From owner-freebsd-chat Fri May 25 14:27:45 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from maile.telia.com (maile.telia.com [194.22.190.16]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E7D0E37B424 for ; Fri, 25 May 2001 14:27:42 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from fredrik@speechcraft.com) Received: from d1o74.telia.com (d1o74.telia.com [62.20.224.241]) by maile.telia.com (8.11.2/8.11.0) with ESMTP id f4PLRfW00302 for ; Fri, 25 May 2001 23:27:41 +0200 (CEST) Received: from molly.telia.com (t5o74p84.telia.com [212.181.216.84]) by d1o74.telia.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id XAA26401 for ; Fri, 25 May 2001 23:27:41 +0200 (CEST) Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 23:27:56 +0000 (/etc/localtime) From: Fredrik Olausson X-Sender: fredrik@molly.telia.com To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: The desktop apathy Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Hi all, Over the past few weeks there's been an increased amount of reporting in various on- and off-line media about the failure of open-source OS:es on the desktop. Eversince Ximian closed down, I feel it has accellerated into an apathy amongst the open-source community. Now, everywhere I look I see announcments that "company X is moving from the desktop to the server market" (MandrakeSoft) "OS Y is too technically oriented, and is not a viable option for desktop use" (Dell on Linux). This attitude surprises me. No open-source operating system has every had a market share on the desktop. However, there has always been a drive in the community to improve the viability of the OS on the desktop, just look at the KDE and Gnome project that have been maturing by leaps and bounds over the past few years (I still prefer FVWM tho ;) Now, I feel that this optimism has been transformed to apathy. If I am correct, it is indeed unfortunate and un-called for, there is still some miles to walk before we have 100% optimal gui:s and environments, but did anyone really think that we would have average home and office users sitting at *BSD or Linux computers so soon? What do you all think? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message