[ale] OT: more info on where all the jobs are (going...)

[Joe]

"Greg" <runman at speedfactory.net> writes:

[snip]

> 	RPM dependencies, apt-get, ports, and packages still don't compare to just
> hitting a button to update, inserting a CDROM, or having it done
> automatically.  Red Hat's up2date is the answer.  Suse needs to make it a
> single button and not require a menu hunt.  Wine/Win4Lin/VMWare need to be
> done automatically and done flawlessly.  The question of "Can I run
> Office/Foo on this ?" should be answered "of course".  A discussion of
> anything else will just give a consumer a case of
> glassy-eyed-my-head-hurts-please-stop-the-madness-of-tech-talk".  Unices
> still are not ready for the casual user desktop until they fix this
> problem - though one needs to keep in mind that the goal of some projects is
> not the casual user desktop (plan9 and OpenBSD come to mind). 

And in fact, Open Source Unices are unlikely to ever be ready for the
casual user, because the vast, vast majority of people who actually
work on them are not all that interested in making every conceivable
task trivial for the user. But usability is a big niche that for-profit
corporations can invade - witness Lycoris, for example. That's
a good thing, too, but they have their work cut out for them, because
they have a huge array of different applications to support, and
each of those apps pretty much does things its own way.

Windows has an advantage in this regard due to its monoculturalism -
*everything* that runs on Windows "has to" follow M$'s UI and
interoperability guidelines and APIs. (Though I, personally, try to
give all the Windows software I write cryptic and confusing UIs
whenever possible :-)

I think the single biggest step the open-source community could take
to narrow that gap would be to develop a comprehensive set of open
*application-level* interoperability standards - eg, XML DTDs for
word-processor documents, spreadsheets, and so forth - that support all
the features M$ touts in their own products. But the nature of the
open-source community makes such a development unlikely, I think.  It
would be a chore, and people have more interesting prey to track down
and kill.

Cheers,

--Joe Knapka
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