On Oct 10, 2009, at 4:33 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote:
Geeze!

Why try so hard, when there are good, viable alternatives?

--Doug

As wonderful as linux world is, they still are at war with each other. They do not have a unified software package management system across them all. There are differing window systems and UI toolkits. Cut/paste is not always assured to work across different UI toolkits. And linux servers are still the core target, not desktops.

So much like the Mac/Windows incompatibilities, the linux platforms have their own incompatibilities, thus form their own siloed communities. Your foo won't work with my bar.

And the linux developers are hypersensitive to what their users consider trivial, thus creating unnecessary divergence.

It does seem to be getting better, with Ubuntu leading the way to desktop centric linux. Maybe it'll all converge eventually with a single window system, desktop, UI toolkit, software package system, and application interoperability (cut/paste etc).

But until you spend less time fussing to get your system working than linux requires, and have universal drivers so that when you buy a laptop all of its features work very well with your linux distro, and maybe even have a large number of vendors supporting linux systems, .. you still have the linux of old: fussy, incomplete, and incompatible.

You'll know you've arrived when you don't ask your linux packing laptop friend which distro he's using.

    -- Owen



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