so what will it take for linux to actually compete on the desktop? there’s a ton of software, but very little of it i would call polished.

firefox and thunderbird are great apps, and it’s good to have them on the linux side, but until they(and by “they” i mean “whoever”) can  fix the font problem firefox is always going to look a bit off. fonts in general seem to be a problem on linux. this isn’t late breaking news, but in 10 + years nobody has done anything about it?

games. games have state of the art graphics…for 1986.

if there were a supreme commander or command  and conquer 3 for linux you wouldn’t hear linux people say “i have a windows machine strictly for gaming”

another thing that isn’t exactly the fault of the linux desktop is cross platform softwre. i have yet to see one that doesn’t look off or work flawlessly. maybe tkblog is the only one but i could be biased there.

one thing i’d have to say is there should be no complaint about linux eye candy on the desktop. it’s better than what you can get on windows or the mac. although it’s harder to install and configure. of course i’m thinking of beryl or compiz fusion… i haven’t tackled either of them but i’m not expecting either of them to work out of the box.  especially on feisty

all this frustration comes from my experience with songbird on feisty. not ready for primetime. i had to find gstreamer packages for codecs. isn’t apt-get supposed to take care of dependancies? unless the package maintainers just forgot about that half of a multi-media app…

i have songbird half working but i had to spend WAY too much time on it. so linux on the desktop is not a failure but it’s taking a long time to make any windows user happy

it used to be that a journalist had to do some fact checking if he wanted to stay employed for very long.

“linux has failed on the desktop”

how often have you read an article that had a subject line similar to that one? well if you’re a linux fan, and found it  worrisome. worry no more!

linux has NOT failed on the desktop. how’s that you say? simple. because linux “succeeding” on the desktop has no time limit. there was no cut off date. something could happen in the next month that makes linux the perfect desktop operating system, or it could happen next year. or ten years from now.

i think columnists are comparing the linux desktop to windows desktop. and if the microsoft shills find something that doesn’t work exactly like bill told them it should work it’s “hard to use” or “not as convenient”. using that measuring stick vista has failed on the desktop.