Re: The desktop wars

Peter Gordon wrote:

Good. The apps are cross-platform and interact well with other apps
and file formats. Now how does Granny User transfer her settings from
Windows Firefox/Thunderbird/OO.org/etc. to Linux?

It would depend on who's Granny.

Currently no easy way exists to do this (of which I am aware). By
"easy" here, I want there to be some way to have a dialog which says
"I want to transfer these settings/bookmarks/preferences/et al. from
my Windows applications to my Linux installation" with clickable
options for Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Gaim) and the user
could just click it. Even nice would be things like transferring what
we could of a user's MS Outlook setup to the corresponding Evolution
configuration or transferring a Trillian buddy list to Gaim, etc. It
would be very difficult to ensure everything was transferred
correctly, but I think it would really help people learn to use
GNU/Linux further without the trouble of reconfiguring their client
software for instant messaging, email, web browsing, etc. (Hey, a
geek can dream, right? :o)

That's a nice dream. OC, you can't do that now with any platform so if
Linux were to accomplish this it would do so before any other OS. But
again, that's the realm of dreams.

Not necessarily. Sure, it's easy to use for beginner computer users,
but even my own grandmother was rather proficient with
Windows-specific stuff.

There's that Grandma again. Maybe you might like to read this and see
that the Grandmother argument no longer applies.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6562

Admittedly, things like what you have
mentioned, as well as central and trusted software repositories
(rather than downloading from "cool-applications-example.com" or
similar) are a major plus for GNU/Linux and the Free desktop in
general, many computer users would need to relearn how to use GNOME
or KDE (or another WM/DE) and how to use which apps to achieve
specific goals, etc.

Currently this is a 10 minute exercise for most regular users. The
people that actually have more problems moving over are the MS-Windows
power users. They are the ones who are so locked into the way they do
things now it's hard for them to change.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest defeats for the Free desktop
currently is lack of proper video driver support from major
manufacturers, such as NVidia/ATi. Thankfully, ATi's older stuff
works well with the in-tree radeon drivers and Intel has published
specs and source code for the drivers for their integrated Graphics
Media Accelerator stuff; (Thanks, Intel!) and the Open Video project
looks very promising as well.

This is 100% the fault of the HW vendors. Nothing can be done until
they start playing fair, unfortunately.

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