I am going to to summarize the most common problems encountered by newbies and desktop users on Linux. Is the situation recoverable? It certainly is, but the Linux Standard Base organization must impose a bunch of severe standards to be strictly respected. Hardware manufacturers may face similar problems when thinking about porting drivers.Software houses cannot develop something and be sure it will work everywhere.Programmers waste their efforts (and ability, time, money) in creating similar projects, and related configuration tools, documentation, translations.Beginners get confused by the amount of “duplicated” software bundled into distributions.So, is Linus Torvalds’ creature now ready to conquer the desktop? In my opinion, the answer is “not fully, not for everyone”, and the reason is the lack of solid standards, which results in the following problems. Applications have dramatically improved, too, both in quality and quantity: OpenOffice, AbiWord, Mozilla, Evolution, Gimp are examples of packages allowing Linux to be used for everyday work. Everyone can see the Linux world has been making giant steps towards usability during the last five years. Of course I cannot say it was a wise choice for a beginner, and I soon moved to Red Hat, and then tried various SuSE, Mandrake and Debian flavours now I am using this good Slackware 8.1. When I first got in touch with the Linux world – it was back in 1998 -, I started with an old Slackware distribution.
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