Out of the geek loop

[womzilla]

I hadn't heard until tonight about the annoucement that Red Hat was getting out of the business of producing Linux for workstations and that the CEO has said that home users should stick to Microsoft Windows instead because Linux was not a mature desktop system.

Wow.

I heard about this through a post to Epicycle (from Avedon), which includes this pithy summary:

Complexity doesn't scare me, and after twenty five years of experience I don't usually need my hand held - but I know what I like, and I know what I consider to be reasonable behaviour in a desktop computer system, and having to reach for a compiler to rebuild the OS kernel every time I want to perform some minor hardware tweak is not it.

Comments

[mneme]

IMO, the thing's been pulled out of purportion -- RH is still producing Linux (Fedora Linux) for workstations, and the statement that Linux on the desktop is still not ready for the consumer is merely accurate (though to be fair, it's more easily usable, given carefully chosen hardware, than, say, Windows circa '90).

RH is dropping -support- (and the willingness to use their brand) for workstations, though, which may have an impact; I've long ceased to be all that impressed with RH disties, though I still use them in some circumstances.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

This is thoroughly not my world, but my understanding from those whose world I inhabit who seem to understand it, is that Linux is already on tens of thousands of consumer desktops, hidden under the label OSX.

[avram]

The people who’ve told you that are wrong; MacOS X is running on top of the FreeBSD version of Unix, not on Linux (which isn’t technically a Unix at all, but it’s close enough for most purposes).