Ed Haletky: Desktop Linux Nearly There 84
Mark Brunelli writes "When Edward Haletky's friend asked him for help setting up a Linux desktop in the year 2000, they found only half of the Web applications needed. Since then, while researching his new book, Deploying Linux on the Desktop, Haletky has seen desktop Linux application availability and usability increase to the point where it's nearly ready for widespread corporate use. Yet Haletky does not think that Linux desktops will be widespread by 2007. In this interview, he explains why." Read on for a snippet from the interview. I know my Linux desktop (several, actually) has served well enough for "corporate use" for the past several years.
"Edward Haletky: 'The current enterprise demand for desktop Linux is growing daily and is very hard to quantify at this time. However, there are two desktop efforts going at the moment. The first is for the home user, and the second is for the enterprise. While these may seem dissimilar, they are in essence the same in most respects. The difference boils down to either the custom enterprise applications or specialized tools to access mail and enterprise databases. But in many aspects: for information sharing and training, a good Web and connection client is all that is necessary. For information generation, a good office suite is needed. Both of these are available on Linux today. There are many things to overcome before Linux will be a primary desktop for most users.'"
Re:Obstacle: DVD has to work after basic installat (Score:2, Informative)
Granted, you can purchase third-party software easily enough for Windows... I dont think there is any legal way to watch you DVDs in Linux (though I still do so without remorse).
Almost, but not quite. (Score:3, Informative)
As mentioned by others in this thread, there are plenty of problems that are impossible or difficult for open-source coders to solve. These include playing DVDs (patents, CSS issues), device drivers (many hardware manufacturers do the dirty work of writing drivers for Windows, and specifications can be hard to get), support for lots of printers, etc.
There are also plenty of problems that can (and probably will) be resolved by the open-source community. I've been struggling lately with the clunkiness of running a dual-monitor desktop in GNOME (as compared to Windows). Many GUI components are far less responsive than their Windows counterparts. (When composing an email in Thunderbird in Windows, I'm accustomed to highlighting a URL then pressing CTRL-L and ENTER rapidly to create a hyperlink. In Linux, that doesn't work because the CTRL-L dialog box doesn't come up fast enough.) And don't even get me started on out-of-the-box support for notebooks, such as power management, hibernate, and whatnot. (My latest install of FC4 had my notebook's speedstep running at ~600Mhz even when plugged into AC, until I manually tweaked some files.)
So, I wouldn't recommend Linux for standard desktop deployments just yet. If the next 3-4 years show as much progress as the previous years, then a solid Linux desktop may be just around the corner. In fact, I think that Linux has the potential to offer a much more solid desktop platform than Windows -- at the very least, it doesn't suffer from the brain-dead Windows memory manager that thrashes my notebooks's slow hard drive around every time I click something.
I keep meaning to dive into some of the code and contribute to GNOME reaching this "last mile" of desktop usability, but I have so many projects on my to-do list ahead of that.
Re:Almost, but not quite. (Score:2, Informative)
This is entirely because of GTK2 and pango. GTK2 is slow, pango is *realy* slow. If those can be optimized or replaced most GUI-speed issues would clear up (at least in GTK apps).
Re:Linux is actually much better than it used to b (Score:3, Informative)
You said that you tried Gentoo already, but it seems that you didn't look too carefully at it, as it really does all of these things already. Portage is the best thing since sliced bread, although it's not really alone in that respect. I find the biggest mistake that new users make with regards to Linux is that they totally ignore their package manager, then get frustrated because they want the source tarballs to do all the things that the package manager already does. (I did it too when I was new to Linux...) Of course the blame lies in the fact that there is no package manager at all in Windows, and too many people equate Windows with computing, thinking that everything must be like it. I don't think there are any package managers that don't already do automagic dependency checking and resolving, although if you snag random rpms off the net and try and install them you may run into problems (which is why you always check your package manager first!).
As to non-free items, both the ATI and NVidia binary drivers are one emerge away (emerge ati-drivers or emerge nvidia-glx, respectively). You can specify to use win32 codecs (set win32codecs in your USE flags) for Mplayer, Xine and most every other media player on Linux, and Portage will snag those automagically too. I really can't say enough good things about Portage, I've never been happier.