begin Burns MacDonald's quote: | Tyler wrote: | > They're all there, its just that Mandrake has practically | > eliminated the need for the CLI tools. | | Oh swell... like filling your car floor to ceiling with cotton | candy, then trying to drive down the street.
which is actually not far from my characterizing suse's configuration tools -- filling the box so full of strofoam peanuts that there's no room to move. | I'm sorry, Tyler, but I just can't bring myself to join the "our | aim is to out-windows Microsoft" camp. IMHO anybody with enough | money, time and a frontal lobotomy can produce a Windows OS clone. | We shouldn't compromise on the values that make Linux *better* (and | different). I don't want to sound elitist and it's true we do still | have a ways to go in terms of useability, but if we have to make | Linux look and act exactly like Windows, then maybe there are some | users we just don't need to attract. </sunday evening rant> agreement again. a surprisingly delightful post came from rms on the gnome list -- he said that chasing msft is foolish, that chasing the mac would make far more sense. which it would, because linux is far more flexible than the mac, but the mac has a gui that eats for breakfast the best that msft has to offer. | The MAC suffered because they insisted on a completely proprietary | model in an increasingly generic market model. They were clobbered | by the dominance of the PC clone model and all the explosive | cross-development that brought with it. exactly right. ibm's open architecture. | Psion did a pretty good business in Europe, especially with their | handhelds devices... they were years ahead of the current PDA | market. However, they became stagnant and are starting to lose | share in a market they should have dominated. They easily could | have been Palm, but for "old boy" parochialism and an inability to | think globally and reach beyond regional markets. You're a PDA guy | - you should know that. the amstrad of the 90s. sad, really. i just spent a little while with the sharp zaurus, and it ought to devour everything in sight. even has a keyboard. though the market remains open for someone to produce the pentium (or, better, transmeta crusoe) equivalent of the wonderful old poquet pc with an ibm trackpoint-style pointing device. i keep hoping ibm does it, and ibm keeps not doing it. i have a toshiba libretto (p-166, 64 megs, 10 gigs, 800x480) that *does* run linux well -- wrote my piece on lwe on it, on the train coming home -- but the combination of its limited resources and linux developers' lack of discipline when writing code (it could, and ought to be, a hell of a lot tighter, but new hardware prevents its needing to be) keeps it from being really practical for most uses. | Mandrake's primary money market is Europe, where the Linux desktop | is gaining far greater acceptance than on this side of the pond. | Here, in North America, the Linux market is primarily in the server | room and that is where RedHat is putting most of its development | resources. Ipso Facto: Engineering goes where the bucks are - where | that is depends upon your target market. mandrake isn't doing all that well in europe, either -- suse is doing much better there, because despite its many obvious shortcomings, it has a caldera-like desire to achieve and maintain stability. mandrake is in many ways little more than a broken red hat. -- dep There is sobbing of the strong, And a pall upon the land; But the People in their weeping Bare the iron hand; Beware the People weeping When they bare the iron hand. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
