linux distro

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 15:27 -0700, Trent Shipley wrote:
> Well, it seems like the list has come down to two major desktop distros,
> Ubuntu and Fedora and as far as I know neither is commercial.  There was
> a time when Mandrake, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, and others were all looking
> at the desktop as a potential market.  The survivors seem to have headed
> for big servers or special cases.  Meanwhile, a lot of activity has
> opened up in sub-desktop consumer Linux, most notably with Google's
> Android and Chrome.
----
I think that Android and Chrome serve different purposes than the main
stream Linux distributions - they are intended for lighterweight
hardware, smaller cpu, smaller screens etc. and thus far, telephone and
similar devices and netbooks have been their target.

There clearly is a need for both lightweight desktops and full featured
desktops.

Any distribution looking to sell a Desktop OS is going to have to ramp
put the technical support for it because people will have questions and
expect answers. 

I gather that some of the early release images of Chrome have been
dominating the torrents lately.

I would like to point out that I just got a Moto Droid the other day and
it is an extremely complicated device and I'm still discovering things
about it. 

I thought at first it was curious that before the dude at the VZ store
would hand me the telphone, he downloaded and installed 'Advanced Task
Killer (Free)' and wanted to show me how to use it. I didn't need the
demo, I understood what it was for but apparently at some level, VZ made
a decision to teach people how to use these things because they are also
holding classes on Android (one of my friends bought one and was very
grateful for the class he went to).

But I will point out things I didn't realize until after I got the
Droid...
- Evolution calendars sync rather well with Gmail calendars 
- Evolution contacts can mount Gmail contacts and contacts can be moved
or copied back and forth (beware that certain punctuation like $/\& can
cause problems) Not all fields work...but enough work
- Evolution task lists however - fahgettabouddit

It occurred to me that in this case, I was lucky because Linux desktop
essentially already integrated support for Gmail while on Apple or
Microsoft (especially Outlook), there are extra hoops. I also found when
doing my google search thing for this, that the KDE PIM stuff can sync
with Google but I don't use the KDE PIM stuff very much.

Craig


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