I usually hate whitepapers like this. But this is a well-written, informed and thoughtful write-up.

I enjoyed reading this.

http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux...p.current.html

Of course, Ill continue to use Arch as my desktop anyway

"Informed"? LOL.

The sources for the "Audio Subsystem" section are Slashdot summaries that are years old and that were arguably invalid when they came out. IIRC, they were quoting Adobe's excuses for not getting the Linux Flash player working right. Adobe's Linux Flash team was composed of the most stupid people in the business. (If you were on that team and you're reading this: Adobe was right to fire you and outsource your job to Google, because your track record, rather, your lack of it, speaks for itself). They didn't know what they were talking about when they made those excuses, and they had no idea what they were doing.

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^^ Sarcasm on my part.

Just so I'm on the same page.

Luckily, it's on the winds that we might not need Adobe Flash/Shockwave anymore, with HTML5 canvas and all that. So that's something to look forward to. Or HOPE happens.

This guy is reallllly nit-picky though, and while I agree here and there, overall, I think Linux is fine as a desktop. And also, a LOT of what he mentions isn't wrong,.. it just has to do with the industry being closed-source and the Nix guys having to reverse engineer drivers to get things to work.

(Shrug ...) "Who cares?"

I mean, "really!" Linux, in the form of Android, is by now running most of the portable devices in the world ... while Unix, in the form of iOS, is running almost all the rest. (And . . . Unix, in the form of OS/X, "is doing quite nicely indeed" on millions of Macintoshes!)

Both the days of "computing == laptop/desktop," and the days of "laptop/desktop == Microsoft Windows," are truly "in the past." (Oh, so 20th Century...)

Yes, Microsoft will continue to have plenty of customers ... and let us give the Devil his proper due: "Microsoft is damm good at what they do!" Yes, they will continue to prosper for a very long time and (yes, I mean this) will truly deserve to do so. But still, the game has changed for good. Neither they, nor "the laptop/desktop," have any exclusive anymore. The sea-change has occurred. "Cooperative software development" has changed everything, and there is no turning back; only, moving forward. "Portable devices" have become the forefront of computing in this new "Internet of Things," and . . . uhhhh . . . "Linux PWNS that world, D00D!"

Linux has been ready for the desktop since I started using it. "Readiness for the desktop" is not the issue.

The issue is that the average consumer thinks that "Windows is computers," he or she cannot bring a computer with Linux on it home from the Big Box Store, and he or she never has and never will install an operating system, because the computer is a scary magic box. And, as much as I loathe how MS does business, I do credit them for making computer use accessible to the general public.

Folks who focus on "Is Linux ready for the desktop" are like gerbils in a exercise wheel--they keep spinning, but they are never going to get anywhere.

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Linux would be desktop ready if vendors for software would support it as well as hardware OEMs giving direct contributions to kernel drivers or releasing their own drivers. Because most hardware has to wait at least up to 3-12 months to get stable drivers, few vendors are willing to support it.

Why release a game for GNU/Linux with drivers that are possibly unstable, untested, and might not work, when you can release it for Windows with drivers that do work?

Plus, because no two distributions can effectively settle on a package manager system, and the Loki installer a=was never formally adopted for GNU/Linux, few vendors are willing to support a distribution that isn't as mainstream as others.

My desktop has had Linux on it for most of its life, I bought it minus an OS about 5 years ago. About a couple of years ago, due to temporary insanity, I bought and installed (dual-boot) Windows 7 Home Premium. It lasted 2 days. I could tell my desktop wasn't happy running such an inferior product. So it will never be ready for Windows.

"And this," my good friend, "is where today I disagree with you." On two points:

1. Today, I believe that "the average consumer thinks that a tablet and/or a smart-phone is a computer." As in, "all the computer they need or want." They think that way because these types of computers do "do everything they want," and they never need to take it to the Geek Squad because it's stuffed with malware.
2. Macintoshes ... which run OS/X (Mach/Darwin Unix) but which do not concern the end-user with that fact ... are also increasingly popular. ... You can walk into any Starbucks Coffee shop in the US and see that for yourself.

The one place where Windows continues to do remarkably well is the X-Box gaming system. And of course in corporation-land, where their vertically integrated stack of software that is extremely easy to manage from centralized locations, continues to earn its keep.

But the "average consumer" market? I cordially submit that, that battlefield has already been ceded to Unix/Linux-based equipment, and Microsoft will never recover it.

Nor should they try, I think. Steve Ballmer tried almost-obsessively to do that, and I think it was a mistake. Windows is still King of the Hill in highly profitable market segments, that lately have been slighted in favor of this probably now-unprofitable one. (It's easy to overlook and easier to "diss" just how good Microsoft still is in the areas which it still rightly [IMHO...] dominates.)

Then I believe the phrase is: Folks who focus on "Is Linux ready for the desktop" are hamstering.

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i think this recent post is evident that linux still isnt ready for most peoples desktops:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...tu-4175496142/

The problem with Linux on the desktop is that you still have to want to run it. It can be ideology or financial but there has to be a reason to switch. There is still a lack of commercial software support no matter whose fault it is that needs to be addressed. Linux on the desktop finally offers 90% of what I need and that's now why I run it full time on two of my three boxes but until there is CC/CS support I cannot give up my Mac.

Isn't the Mac OS just FreeBSD nix all dressed up?

FreeBSD is Just OS X Without the Good Bits

This is as much a myth about OS X as about FreeBSD: that OS X is just FreeBSD with a pretty GUI. The two operating systems do share a lot of code, for example most userland utilities and the C library on OS X are derived from FreeBSD versions. Some of this code flow works in the other direction, for example FreeBSD 9.1 and later include a C++ stack and compiler that were originally developed for OS X, with major parts of the work done by Apple employees. Other parts are very different.

The XNU kernel used on OS X includes a few subsystems from (older versions of) FreeBSD, but is mostly an independent implementation. The similarities in the userland, however, make it much easier to port OS X code to FreeBSD than any other system. For example, both libdispatch (Grand Central Dispatch in Apple's marketing) and libc++ were written for OS X and worked on FreeBSD before any other OS.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths

www.apple.com/darwin
goes to the site where you can download/examine all the stuff that os-x/ios are based on (i would beleive it wouldnt include the gui/menu system -- just the under-the-hood kernel/command-line gnu software that they have to provide as part of the licensing agreement).

it makes sense that they would use the bsd kernel since steve woz and jobs met at cal-berkley before he dropped out to start apple (i would imagine that many cal-berkley engineers probably work on bsd for senior design project).

i've had frustrations with using macs to do programming on because gcc was missing or there was no apache so i had to hax something up with netcat. my suspicion is that they remove those programs so that they could sell os-x server licenses for more money (or whatever ide they sell for their development distro).

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But up until OS X and 10.5 for that matter Mac OS wasn't POSIX compliant, OS X is Jobs' baby.