On Thursday 18 May 2006 03:52, Nikhil Marathe wrote: > 2. "We compete with OSS products" > He continued to mention red hat, ibm and oracle. THey don't realise > that the bigger threat is from the stuff that matters to the majority > of the people. its projects like KDE and ubuntu leading to their > gradual fall, the ones that matter to the common people, not products > made by some company.
Umm...not to play a spoilt sport but I have run the latest KDE / GNOME and they are no where near the responsiveness, intuitiveness, userfriendliness that XP's (or M$) GUI offer. I see the GNOME community harping all along how KDE is evil and all. But I dont see any userfriendliness being built into GNOME. As a concrete example, I still cannot right click any file and associate it with an app. This has been a standard in M$ GUI for like ever and even KDE guys added it a long time ago. See its the little things that matter. I can see that GNOME has come a long way, its now faster, more optimized but it still lacks a good "control panel" (infact AFAIK it doesnt have one). KDE is far far ahead of GNOME in this case. But KDE is bloatware, I agree. I still use KDE and GNOME on my FC5 system and I find that none of them are upto the mark when it comes to userfriendliness. Just to disillusion you, Microsoft has no threat from Linux's DEs. None of them match upto the potential of their UI. However, they have to fear linux on the server end. > That is what is going to reinforce linux on the desktop, that is m$ > biggest threat since most of their revenue comes from windows. M$ > seriously has to wake up and reassess the situation, they are still > stuck in the OSS situation of say 5 years ago. Agreed. But as I said none of the DEs are a threat to M$. Linux, is a very stable core but you need a good shell to compete with them. Besides, you forget that very few vendors have opened up their hardware specs so that the OSS community can build drivers for Linux. Major vendors still havent extended their support... So, while you hack at your machine to get something working, Windows guys are just gonna pop in that driver CD, install that driver, reboot and enjoy their hardware :/ And one last thing, I dunno who that guy was but it doesnt matter whether he is aware of FLOSS. What matters is that Ballmer and Butthead are already aware of the threat and are watching the OSS intently :) P.S.: I might sound like a pro-M$ guy but I am not ;) I love my Linux - all three of my machines run it :D -- Dinesh A. Joshi -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
