On 01/10 01:23 , Kristopher Browne wrote:
> I was at a Usenix conference in 2002 and then 2003... what I could see then is that the percentage of Linux laptops vs PowerBooks flipped in pretty much one year.
> 
> In '02 it was about 50% there using windows, 40% some kind of Linux (some of it on Apple hardware) and 10% Mac OSX.
> 
> In '03 I'd have said it was about the same for Windows, but 30% Macs with Mac OSX and the remaining 20% Linux. 
> 
> That trend seems to have mostly continued. 


Looking back, I think one of the limiting factors is that Linux desktop
environments have not gotten any better since about that early-00s time
period. They've gotten *different*, but not necessarily *better*. I've been
doing Linux on the desktop for about 17 years at this point, and while there
are now many more applications, and those applications are more functional,
the usability and configurability of the base environment is little better
than it was 10 years ago. 

Even if you can get past the UI differences (GNOME I'm looking at you),
things as seemingly basic as changing the display resolution are difficult
or impossible to find. It's not apparent to most users that there are two
major different desktop environments (GNOME and KDE), and each has its *own*
control panels. Then there's limitations like an inability to change the
width of scrollbars, wierd semi-popup scrollbars like GNOME uses (which are
hard to grab), different scrollbars between applications, undesireable
inconsistencies in adherence to chosen color schemes (on one application a
non-default background color works fine because you can change the text
color, on another application the text color doesn't change which makes the
text unreadable), etc.

I accept that different widget sets will be with us for a long time to come.
However, it would be nice if some effort was put into at least making a
common format/method/interface for setting colors. So both GNOME and KDE
widgets would use a common set of colors between them.

-- 
Carl Soderstrom
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com