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Discussion on:
Ubuntu aims at healing Linux's 'paper cuts'

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Windows Competition
chromeronin 17th Jun 2009
The biggest threat MS sees to Vista and Win7 is
pirated versions of XP and WIn7, then followed
a log way behind by Linux.
However there is one important thing to note,
Linux is just the Kernel. Like Mach kernel is
for OS X, (Which is based on BSD anyway) Most
of the tools and utilities come from GNU. These
are very similar in most linux distros and in
OSX. This is the nature of the Unified part of
the name UNIX. Many tools and utilities can be
designed across Linux and OS X because of a
common security model and similar file system
layout. The differences are more apparent in
the GUI. In linux, you can pretty much use
whatever you want. In OS X, you get Aqua or X11
only (Although I believe KDE is working on a
native OSX port)
Application installs - I think the Apple method
is pretty good as all of the application
packages come in one file, and ussually are
very easy to remove or move. However .RPM and
.deb files for Linux make installing and
removing most software a single line command.
Compare this to MS and the .msi model. This is
better than it used to be, but still hard to
track down dependancies and remove the app when
the install goes pear shaped.
For me though what takes the most time is
mapping drives (NFS, CIFS etc) This should be
mush more seamless than it is. FUSE makes a
difference here with file systems that can be
mounted in user space, but performance is an
issue there. The UI itself is pretty good. I
like both KDE and Gnome. The default
settings/themes usually last no more than 30
seconds on my machines though 8)
Usability studies sometime provide good
results. I really like the application menu
panel in KDE that came out of Novells study,
but I don't like the Gnome one so much.
The only really sucky part of the normal
GNU/Linux desktop is monitor and desktop
resolution changing. This has to be made much
slicker on desktops and laptops. I love the way
OS X fades all of the major screen changes. I
have never seen it display a bunch of crap from
the video card memory the way i've seen on
Linux and Windows (Vista and Win7 are a big
improvement here over XP)
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