On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 14:58 -0400, swhiser wrote: > The presentation speaks for itself as to why Linux can't get across. I disagree, but that's mainly because a presentation of slides /= a real report. Fortunately, I read his article[1] as well. Or do you mean, because he used special Acrobat PDF extensions and non-free fonts, the presentation looks terrible, and that speaks for itself? That's like blaming proprietary document formats being unreadable on the recipient, instead of the sender and they proprietary software vendor. The problem is, he is discussing Linux in general, as if it were one entity. Anyone is welcome to put the kind of polish on a desktop that he is proposing, without having to make "all of Linux" do that. I find his ideas contradictory. For example, in his article he specifically mentions the reversal of OK and Cancel in GNOME is stupid, then he says, "... application developers need to make some of the hard choices and stop falling back on the "make it a user option" solution that seems to be all too popular in most software these days." Well, are we to trust our usability experts to make these decisions or not? He seems to think yes, and well, no. It depends on how "valuable to change" an area is, versus how "comfortable" the change is. As long as the future of Linux on the desktop is couched in the terms of how like Windows it is for Regular Users, I think we'll do little more than be a Windows UI clone. Since the Windows UI sucks, why clone it? After all, we already have Xandros. FWIW, no amount of catering will get people to be unlazy. I tend to agree that a Windows2Linux migration project would be good and helpful, but I already encounter people who were surprised at how easy a modern Linux desktop is to learn. Even if there were a feature-for-feature compatibility and it all looked the same, what would be the value gained for the few stragglers brought along? This value would all be in the hands of the people prepared to sell those new Windows-like desktops to companies, which brings us back to the chicken-egg scenario. - Karsten [1] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/008499.html -- Karsten Wade, RHCE * Sr. Tech Writer * http://people.redhat.com/kwade/ gpg fingerprint: 2680 DBFD D968 3141 0115 5F1B D992 0E06 AD0E 0C41 Red Hat SELinux Guide http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/selinux-guide/
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