaming I think. Later...

    • Re:Real unveils features of next version (Score:4, Informative)

      by kforeman ( 596891 ) * on Sunday February 13, 2005 @11:17PM (#11664464)
      Great note taking.

      Yes, with now 84% of Real's record revenues coming consumer SERVICES, not products, like RealRhapsody, and RadioPass, Real can be much more open about our direction.

      Today the free Helix-powered RealPlayer 10 plays MP3, Flash, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, RealAudio 10, RealVideo 10, so users can enjoy the web's best FREE content. Our goal of the NEXT version is to allow users to start to enjoy PREMIUM content, including dozens of commercial-free radio stations.

      For those of you interested in following our process or lendign your insight, join the free dev mailing list right here: https://helixcommunity.org/mail/?group_id=154

      Kevin

  • Oh I DO hope.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Smiffa2001 ( 823436 )
    ...that the folks at Linspire don't do an MS and run everybody as root: http://adn.bmdhacks.com/desktopsummit/images/lindo ws.jpg [bmdhacks.com]

    It's been a while since I played with Lindows/Linspire 4.5 and I can't remember if that ran as root by default or not. Can anybody confirm ? I really hope that they've not made that mistake as 'Average Joe' mentioned above won't know its "bad"...
  • I see lots of posts saying "games" are the magic ticket to Linux getting popular. Stop dreaming... it's not gonna happen for a long time. Linux on the desktop is not even remotely near even 10% market share... no sane company is going to put lots of resources into developing games for Linux. Yes there were some flukes where a couple popular games got made but they were hardly profitable. Most of what Linux has for games are done by hobbyist... which is fine for the nostalgic type who like 80's style gaming
    • God the same old crap time and time again.

      I for one am tired of these old outdated complaints. Nobody has to compile anything unless they want to. With the exception of gentoo no linux distrubitution requires compiling anything.

      A common control panel? Wake me up when windows has one. The control panel works for some things, for other things you need to right click on my computer and manage, still others you have to manually load a snap in, and finally you have to muck with the registry for others. With
      • "A common control panel? Wake me up when windows has one. The control panel works for some things, for other things you need to right click on my computer and manage, still others you have to manually load a snap in, and finally you have to muck with the registry for others. With linux everything is in /etc. If the GUI can't take care of it then you can go in and do it yourself. It may not be perfect but it's better then windows."

        I pretty much only use windows, though I have tried a couple of times to swit
        • Then you've never had a need to stray far from the default configuration. That's fine, I'm not putting it down or anything, but Windows does make some things nearly impossible for no good reason other than perhaps that not that many people want to do them. With Linux (or any other *nix, really), these things may not be simple, but they're not especially hard either.

          That said, if you honestly think Windows has something over Linux in this regard, you really need to try Suse. Yast is so much more usable and
    • For #1 there is gnome-system-tools, which quite a few distros use now, and it's usage is gaining. This means that we will finally have a decent control panel. It's well coded with the same GUI for every distro and a backend that does the right thing based on system config.

      #2 needs solved fast. apt-get/synaptic 'do it' but have major flaws, in that it is centralized, and therefore resources are lacking (you will have some things that are 2/3 major revisions behind because noone has packaged them for the apt
      • #2 needs solved fast. apt-get/synaptic 'do it' but have major flaws, in that it is centralized, and therefore resources are lacking (you will have some things that are 2/3 major revisions behind because noone has packaged them for the apt-get repo you have). Plus it's no good for commercial software, which like it or not is not going to vanish.

        Yup, apt/Synaptic work great for the base distribution, but if you want anything n ot in the distribution you'e in trouble. Fortunately this problem was noted a wh

    • Re:Hey I've got some ideas (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @12:08AM (#11664766)
      For #3 check the Freekdesktop specification [freedesktop.org].

      Basically, different toolkits and DE will still exist but they aim to standarize stuff to increase interoperabiltt between DEs; from stuff like common configuration files, proper metadata support, menu files, and trash can management to more complex like drag-and-drop between tookits, control embeeding and (finally) proper clipboard functioning.

      This has the potential to end a lot of nightmares for program instalation and interoperability, no matter for which desktop you write them.

