Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2003 10:01:23 -0400 From: "Person, Roderick" <personrp@ccbh.com> To: advocacy@freebsd.org, "Gregory A. Gilliss" <ggilliss@netpublishing.com> Subject: RE: Brilliant and very useful for FreeBSD, IMHO Message-ID: <46AEB8C1B628D511969200508B6FE42A088D932B@1upmc-msx6.isdip.upmc.edu>
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Just an over all response, I think the biggest problem with the "Is BSD ready for the Desktop?", is the definition of desktop. It seems to me that term desktop has come to mean what every M$ wants it to mean. Myself I use BSD at home as my desktop. I'm at work now, and have no choice of what I can run. I don't dual boot at all anymore. I can check e-mail. I can browse the web. I can do word processing. I can watch DVDs, listen to mp3s and divx movies. I can write programs - since I'm a programmer. There are file sharing programs for people that do that - and they are all compatible with the windows versions. I can even play a game if I want. So what can't I do? I can't do anything proprietary! I can't play a game that is designed for windows. Just the same as a Mac user can't. I can open Word XP documents - can't do that on windows 98 either. I can't run Visual Studio or a VB program( why would I want to - but that's a different story)! But windows can't kde, gnome or thousands of other programs written for a *nix OS. But windows is generally regarded as the desktop os. I don't think anyone would say that Windows is not ready for the desktop because you can't run KOffice or ready a document saved in a KWord format. But, the same person will say that you BSD isn't ready because you can't run MS Word or MS Office. This may just be my perception though. What brought this to my mind is a commercial I see allot now. Juno internet service advertises that you can IM anyone using any other service such MSN, Yahoo and AOL. It states you can't do that with anyone else. Every time I see that I think to myself - hell I do that on FreeBSD with everybuddy! Just my $0.02!! Roderick Person Programmer (412)454-2616 personrp@ccbh.com http://www.ccbh.com
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