On Wed, 12 Mar 2003 19:33:11 -0800, you wrote: >On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 03:02:05AM +0000, Philip Wyett scripsit: >> Seems the enterprise line for certain things will be good. However for >> multimedia and anything game/3d related - it's a non-starter. > >Why on the wide earth would you expect it to be? > >Enterprise is not a business desktop OS; it's a server OS, rackmount >boxes without monitors in machine rooms somewhere. > >The 'professional workstation' is the place you'll see 3D capability in >a costly-support-version for large enterprises, that's probably one of >the reasons to differentiate like that. Redhat has very specifically >not gone after the end user desktop market, and I think they're right >not to do that just yet.
Red Hat has just released "Enterprise Linux WS", describe as "operating system for desktops and workstations". This is (I assume) Red Hat's offering for what you call a 'professional workstation'. However it appears the decision to release Enterprise WS now was a marketing decision because the limited specs available (does Red Hat really expect people to buy a product for $300 with next to no description of what is included?) make it a questionable purchase. Remember that these versions are all going to be around for the 12 to 18 months of the lifetime of this product, and really don't seem to make sense from a technical perspective: Key features of WS apparently are JRE 1.3.1, Gnome 1.4, XFree 4.1.0. The markets WS is meant for include S/W development and ISV applications including the Oil/Gas field. So lets look at S/W development. A significant percent of S/W development is going to be GUI apps. Who is going to be developing Gnome 1.4 applications for the next 12-18 months? Almost any commercial development being done today for Gnome (remember the price of WS, only companies will be buying this for the most part) will be using Gnome 2 both for the better font support as well all the other things Gnome 2 brings to the table. Furthermore most Java development should have shifted to Java 1.4.1 by now. Applications in the Oil/Gas field are likely to be graphical, as are a lot of things that a WS (and not desktop) operating system is aimed at. Yet we have an older version of XFree that apparently has limited 3D support (remember, 3D != games for many people). The idea of an Enterprise Workstation product with a slower release cycle is good, but given the lifetime of the product it should have been based on a more up to date and usuable set of software. -- Phoebe-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/phoebe-list
