On Dec 21, 2006, at 2:20 PM, Bryan Lund wrote:
Norman Palardy wrote:
On Dec 21, 2006, at 1:05 PM, Bryan Lund wrote:
Ronald Vogelaar wrote:
In short, the state of RB on Linux perfectly matches the state
of Linux itself?
...looks promising, but (still!) not quite there yet.
Maybe you're using an old distro or something. I run REALbasic
everyday under multiple distro's. In all cases RB is running
fast and stable (as is the underlying OS). Build times under
Linux are essentially identical to those under Vista on the same
machine.
Linux on the desktop has come a long way and is quite usable, once
you figure out which of the hundreds of distro's you want to use,
what pieces you want installed, etc.
It's still not as usable to the average consumer as either Windows
or OS X because of the plethora of similar choices.
Choices are good but sometimes too many choices is just paralyzing
and Linux seems to fall into this pit of too many choices thereby
paralyzing potential adopters.
The American Psychology association has an article on exactly this
phenomenon http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun04/toomany.html
Agreed. At least in most respects. Some distro's (SLED and
Linspire come to mind) have done a great job of simplifying this.
For an office user the choices become simple (use what the Distro
says to use, unless you need something more).
Personally I'm not seeing any of my clients move to Linux wholesale.
Some are using it on the server side but no desktops.
It's not worth it for them to save a few bucks on the initial
purchase price and pay similar or larger fees for support, etc.
And it's not something any of them relish deploying on hundreds of
desktops.
And unless you're in a small office the "office user" does not make
this choice. The IT guys do.
Some do pick the right tool for the job but larger corporations have
this idea that standardizing everyone on a "platform" makes things
simpler. For many common tasks this is true and that standard is
often Windows because "that's what everyone uses" (or something
equally lame) I have worked in more enlightened companies that let
users run the OS that had the tools they needed (Unix/Linux for
scientific applications, OS X for graphics and media, etc) and they
standardized on a set of tools and applications so things could be
interchanged easily regardless of platform.
Which, really, is no different than OS X or Windows. Heck, if you
install XP you don't really have a usable system. You need to go
out and install a multitude of applications to get a basic set of
functionality. Linux (for the most part) is ahead of that. Out of
the box you typically have your full office suite, email client, etc.
You have an office suite but not THE Office Suite and sadly that
continues to be the reason that Windows dominates and will continue
to dominate
That may change now with the XML based formats but I doubt it do so
rapidly
Until desktop linux is "mainstream" and we see vendors like HP, Dell,
Lenovo selling lots of machines preinstalled with a desktop distro it
will remain a niche player in that market.
Linux has been going to take over the desktop for 8 - 10 years and is
still a long way from being pervasive or even common
Once you see people buying a home computer running Linux because they
run that at work then you know things are changing.
I don't see that happening soon
I think the fear of things being complex (or having too many
choices) is bigger than the complexity or choices itself.
Part of the complexity is having too many choices and also the
complexity of taking advantage of those choices.
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