Re: More Political Stuff

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Paul Warren <pdw@ex-parrot.com> writes:
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 06:23:56PM +0500, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > Also, GNU/Linux isn't even close to ready for the desktop.  
> 
> I do get tired of hearing this meaningless phrase.  Who does this
> mythical desktop that we're supposed to be ready for belong to?  I have
> been using X on my desktop for the last 3 years, exclusively for the
> last 2.
> 
> 50% of the desktops at my work run RedHat and about half of those are
> using Gnome.
> 
> I would imagine that my father could install and use a Linux
> distribution without too much trouble, if he was so inclined.  My mother
> could not, but she could not install any other OS either.
> 
> Which one of the above is "the desktop".
>

I think there are several key "desktops." One is office desktops. With
the LWCE announcements we suddenly have these in range within 1-2
years, as soon as we can ship a finished office suite.  The key point
about office desktops is that end users don't have to install the
software or hardware on them.

Another is appliance desktops. These are also in range; again, end
users don't need to install anything. Linux is actually used here a
good bit already.

The final one is the home desktop. This is MUCH harder because you
need all the "toys" such as little cameras and scanners and printers
and so on. Hardware support and ease of hardware installation need to
get fixed here, and that's not something the GNOME project can easily
impact. So I expect this desktop to take longer. Though, once we have
the above two desktops, I might expect Linux distributions to start
trying to do the work for the home desktop.

So, the future is bright. All we have to do is get things right
technically, and ship quality working releases in a reasonable
timeframe. The major milestones should be the releases of GNOME 1.4,
GNOME 2.0, and then GNOME Office.

Havoc