On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 4:18 AM, Alan Bourke <[email protected]> wrote:
> Used Ubuntu recently? A new horizon in moving stuff around, and I hear
> the latest OSX isn't shy about it either.
I've heard a lot of grumbling about Ubuntu's new Unity UI though I
haven't tried it myself. GNOME 3 is getting a rough reception on
Fedora 15, too -- lots of people very unhappy about the new UI. Know
how they gripe about it? They call it Microsoft-like.
In fact, you highlight one of the greatest features of FOSS: Choice.
People don't like GNOME? They don't have to use it. They can run KDE,
or XFCE (this is the desktop I've switched to, to evaluate as a backup
in case I can't get along with GNOME). This is an incredible option:
if you don't like the way things are going on the particular branch of
FOSS you've been hanging around on, you can switch to another one,
voting with your feet.
How did Windows users vote on Vista? They locked themselves in the
past, running XP and missing out on the security updates and new
features (and lots of hassles) that Vista offered.
The experimentation with new things is a hassle. A ribbon instead of a
menu, a tablet-like touch interface instead of a keyboard-and-mouse
GUI; these are hard things to adjust to. It costs real companies real
money to have their people learn new interfaces, only to have them
disappear or change again with the next version. Instead of offering
only one choice ("take it or leave it") as Microsoft does, the many
different flavors of Linux can offer a range of choices, and the best
can continue to evolve - perhaps a minimal desktop for low power
devices (Sugar on OLPC; http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar), a rich
desktop for office work (KDE: http://www.kde.org) or a micro-console
for embedded devices (Busybox: http://www.busybox.net/about.html), the
Linux stack recognizes the same multi-tier strategies we've had in our
MVC apps for years: separation of the interface from the
implementation.
Choice is Good. Competition breeds Innovation.
--
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com
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