InfoWorld: Showering After Linux

“I often set aside my personal biases for work, and I did so to
write a piece on Xen paravirtualization software. Xen only runs on
Linux, and so I had to install Linux for the first time in about a
year. Now, Xen is way past nifty. But commercial vendors’ efforts
to turn Linux into a functional interactive environment by grafting
on GNOME and YAST and such are just sad. They tried to squeeze ten
pounds of compost into a suede coin purse.

“Here comes the hate mail: Linux is just a kernel, and kernels
don’t have UIs. A powerful server operating system doesn’t need a
whizzo presentation layer, in fact, it only gets in the way. Linux
can kick OS X’s butt in benchmarks. I ought to RTFMs. And wasn’t I
just bitching about open source…?”

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