      Most major desktop enviroments are embracing the Freedesktop specifications: KDE and Gnome among them. XFCE 4 deserves a nod too for being one of the most FD-compliant desktops available.

    • Re:Hey I've got some ideas (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A common control panel.

      GNOME has the control panel, with the most common things you might want to control, plus the configuration editor, which is a similar to the Windows registry editor except that the back end is simple text files instead of a binary database that's easy to corrupt. I think this split makes perfect sense; for "power users" you can really get in to the fine details with the configuration editor, and for normal users the control panel is all you need.

      Older versions of GNOME had the con
      • Since both GNOME and KDE are increasingly adopting standards from freedesktop.org, they increasingly interoperate well.

        This is even better than ending the so-called "KDE vs Gnome wars".
        With this it looks like KDE and Gnome will be two different implementations of the same standard, each with their own distinguishing features. Nothing wrong with that.

        Now, within any given corporation that decides to use linux desktops, it will either be all KDE or all Gnome, as dictated by the IT dept. Nothing wrong with
    • I see lots of posts saying "games" are the magic ticket to Linux getting popular. Stop dreaming... it's not gonna happen for a long time. Linux on the desktop is not even remotely near even 10% market share... no sane company is going to put lots of resources into developing games for Linux. Yes there were some flukes where a couple popular games got made but they were hardly profitable. Most of what Linux has for games are done by hobbyist... which is fine for the nostalgic type who like 80's style gaming
    • Have a common to all distro's install tool that is very easy to use (perhaps a RPM front end).

      Well Synaptic [nongnu.org] is a fairly universal install frontend for all distro based software - it runs on Debian (and all debian based distros), Fedora, SuSE, Connectiva. All you have to do is install the damn thing (it comes by default with several of those distro options). As for third party packages, try Autopackage [autopackage.org]. Yes they're still finishing things off, and yes, it's going to take developers bothering to package t
      • Or are you going to say all the GNOME developers have to go and work on KDE (or vice versa)? So who says who "wins"? And who really cares if there are 2 seperate desktops if they integrate increasingly well via FD.o standards?

        I always figured it should end up something along the lines of Carbon vs. Cocoa (GTK vs. Qt). The look & feel should be uniform, but coding with different languages, APIs, event models, etc. should be supported. There really needs to be a definitive UI guideline summit that w
        • These days you can use the GTK-Qt theme to unify the looks regardless of what visual style you like. It has been refined for a long time and works pretty well. The remaining differences are mostly trivial and are of the level of inconsistency found in Carbon/Cocoa apps or between Explorer/IE/Office on Windows. So I don't think it's a big problem.

  • Why should I switch to Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 14, 2005 @12:09AM (#11664771)
    (This isn't a troll, I just want to see some clear arguments.)

    I'm a fairly heavy Windows user. For about 90-120 minutes a day, I check email through Thunderbird, browse some sites with Firefox, chat on Gaim and XChat, and download my daily dose of Mercury Theatre[1] with Azureus. I use Sygate Firewall and AVG Anti-virus, and I rarely have a problem.

    Why should _I_ switch to Linux?

    [1] Mercury Theatre is in the public domain, so this isn't a warez-related post.
    • Why shouldn't you? It seems like you like and use many open-source programs, so there is very little holding you back. If I had to pick one thing, it would be selection of programs. Sure there are more commercial programs for Windows, but there are many times more free (open-source) programs for Linux. They work well and install easily. There is no reason to stick with MS at this point, and, if you're a competent user, you will like the choice and customizability that linux offers.
    • You are 90% of the way there. You use almost all open source software (short of the security stuff).

      Switching to linux for you isn't necessarily the thing to do if the system you have right now works fast with no interuptions/pauses and doesn't crash. I doubt you would notice much difference if you did an install of Fedora, all the same programs would be there, gaim, firefox, thunderbird...all FOSS.

      For some people, the switch really wouldn't bring them anything. Its the people who do what you do, b

    • My suggestion. (Score:3, Informative)

      by MatthewNewberg ( 519685 )

      I would suggest staying with Windows for the time being. Why becuase it works for you, why fix something that isn't broken.

      Now from your description I would suggest to moving to Linux in the future. This is how I would do it.

