On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 7:41 PM, Giancarlo Livraghi <[email protected]> wrote:
[snip] > I leave it to technology experts to decide if the "big change" was in April > 2009 with Ubuntu release 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope or in October with 9.10 > Karmic Koala (we shall see what will happen with 10.04 Lucid Lynx in April > 2010). And how much of this is due to specific releases or a more general > improvement of linux (or broadly opensource) as a whole. There has been a significant improvement "upstream" in terms of Linux plumbing viz. Hal, udev, Xorg, PulseAudio, Cairo/Harfbuzz, NetworkManager being a few examples which has ensured that the desktop experience keeps getting better. If you start looking at distributions which have had releases starting late 2008 packaging more or less the latest builds available upstream for the components, you would see a remarkable difference in terms of "ease of use". There still remains the question of whether the Linux "desktop" is going to be around for long as a practice or, even a metaphor. Both GNOME and KDE are going ahead with changing what "was" and, experimenting with what "might be". -- sankarshan mukhopadhyay <http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog/>
