[arch-general] [*] We have lost the desktop war. The reason? Windows 7.

[ppk]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 11:57:59AM +0100, RedShift wrote:

> This thread will probably erupt in a massive flamewar, yet I decided
> to post my story anyway. I am talking about the desktop experience
> in general, not the technical details behind it. Keep that in mind.



> I've been working these past few months with KDE 4.3 and it feels
> very sluggish and incomplete.

[snip]

> back in. WOOOOOF, everything is fast again. Opening new windows is
> instantaneous, hell even bringing up context menus is faster. If
> Linux is that much better, why does the current Linux desktop (KDE
> 4.3) still suck compared to an operating system that's 8 years old?

Here are my two paises (Indian cents). You bring out a point that I
regularly see:

* Oh my graphics card does not work. Conclusion Linux is not for
desktops.  This was say in 1997 when I started on linux. Surely this
was a problem. But even then things were not bad compared to windows.

* Oh my printer does not work with GNU/Linux. Conclusion Linux is not
for office use.  Yes it is true that some esoteric printers do not
work but then a careful netsearch will give you what to buy. If you
dont want to search a product then your vendor will sell you snakeoil
any way. I bought a Samsung printer (ML something) for my office and
it works like charm.

* Oh my foo bar effect on KDE 4.x/GNOME x.x does not work. Conclusion
Linux is not for desktop usage. What you say might be true. I dont
know because I use xmonad and that beats all other WM in my
opinion. But to conclude we have lost the ``war'' (which war I dont
know) of desktops might be premature.

Really many of us do not care. GNU/Linux and *BSDs give us excellent
servers, desktops, development environments, document creation tools
(TeX/LaTeX) which together is hard to beat. Plus it is hackable and I
have choice of what to use (xmonad for desktop for eg). So as far as I
am concerned the war is over. Opensource won.

Just to illustrate, for a talk I carried my presentation as a pdf file
created using latex beamer on an Arch linux and some one from
Microsoft research carried a ppt (for ``security'' reasons we were not
supposed to connect our laptops on to their projectors vga port). Both
of us were given a windows machine to project the presentations and
yes you guessed it right the ppt fonts were all garbled where as my
pdf file was just fine. In fact the only other presentation that
worked without any problem was also created via beamer on GNU/Linux.


KDE/GNOME/XFCE or whichever is your favorite WM will continue to
produce high quality software and you may also contribute. My
suggestion is forget about the war and have fun. Let the people in
Redmond suffer hypertension by attempting world domination. Meanwhile
try out xmonad even if you do not want to use it.


Regards

ppk