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On Saturday 30 November 2002 10:19, Richard Jenniss wrote:
> It takes 2 years+ to develop most games, I can guess it takes a similar
> time for applications.
no. game and application development are night and day. games take WAY more
code and are of a fundamentally different sort or development. most
applications are downright trivial when it comes to the amount of development
effort required to get something useful.
why do you think we have so many quality free software applications and so
few quality free software games?
anyways, devel time is only the first part of the cycle from developer's heads
to user's desktops. after that is release of the software, integration (aka
"hey, SuSe is making a new distro!"), release of the integration ('Sweet!
SuSe X.Y is out!'), evaluation ("Damn ZDNet is stupid, thank goodness my
manager is letting us do a test bed in the office here."), planning &
budgeting, roll-out.
given your 2 years of development concept we'd be about 3 or 4 years away from
seeing anything really interesting happen. personally, i think that process
started about 3 years ago.
why do you think we're suddenly hearing so much about the desktop in the
media, and how we're starting to hear about companies/governments actually
using it? remember Korea's 120k desktop purchase some time ago? that was
probably the beginning.
> I've used kde 99ish, and the amount it has changed is significant, but its
> not enough, imo.
what exactly is not good enough for mainstream usage in KDE 3.0.5? i can list
many things that are absolutely great for it.
> Things I think that need improvement, that keeps windows users using
> windows.
> Program installation
from source or binary? from binary, it's pretty damn simple. and reliable. and
easy to replicate. it does mean that people need to learn a new way (e.g.
non-wizard driven, just select from a list and hit install), but that new way
is faster and better. and no, you don't need the command line to do so.
> Drivers!
interesting how a recent ZDNet (no less) review noted in an XP vs Linux
article that Linux actually has BETTER driver support that XP does. yes,
there are some pieces of hardware that don't run well under linux. same can
be said for any OS. drivers for linux have long ceased to be a real problem.
> XFree86, its ugly to configure.
not only are distros coming with XFree86 configuration control panels for KDE,
but you'll just love XRandR and it's attendant config-free configuration in
XFree 4.3. note that we are at XFree 4.2.
> A competitive office suite, MS office is still better.
you are right here. but you are also wrong to pick on office suites. for most
people, there are perfect alternatives on Linux. you wanna know the REAL
killers? CRM and finance.
when people trot out MS Office as the piece of software linux is missing as
proof that linux isn't ready for the desktop but never mention CRM or finance
packages i immediately know that they haven't actually been involved with
Linux in corporate environments. those are the real showstoppers. i used to
include groupware in that category, but recent developments have removed that
one from my list.
> How long would it take to develop such applications, or devise methods to
> enhance ease of use?
> Two years sounds about right to me, to be desktop ready.
i suggest you take a good distro like SuSe 8.x with KDE 3.1 on it and give it
to your office's non-technical staff (clerical, management, etc). you may be
pleasantly surprised at how little they care about the things that could be
better in Linux.
> Lindows looks nice, Lycoris. Redhat's not bad. but I think the two I
> mentioned are more geared toward "windows"-ish ease of use, and those both
> need a bit more time to polish.
try SuSe, or even Mandrake. both are there right now and both are being used
in office environments right now. even here in Calgary.
p.s. the Backspace button on your keyboard in combination with the text
highlighting capabilities of your mouse allows one to remove all that
unecessary quoted email text at the bottom of your emails.
- --
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"
- Albert Einstein
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