cold water on linux

[Net Llama!]

On 04/23/04 15:09, Joel Hammer wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 09:11:54AM -0400, Net Llama! wrote:
> 
>>Now Lindows has just been stupid.  They're taking on MS with a product
>>that is mediocre at best, and using Walmart as their primary retail outlet.
>>No company can sell products at Walmart and expect to make any profit
>>unless they are moving enormous volume.
> 
> 
> I think the best way to regard lindows was an attempt
> to use a novel marketing plan (yearly fixed payment
> for essentially unlimited software) to market to home
> users. They decided to attack the destop, likely figuring
> if they could get a 1% market share they would be in
> deep clover.
> 
> I have been using lindows for a couple of years. It is the
> most user friendly linux yet. ALMOST everything downloads
> and works easily from the warehouse. If lindows can't
> get average users to use linux, forget about linux on the
> desktop for another 5-10 years, maybe in our professional
> lifetimes.

Granted I've never used Lindows, but from the stories you've told, I'd 
never recommend it to the preverbial grandmother.  Sounds like it ships 
with significant security holes, the warehouse is full of old, outdated 
software (even behind Debian stable in many cases), and they don't even 
have security updates.  If I wanted someone to have that much risk, i'd 
let them continue to run M$ products.

> The odd thing is that I know that most desktops in my
> corporation, and there are a lot of them, don't need
> windows. Now, if linux were cheaper, there would be
> considerable savings for the corporation. I just don't know
> what kind of deal MS offers large corporations. What I do

Depends on how large the corporation is, and how badly M$ wants to keep 
them locked in.  In some cases M$ is literally giving away the OS.

> know is that typing with vim is much faster than typing
> with any other wordprocessor. Why use MS word for average
> typing tasks?  Just boggles the mind.
> 
> The only ray of hope might come from Europe, where
> xenopobic governments might declare proprietary (US)

I think you've got that backwards.  The US is the one that started 
renaming french fries.

> software verboten. But, what to replace it? I sometimes
> wonder why such govt's don't just buy up wordperfect and
> quattropro, etc, and make all their govt workers (1/4th
> of French workers, for example), use it. Make wordperfect
> open source, even. Anything to beat back the encroachment
> of MS proprietary software. I think people just take the
> easiest way.

Israel, China and many European cities already are requiring Star Office 
or OpenOffice.  Some more enlightened US municipal governments are doing 
the same.

> 
> Well, MS is reporting record revenues but was hit by legal
> actions and stock options. The sky is clear for MS.

Apparently they don't even think so, considering their recent FUD 
campaigns.  The best way to tell when M$ is scared is when they start 
spreading FUD.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo: 		    http://netllama.ipfox.com

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