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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (1220)	3/3/1999 2:34:00 AM
From: Mitch Blevins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2617

My guess is that Corel's "Desktop Linux" will be based on one of the better distributions (SuSE or Debian), and short of their commercial products (CorelDRAW, Wordperfect, etc) they will donate all of their improvements (installation and configuration proggies) back under the GPL. The desktop environment will of course be GNOME. -Mitch

To: JC Jaros who wrote (1220)	3/3/1999 4:54:00 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 2617

Well it is dated (X11R4) but a lot of the problems as you know still exist. The X GUI is clunky. It is sure no Windows and Netscape true to form operates the same stupid way. It is huge, slow, a memory hog (needs 64 megs ram) and crashes. It will also crash your system too. Although their POP mail pickup works I cannot for the life of me figure out why they decided not to be able to import ascii mail lists and bypass the good mail box system of Unix and go to the huge corruptible file mess that they did. That is no database system. X still locks with a lot of programs. It still is hard to write. MOtif is no solution still. Cut and past is anemic. Virtual desktops systems are a bit of a pain. Printing is not there yet. Neither is OLE, DDE or other doc interoperation... Wouldn't it be nice if the display would print out just like you see it? What are computers for? Wouldn't it be nice if the man pages actually explained something in pop up files and did not assume that you graduated in Comp Sci with a PhD form MIT? I don't think the average user is Linux ready. In 5 years Linux may be ready for the average user. But it will take work. Work takes money I have found. It would be naive indeed to assume that a user will buy 5 Linux manuals worth 40 dollars apiece but won't pay 100 bucks for a decent GUI with drivers. And it has already been written.. way way better than X. Commercial code does not have to be MS. I think there is no time like now to improve the GUI for Linux. Where is the X replacement?. Why are two groups working feverishly on doing just that? Is athe 600 megs of Gnome code going to do it for mr average? What decade? You know how that is goingto turn out. The Berlin project is the same boat.. different channel. But read my lips. Better men have a.l.r.e.a.d.y d.o.n.e i.t. Yes. It was done and better than Berlin or Gnome. So? Why sit and suffer? Why not not build/rebuild the GUI_that _worked? With display printing inherent? With net/wprocessor document code commonality. Why should there be one code for net documents and one for machine documents and one for printers... duh.. Wouldn't you rather have a smooth workable GUI rather than a patch quilt of where_do_we_ go from_ here? How but trusted code extensibility for intranets? We know Java is not there now or perhaps will never be. Too slow. No pointers. Won't do complex tasks. How about database code commonality? Why should it take a PhD to build a relational list in the OS? Aren't all notes and worklists linked? Why can't you link them yourself in the OS? Is X the working GUI with band aids on it for the 21st century? I think you know its not there. And it cannnot be pushed or hacked to get there. Redesign is needed. Not more mortar over old mistakes. EC<:-}