Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 20 May 2009 06:33
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
One debate which the FOSS community will never give up on is the one about GNU/Linux on the desktop. No matter that the two big companies which were once interested in putting GNU/Linux on the desktop have now officially given up.
Practically every year since the early 2000s, we've had articles about it being the year of the GNU/Linux desktop. One doesn't really mind these, given that journalists often regurgitate the same arguments on an annual basis, no matter what the subject.
But when it comes to intellectual dishonesty about the debate, when it comes to being a scramble for traffic without facts, then one does need to take issue. If only because nobody will dare to do so - some debates are considered too big to cross.
A couple of days back, the American technology news accumulation site, Slashdot,
linked to
a site on which someone had listed his reasons why Linux is not ready for the desktop. Of course, the man is free to list anything he wants - but when that information is disseminated as something else, we get into troubled waters.
At the top of this list, was a line reading, "a primary target of this comparison is Windows OS." And that should have been enough reason for anybody who considers themselves to have a shred of intellectual honesty to move on.
Not so with Slashdot. The piece was linked to and resulted in a goodly volume of traffic. Which I supposed is what the story is all about - traffic, no matter what pulls people in.
Any seasoned GNU/Linux user knows that a debate which compares the operating system to Windows and tries to match one with the other, feature for feature, is a waste of time. GNU/Linux is not Windows, and vice versa. This long-running
excellent, logical essay says it much better that I ever could.
The two are similar in that they are computer operating systems and the similarity ends there. People who use GNU/Linux do so for entirely different reasons as compared to those who use Windows.
There are strengths in one system that are absent in the other. There are weaknesses in one that are absent in the other. There are common tasks that both can perform but then one doesn't switch because of that.
CONTINUED
