Desktop relevance

[richb-RBmg6HWzfGThzJAekONQAQ at public.gmane.org (Rich Braun)]

I was a Unix desktop user in the early '90s so when Linux came along (end of
1992) I immediately adopted it as my home desktop.  But Windows for Workgroups
came along and WINE really wasn't ready for primetime so if I wanted to use
most (OK, virtually *all*) desktop apps starting around 1994, I had to use
Windows.

Only in the past year have I tiptoed back into Linux on the desktop, this time
using VMware Server 2.0.  I did this first at the office using Ubuntu, and
then starting about 6 months ago using openSUSE 11 at home.

There have been two difficulties:

- Display drivers (and a couple of other types of devices) are still basically
controlled lock-stock-and-barrel by Microsoft.
- I have not found an adequate way to get native performance out of my desktop
apps, and I can't wean myself off some of them.

99% of all desktop apps are sold under Microsoft and very few are sold as
native Linux apps.  So you have to run some sort of compatibility mode, or you
have to learn to do without such things as income tax software, genalogy
software, QuickBooks and stuff like that.  I've got a hard drive with decades
of that stuff, and family members who depend on that.  It's just the modern
reality thanks to the market-share game that Microsoft won decades ago and is
not in any position to lose now.

The VMware Server 2.0 solution royally *sucks*.  I hate it!  I'm almost ready
to give up on it but don't want to because I like being able to copy/paste
stuff between Linux and Microsoft apps running on a single display.  On both
my office and home desktops, I find that the apps under VMware Server run 10x
slower than native.  And if they talk to the Samba server, data corruption
occasionally happens.  It's unbelievably awful.  And because it happens in two
completely separate places, I have to (someday) come up with a better solution
that gives me my copy/paste and reasonably simple administration.

For now here is the hack I've come up with:  set up one native Windows XP Pro
box (quad-core) as a timesharing terminal server.  Download a patch that
defeats Microsoft's single-user limit so two or three people can connect via
Remote Desktop Client simultaneously.  Then I don't have to deal with
compatibility mode and the only real problem is that some stuff looks/runs
piss-poor through RDC.

I'm still rooting for Linux on the desktop.  I think there are only two
entities that have a chance of success: the Ubuntu stuff and the openSUSE
PackMan movement.  The latter seems to have more legs lately, no thanks to the
American user (openSUSE's popularity never took off in the USA, though I've
been using it since SUSE 6).  Seems to be a European craze.  There is vastly
more desktop stuff that works under openSUSE out-of-the-box using the PackMan
distro site than any of the other repositories out there.

Red Hat is never gonna embrace the desktop; they put themselves somewhat at
risk in the data center by taking their position, because people like me do
have a bunch of desktops to support at the office and if I wind up building
these using openSUSE then I might toy with the idea of using openSUSE on
production servers.  For now, I'm still committed to RHEL and unlikely to
switch to SLES.

-rich