Desktop Linux - A Passionate Analysis - Part I

Introduction

Having read numerous articles about the current Desktop War that is going on; as GNU/Linux enthusiasts, developers and administrators writing mega bytes of articles, blogs and reports on amazing capabilities and caliber of GNU/Linux in Desktop and justify their theories and predictions on it's future, I decided to write my own Blog about what I like in Desktops and my reasons to believe that GNU/Linux satisfies those reasons fairly well though improvements are always there.

Note that most of my blog is entirely based on my experiences and the numerous articles I have read (I have tried to give references to most of them, but I couldn't since most of the articles are saved in my hard drive as ODF format copied from sites) and I have avoided the technical aspects (such as describing how one particular task is carried out in GNU/Linux vs Windows) at the most.

This article is for one who needs a very layman way of explaining such as "iPod is a digital and sophisticated Walkman with facility to store songs in it" rather than "iPod is a brand of portable media players designed and marketed by Apple. It can also transfer photos, videos, games, and calendars to the models that support them." and so on. Now let's get into the blog.

Past: Quick Preview

Years back, when GNU/Linux started becoming a mainstream, the main goal was to provide a robust operating system with tight security right out of the box and thus roaming much of its early years with a geek look and feel to it; however, over the years, realizing it’s not an easy task to capture the OS market unless the home user starts recognizing it, GNU/Linux developers and contributors started investing their time, thought and money in making GNU/Linux a full-featured general user desktop.

The biggest hurdle to bring this Geeky Operating System to the normal user was the Geek coating that came along with GNU/Linux, not to mention the lack of “driver” support from the hardware manufacturers and GNU/Linux hardliners (though their arguments are ethically valid to a large extent) who oppose proprietary drivers.

Modern GNU/Linux Desktops

The past two years saw major change in the way GNU/Linux distributions evolved. It became flashier, challenging the other operating systems with technologies implemented in the best possible ways and far, richer hardware support out of the box and thus making a mockery of the proprietary operating systems like Windows and Macintosh (Their 'it just works' happens because it's custom made hardware, just try installing OS X into any other hardware and you'll understand what I am talking about).

Now it has reached a point where each and every distribution brings out major change on in how the Operating System looks within a short span of time between each release. The leading desktop environments, KDE & GNOME brings rapid changes to give better Desktop experience to the normal users. Though there are other desktop environments that exists (Xfce, E17 to name a few), these two are the real leaders in evolving and giving best Desktop experiences. Despite severe criticism from the Linux founder, GNOME leads mightily along with KDE (The number one position among KDE and GNOME cannot be decided since every distribution comes with these two desktops and there is no survey on which desktop manager is being used by an individual).

The raising success of GNU/Linux is credited on being extraordinarily scalable and the ability to run on everything from handheld to supercomputers. Features in the Linux 2.6.x kernel have been particularly aimed at making the kernel easier to port to embedded Linux systems, as well as large multi-processor and enterprise-quality servers.

I have classified my analysis under 11 categories as below.

• Usability
• Administration & Maintenance
• Choice
• OS Response
• Security
• Hardware Detection
• Customizability
• Trustworthiness
• Affordability
• Bug Fixes & Patches
• Backward Compatibility

I will take you through each points in a more elaborate way avoiding the technical aspects at most in my forth-coming blogs in this series which consists 13 parts. Sit back, relax and enjoy my blog. Please give me your criticism and comments. Anything healthy is accepted. See you all in next blog.