[Dclug] Where is the free software dividend?

[Kevin Dwyer]

On Sat, Dec 02, 2006 at 12:32:00PM -0500, Adam Morey wrote:
> You can debate whether Linux does or will eventually do these things,
> but the reality is, there are productivity and technology improvements
> of Windows that slay linux, mostly in the presentation aspects, that
> hinder linux desktop adoption.

Microsoft cut the interesting features from Vista long ago once they
realized that they were intractable to produce.  They couldn't delay
Vista any further, so it's merely XP++ (XQ? XP#? ;-p). 

> Linux was getting close to XP is terms of features and support,
> personally I'm not a big fan of Ubuntu, but think Freespire will
> become a dominant player, as unlike Ubuntu it has a strong commercial
> backing in Linspire to keep it fresh - and their core business model
> is to make it user-friendly, and of course to make it look good
> (personally I think the fonts available for Ubuntu for example, to
> surf the web, are kind of sad).  Btw - Linspire.com has links to Best
> Buy, Walmart, Fry and others who offer linux machines on the web -
> with Linspire of course.

Your gripe is that there is a poor default selection of fonts for the
web?

[preamble to run-on clipped]

> in five years, the standard $800 desktop might be a quad processor,
> 512MB video with 4GB ram, hybrid flash/disk drives - why would you run
> linux on a box like that instead of Vista?

Just to get some work done.

-kpd