>You are correct, of course. >But there is a general perception that Windoze apps crash because >Windoze is crap and Linux is so effing perfect that nothing can happen. ><G>
Linux is far from perfect. But it offers more choices than to reboot/remove/reinstall... In fact, Linux is crap when it comes to desktop performance. But desktop stability is comfortable too. X11 is slow, mainly because of its network-transparent architecture. It was designed in era of vector graphics and occasional statical 2d bitmaps. It was also expected Display Postscript to be used for document rendering, but as Ghostscript doesn't implement Display Postscript, X11 or Linux is not really suitable for tasks like DTP yet. Fortunately, we have at least OpenOffice.org now, but it is true, that is even more bloated than MS Offfice (prepare 256 MB RAM...). Crucial Linux apps these days is Mozilla, and again, Mozilla for Unixes (including Linux) is crap. Mozilla for Mac outperforms MSIE, Mozilla for Windows is not built in Windows kernel, like MSIE, but it still performs good, but Mozilla for X11 is slow crap. It is based on Gtk/Gdk-pixbuf, but doesn't use it for much more than displayin scrolbars and clearing screen ! Galeon is Mozilla based browser giving slightly better results, but still it is slow compared to MSIE. However, Linux has potential to win the races in the future. We have OpenGL for local 3D graphics, OpenGL being popular even among Windows developers. The base of the system is robust. The problem is not so much absence of GUI setup tools, but rather absence of wizards, which would do things like autodetecting scanners, USB peripherals, 3D videocards, CD burners, and the same is true for accessing this hardware. Both existing Linux desktops are not intuitive and not designed by people who actually use graphical enviroment for their everyday work. There are many basic tasks, including accessing floppies or burning CD-ROMs, which cannot be done very intuitively under Linux. But it still makes sense to upgrade from DOS to Linux, instead from DOS to Windows. Alternative for all the cool sharware stuff we were using in DOS is open source world. Situation is still not as good as it should be, but there is growing "Linux scene" - games, even 3D games, and more cool stuff will follow, definitely. And you won't have to care about such shit as DRM - digital rights management - and so. On Linux, you can have most of your multimedia data in MP3 or AVI/DivX (or MPEG) without any problems, so more and more people are likely to escape to this platform in future. Definitely more than 5% market share like MacOS has (worldwide, not in USA). In .cz, market share of Apple is less then 2%, while market share of Linux desktop is already about 5%.... and it is definitely more than 50% on internet and LAN servers.... It is also likely, that MacOS X and Linux will get closer in future. Mac OS X is FreeBSD-based Unix, and it is relatively easy to run Linux apps on it, including X11. There is chance, that at least some software will be available at the same time for Mac OS X and for Linux, because of that. M.Polak
