ZDNet: When was the Linux desktop ever alive?

[ Thanks to George Mitchell for this link. ]

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols joins in the dead desktop fray. The issue to Mr. Nichols isn't the polish of GNOME or KDE, which he says require as little of the user as any Microsoft interface, but the perceived lack of applications, specifically MS Office. Win4Lin, he maintains, isn't going to help either.

"Before all you Linux fans who don't know me get into a lather, you should know that I've been using Unix as a desktop operating system when the big interface choice was between the C shell and the Bourne shell. Over the years, I've used Open Desktop, Looking Glass and OpenView, and these days I'm a KDE fan.

And you know what? None of them has ever made it as a big-time desktop operating environment and none of them ever will. It's not that Unix/Linux is hard to use. With Gnome or KDE, the average user doesn't need to know any more about the system than he would about Windows 98's foundations."

Complete Story

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