I would just like to preface my comments to this post saying that Brad has basically summarized my opinions and arguments on the current state of GNU/Linux in a much more coherent way that I could ever hope to do while at work. Good job Brad.
> Let KDE or Gnome or any other desktop run their > own X server. It should be installed or uninstalled > with that app. I think this is a hurdle that > GNU/Linux needs to overcome to compete in the > home desktop market/easy user market. (If it > wants to compete there.) A lot of people say > we don't really want Linux to be used by the > masses. But then a lot of people tell their > friends, parents and grandparents to use Linux > so it's going to be used in that market. I would say that if our goal (the goal of Linux advocates) is to considerably penetrate the market, we have to standardize and eliminate a lot of technical hurdles, one of which being the windowing system. Does our windowing system / windowing environment REALLY NEED to be TCP/IP based? Do we need to have 20 different widget toolkits and window managers running around everywhere? If we are going to be GNU, we should standardize around Gnome/GTK. > > If so then a few things in the overall OS needs > to have a bit more cohesion. I know there are > supposed to be standards, so why don't people > follow the standards? Especially the big players > should. Suse, Redhat and Mandrake (haven't really > used mandrake in a while so I'm probably wrong > making a generlization about it) have different > ways of completing the same task. Whether it's a GUI > tool or a CLI tool there needs to be cohesion > between distro's. At least from the major players. > Still, there are hundreds of other distro's > where people want to do their own thing, which > is fine, because most newbies don't venture > into "other" distro's. Usually. United Linux was supposed to be a big step in this direction. I don't know what happened to that movement. > Myself, i've always been happy digging into problems > and figuring things out. It's just the geek in me. > But my wife or my mother don't really care to know why > X is broke or why KDE won't load cause X is broke or > because X can't load drivers or sync rates for the monitor. Or why mythtv segfaulted or why quake3 can't mmap /dev/dsp or why a kernel oops happened while trying to play mp3s, download .torrents, read newsgroups, browse the web, and unrar archives all at the same time. There needs to be standardization from hardware vendors/kernel developers too.. so I can buy my new shiny videocard from the store, stick a CD in, click a button, enter the root password, and have my new drivers installed and configured pending a restart. Maybe having features like that inherently lowers the security of the OS. IF that is the case, then Linux can never hope to penetrate the market beyond people who are willing to poke around /etc/.
