[Ilugc] Re: Another storm (XXX and Sex Education)
- From: ksriram@xxxxxxx (Sriram Krishnan)
- Date: Fri Nov 26 18:50:15 2004
(Prabhu) the windows world is waking up to CLI interfaces, and security,
true multiple user setups etc.
I'm happy that finally someone admits this.Windows has come a long way from
its BSOD, GUI-only administration days.
(Chandrashekar) Actually the general statement that UNIX-like OS's made
zero
inroads into user-friendly GUI's is so wrong.
Joel was probably referring to popular mindshare. He correctly mentions
Apple in the article as the the first GUI-based system to become widely
popular.As for Gnome and KDE and others, they may be great pieces of work
growing very fast, but I doubt whether their numbers are comparable to
Apple's numbers, let alone Microsoft's. Don't believe me? Check out the
archives of Google Zeitgeist.Linux maybe an excellent product - and though a
lot of people have heard of it, not many from the non-techie population are
using it full-time.
Actually, I don't know why Ubuntu was spoken about.Though I'm sure its an
excellent distro, excellence doesn't automatically mean popular
mindshare('popular' as in outside the geek community) . From my personal
experience,the non-techie people who know of Linux mostly know of Redhat and
to a small extent Suse and Mandrake.
Btw, Joel isn't the only one to criticize OSS usability. Check out Eric S
Raymond's article on how he struggled with CUPS.
Also, see
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/25/1416208&tid=189&tid=1
56 and the forums of www.ok-cancel.com where this was a hotly contested
topic once.
Usability isn't the only issue here. If Linux *has* made in-roads into
desktop systems, why is it that 30 out of 41 people who responded to the
recent survey on this list dual-boot with Windows? I'm sure they have their
reasons - perhaps the lack of a lot of popular software or games -or maybe
they have some hardware issues - or perhaps they have some documents which
only proprietary software like Photoshop/3DS Max/MS Office would open.
Whatever be their reasons, the point to note is that those reasons do
exist.If members of a Linux mailing list find themselves unable to live
without Windows, how do you expect the general public to do so?
Sriram
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