> > , and linux's network capabilities are surperior to
> > windows in all respects.
>
> *All* respects? Not quite. There is nothing in Unix-land (or anywhere
> else, AFAIK) that even begins to compare with the capabilities of COM+ for
> writing distributed applications.
Having written a lot of distributed code, I can say I'd rather use Java
RMI and CORBA any day over DCOM.
> > > or that the
> > currently available UIs are no good (Irrelevant, you can put any UI on
> > top of Unix you want. Hopefully soon open source UIs will achieve ease
> > of use parity with Windows (e.g., <http://www.eazel.com/>) and some
> > developers will move on to more radical interfaces.)
>
> Now, I thought it was supposed to be the evil Micro$ofties that tried to
> treat vaporware like a current feature. :-) I could say the same thing
> about Windows with equal accuracy (after all, it runs POSIX applications,
> DOS programs, and all the major Unix shells, and Microsoft could easily slap
> other interfaces on top if they wanted to). The questions are:
>
> 1) Is there anything decent you can use now (and if you have to compile it
> yourself, you've completely missed the point as far as the mass market is
> concerned).
Yes, Eazel is vaporware, but KDE isn't, and Corel's customized KDE is
competitive with Windows/MacOS. Corel really did their homework: it
ain't your father's Red Hat.
> 2) Is there reason to think that X years of improvement in Linux UIs will
> yield better results than X years of improvement in Microsoft UIs? (And it
> would be nice if the reason amounted to more than 'oh, open source will
> automatically make everything wonderful'.)
There is one other reason: Unlike Windows and MacOS, Unix GUIs won't be
as handcuffed by an installed base. Since existing Unix UIs have many
differences among them, Unix software tends to be written in a non UI-
specific manner, so it can more flexibly adapt to new ones. And open
source (of popular apps if not the UI) _is_ a big advantage: if a new
UI-maker wants to show off his stuff with popular apps, he doesn't have to
talk the appmakers into supporting him, he can just do it himself: witness
Qt/Mozilla.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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