Re: [tlug] How revolutionary is M2?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "jb" == Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com> writes:

    jb> I would argue that Debian actually gives you something like
    jb> [ease-of-installation] via apt-get, but others would say that
    jb> nothing which involves typing something at the CLI or
    jb> memorizing even one command qualifies :-p

Well, Cygwin and XEmacs give InstallShield levels of ease on Windows,
and XEmacs _could_ extend that to Unix, but we currently don't bother.
It presumably would be quite easy to adapt the netinstaller to Debian.

Aptitude isn't bad now (especially since somebody _finally_ realized
that the right setting for `sid' is "hold the pickles, hold the
lettuce").  It could be GUIed easily, I think, but probably half the
users would abandon it as soon as that happened.  :-)

    jb> For home use, even with supervision, there is still a ways to
    jb> go in the area of multimedia.

OK.  "Network externalities" make this a hard one to crack.  With at
least three rather different versions of the Linux kernel in use, not
to mention KDE and GNOME rewiring the world on minor version bumps,
vendors are not going to go to the effort of providing Linux drivers
the way they do for MSFT and Apple.  Keeping up with leading edge
multimedia will probably require serious changes in the way OSS is
developed.

    >> Try a Sharp Zaurus.  All the opacity you could want; the
    >> notepad tool can't even find a README without the .txt
    >> extension.  vi, of course, has no trouble.  :-)

    jb> Gee, that *is* awfully Windows-like ;-)

Except that on a machine that doesn't even provide less, vi is
installed by default.  No gcc, unfortunately.  :-)

    jb> This is true, although a misconfigured Linux box may also make
    jb> a better platform to take over and use to launch attackes
    jb> against others

No question about it.  That's why I say the firewall is critical.

    jb> This is good.  I would add the common instant messaging
    jb> protocols to it, though.  Having the user specify which ones
    jb> to allow is an option.

    jb> So, when are you going to announce the launch of Turnbullinux? 
    jb> :-)

Heh.  The day Linus accepts XEmacs as a kernel module.  ;-)

    >> Note: webservers and stuff like that are a different matter.
    >> The target audience ("Windows is good enough for them") doesn't
    >> want them,

    jb> SuSE is at least something like this.  The standard boxed set
    jb> does not include servers, compilers, etc.

Yikes!  Things have changed, things have changed.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
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