      First Thing I would suggest you to do is read up on how to use Linux, and get used to it. Try out one of the bootable distro and use that for awhile, make sure you can use everything. If everything works(hardware and software), and you have the time go ahead and (Backup)install Linu

    • Well, it would allow you to ditch the anti-virus. Yeah, I know that's not really much of a selling point in and of itself, but think about what it implies:

      Even though you don't use them, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express are still on your system, and they still represent a non-zero level of vulnerability simply by existing. Additionally, Firefox is still vulnerable to some kinds of spyware and such when it's running on Windows (don't know about Thunderbird).

      I've been a Linux user for over 5 years now,
    • You shouldn't. What you have does everything you need, and if you don't experience the common problems associated with windows, you may never need to. It amazes me that some people assume you *must* be having problems because you're using windows.

      The zealots won't get this, because they're too blinded by the foam coming out of their mouths. Realisticly though, that's their problem, not yours.
    • In Windows you are subjected to the whims of whatever company or individual that handles to put a piece of software in your computer, from known manufacturers to spammers, crackers and fraudsters.

      With windows you are waiting that uncles Bill snaps his fingers to be out of support, need to upgrade or having to agree to draconian EULAs when installing things like media viewers.

      With Linux you are free of those inconveniences and you know that the software you use has a better chance to be improved in the ben
  • Robin Rowe founder of LinuxMovies.org
    Linux in the Motion Picture Industry

    He showed clips of 'The Last Samurai', Bad Boyz, etc. He said Shrek2 had a 2,500 cpu render farm and was fast approaching their deadline. They contact HP for an additional 1,000 cpu render farm and sent their info to them so that could finish. Like in last samurai he said no arrows were shot in the whole movie they were painted in. Also the shot with thousands of arrows the actors had them stuck in their legs and the digital effec
  • ... Was there much in the way of WM updates? Distros other than Linspire? Productivity apps? Prosumer (iLife-style) apps?

    I mean, it looks like pretty much a Michael Robertsonfest going on, a few interesting bits, but nothing that's gonna give MS cause to worry...

    Now a solid production IMAP or WebDAV groupware release with a free Outlook plugin, _that_ would be cause for partying.. And getting full xinerama support for OpenGL....

  • Being almost Windows is a dead end (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gelfling ( 6534 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @09:54AM (#11666831) Homepage Journal
    At least I think it is. After all XP really is a pretty good desktop all other things aside. The problems are a) cost b) security c) adminsistrative overhead. Linux addresses two out of three. Administrative overhead is still pretty high, at least if you're the guy doing it because no one else will be able to. In either case Linux also suffers from a few distinct disadvantages: a) installation complexity b) inability to run Windows apps without introducing another layer of complexity in Wine, etc. c) It really doesn't run well in a desktop environment in hardware that is significantly cheaper or underpowered compared to Windows. XP requires quite a bit of juice to run well whereas W2K runs rather nice on my P2-400 with 288MB RAM. Similarly ANY good Linux desktop really does need 256MB RAM and at least that much processor. Installation disk requirements for Linux are somewhat higher but disk is practically free.

    So instead of playing to Windows strengths why not play to Linux strengths? Make a desktop that can run Windows apps when it needs to but runs the machine in a highly configured, locked down, no spyware, no virus no end user ability to change anything configuration? And run it on cheap hardware? In fact a Linux terminal server starts to look like a nice alternative for a home LAN.

    Other than that I'd ask for better support and much much cleaner functional installs of devices that are no longer exotic, like Wireless NICs, scanners, multifunction printer/scanner/fax machines, drawing tablets and USB devices of all kinds. Instead of building the 19th most popular UI for Linux why dont' we build better integrated support for LAN bootable 802.11G NICs?

  • Linspire (Score:3, Insightful)

    by phorm ( 591458 ) on Monday February 14, 2005 @12:06PM (#11668197) Journal
    I don't know about everyone else, but personally I found that the last screenshot gave me shivers.

    Username: root
    Hostname: linspire

    I don't really think that touting "looks and works like windows" is a good thing, because eventually that just dumbs down to "gets 0WN3D like Windows" as well.

    I run as a local user, which works just fine for me (and guess what, my touchpad scroll also works on X.org). For things that need root access (such as installing new software through apt), specific apps are allowed via sudo.

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