Randall C. Kennedy, InfoWorld
August 18, 2009
Will desktop Linux ever grow up? I ask because, after years of monitoring this wannabe Windows-killer’s progress, I’ve yet to see it emerge from its awkward adolescent stage. Despite numerous attempts by Canonical (Ubuntu’s creator) and others to dress Linux up and make it more respectable, this technological paean to anti-establishmentarianism remains as unpolished as ever.
Case in point: X.org. The FOSS crowd has made much of the open source platform’s graphical prowess (I still remember those cool Compiz/Beryl fan videos from YouTube’s early days). But as my contemporary Thom Holwerda of OS News fame found out the hard way, the current iteration of the Linux video driver stack is more or less a house of cards. Seemingly innocuous actions, like resizing a video playback window, can trigger a catastrophic failure of the X Window System, taking any running graphical applications down with it.
[ InfoWorld's Galen Gruman shows why desktop Linux would work well as the standard OS for many business and government users | Neil McAllister shows why it may be too late for desktop Linux to gain treal traction. ] more…
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