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."
