Re: Linux on the desktop - it's come a long way, but is it there yet?

["Rich Braun" <user=44@nabble.blu.org>]

 Ben Holland challenged: 
> Basically the message is this: It's open sourced for a reason, if there is a 
> problem with it submit a bug or code up the solution and submit the code 
> changes for a review. 

Actually, at work I've been pioneering something that I hope to someday push 
out as an uber-distro installation/update environment.  It's a multi-year 
effort, though, and currently a lot buggier than the things other people wrote 
that I've been griping about.  (We open-source advocates are as hardwired to 
complain about other people's code as Boston drivers are to tailgate, cut off, 
and otherwise harass the rest of the drivers ;-) 

> As far as like money management stuff, have you looked at gnu cash?  I 
> haven't used it yet but from people who have they say it's great once you 
> get use to it. IT IS NOT QUICKEN! ~Ben 

Yeah, I looked at Gnu cash a couple years ago.  Unless you're in the 
financial-services business, you're not in a good position to keep abreast of 
all the proprietary technologies that are hitting the Web at the speed of 
light the past couple of years.  Give Gnu cash another decade or so before 
enough of the online services stabilize to make an open-source tool as useful 
as one of the proprietary ones published by the likes of H&R Block or which 
can aggregate web services from the likes of eTrade, the FastLane and Bank of 
America.  It's currently a rat's nest of protocols and the only places where 
any developers are putting meaningful efforts are on the vendors' web servers 
and/or a couple of widely-used Windows apps.  No matter:  that's where 
Xen/VMware and the hypervisor come in.  You can have an 80/20 split between 
Linux-native and Windows-virtual apps these days, complete with copy/paste 
across windows running within either environment on the same desktop. 

-rich 


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