| Top N Things That Have Been Solved |
(continuation)
Note: If you've haven't read the first part, you might want to go back to the main article before reading this.
It's easy to forget how far we've come, looking at the list of nitpicks that still exist today. But just take a look at a few of things that have been solved. Based on the past diligence of OSS developers, I expect to migrate all the items on the other page to this one over the next six months or so!
1. No journaling filesystem.
Many journalists cited lack of a journaling filesystem as the number one thing holding back Linux. Today there are a number of excellent choices, many supported by top-name vendors such as IBM and SGI.
2. Lack of good desktop environments and esp. unified widget toolkits.
Qt, GTK, GNOME, and KDE brought the free UNIX desktop from "non-existent" to "stunningly slick" in about three years. Both of these projects represent not only incredible victories for open source in general, but are some of the most amazing collaborative projects ever undertaken by mankind.
3. No 'best' office suite.
A year ago, office suites had the same problem as browsers do today - there was no one "best choice." We have Sun to thank for launching this one. By opening the code, the community was able to rip out all the stuff that sucked about it (bloated "desktop" functionality, no cut-n-paste, loads of bugs) and turn it into a very usable office suite, OpenOffice 1.0. There's still more to be done but now choosing the most functional office suite is a no-brainer.
Not to say that I don't hope the other offerings (especially KOffice) catch up soon; but OpenOffice's feature set and awesome import/export filters are hard to compete with. I suspect it will be a while before the others are on par with it.
4. No Microsoft Office.
Many people aren't content with just an office suite, they want the industry standard. Thanks to the good folks at CodeWeavers, now you can have it! All the Microsoft Office apps (and Internet Explorer to boot) are now quite usable on the Linux desktop via Crossover Office.
VMWare deserves an honorable mention here as well, though it's not really ideal for this sort of thing, since the app windows aren't a part of your regular desktop.
5. No anti-aliased fonts.
XFree, Qt, and GTK all support AA now. (One small complaint; the latest version of KDE doesn't use AA for most of its displays. A FAQ claims that this is because "all the default fonts are bitmaps." Whose dumb idea was that?)
Dishonorable mention: Mozilla still doesn't display anti-aliased. Yetch!
6. No easy update path for most Linux users.
Yes, we all love apt-get, but looking at the numbers, we see that Debian is less than 10% of all Linux users. The introduction of Red Hat's up2date (other distros have introduced their own equivalents as well) makes it stunningly easy to keep up with security patches.
7. No IDE with integrated debugging.
A few years ago I was working in the video game industry. The company I worked for had early versions of Sony's PS2 development stations, and the only development tools available at that point were gcc/gdb or the Code Warrior IDE, both for Linux only. The former is not an IDE and the later did not support inline debugging. Developers used to MS Visual Studio were in tears.
Today, KDevelop offers all the cool stuff you'd want from an IDE including the holy grail, integrated debugging.
8. No DirectX equivalent.
Creating games required the compositing of many unrelated libraries, and in some cases coding to some fairly low-level interfaces, such as /dev/audio and /dev/joystick. OpenGL was the exception, but it only handled 3D. Switching to a desired resolution in full screen was difficult to do right.
Enter Simple Direct Media layer - it does everything DirectX does, but with a cleaner interface and cross-platform capability. I know one commercial game developer that thinks that open source is silly, but he uses SDL to create his Win32-only games because he prefers it to DX! Honorable mention here goes to Loki, who helped guide SDL to being a toolkit capable of supporting the demands of commercial game developers.
9. Movie viewing.
MPlayer covers most everything including DivX with its amazing "load this windows dll" method; the only remaining one is QuickTime, which you can view quite well with Crossover Plugin. Xine appears pretty cool as well, and there are others (though to be honest I don't have much occasion to watch movies, so I'm not that familiar with them).
Super honorable mention goes to Jon Johansen for DeCSS, simultaneously striking a blow for Linux, and freedom of speech.
10. Digital camera support.
GPhoto rocks.
Unfortunately, I still have to use the USB mass storage driver for mine (Fuji FinePix) - it's not hard, though I had to be bright enough to add a line to my fstab. I believe that SuSE will handle this part for you, and probably others as well.
11. Hard-to-use bootloader.
LILO didn't quite manage to keep up with the needs of Linux users. The embarrassing "can't boot from a cylinder above 1024" issue, the ultra minimalistic interface scary to non-powerusers, and the ability to screw up your system by forgetting to run lilo after installing a new kernel all were starting to make things suck a lot. GRUB fixed all of this, and more.
12. No good mail client.
As a faithful user of mutt for many years, it was hard for me to admit, but: in today's world, especially the world of business, the text-based apps really don't quite cut it. Say what you will about viruses, but Outlook is what people want. (I've never Outlook, so I can't comment on it specifically.) Enter Evolution, the all-in-wonder mail client for GNOME. Our employees just love Evolution, and even I was finally convinced to switch away from my old text-based MUA. Bravo to Ximian for this vital contribution to Linux on the desktop.
Copyright © 2002, Adam Wiggins. All rights reserved. Reproduced by DesktopLinux.com with permission.
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