[ Thanks to Bill
Henning and Saint for
the links. ]
AboutLinux has a pair of items related to David Coursey’s “9
reasons” the Linux desktop won’t succeed. The first is
editor Bill Henning’s rebuttal to David Coursey (warning: it covers
a lot of very brief pages), the second a
response to his response from a reader.
Mr. Henning’s conclusion: Linux will penetrate 50% of the
desktop market by 2010.
The third item is LinuxMedNews’
short piece saying that the Linux desktop isn’t ready to
dominate, but that the pieces are almost in place and things will
gel by this December:
“There are some end-user experience issues which keep
Linux out of the reach of the masses: 1) Installation of video and
sound as well as other installation difficulties remain an issue.
2) Anti-aliased fonts are not widely available through all the
distributions. 3) A browser with the familiar Netscape name is not
currently competitive. 4) Some application software is either a)
not ready, b) not as good as applications such as MS-Office, or c)
ready and superior to its Windows equilvalents (see my recent
article on scanning) but requires more effort and knowledge on the
part of the user to find and use.Given the current rate of development and release of Linux and
other open source applications, December 2001 appears to be the
month that a usable convergence of many of the above open source
technologies will occur. At that time Linux distributions are
likely to have most of the necessary software required in a form
that can compete in all areas. Interestingly enough, open source
medical computing will also likely have its first viable offerings
at the same time.”