[wplug] linux on the desktop

[Douglas Green]

I feel pretty qualified to give an opinion on this issue, as I am both 
relatively new to linux and I am NOT a programmer/administrator. I now use 
linux as my only OS, and I have had very few problems adapting to it. The 
first question to answer is WHY would I do this, and the answer is simple:
I work in an environment that is a zoo of macs, unix-like machines and 
windows machines. Add to this the HP jetdirect printing interfaces (their own 
servers) and you have a filesharing/compatibility nightmare. When windows was 
installed on my machine, I could only "see" the NT server and the printers... 
using a mac I could see almost every mac, but only servers that had 
appleshare running. While the user interfaces in linux definitely need some 
work, at least I have been able to share files and connect to the remote 
servers that I need to. 

I have definitely benefited from the experience of switching, as I learned a 
lot about computers and I have been exposed to a variety of tools that have 
made my life easier. Learning to write documents in LaTeX format, for 
example, and to use bibtex as a reference manager have greatly increased my 
productivity. I have rediscovered many non-gui based applications that often 
work better and faster than their graphical counterparts ("ispell -t" for 
example, and telnet). An apache web server runs quietly in the background and 
has made my work (and CV) accessible to anyone who chooses to look at it. 
Finally, as a member of a large clincal reserach department that is 
responsible for tracking their software licenses, I am never worried about 
software audits or having to purchase upgrades. 

In all, my experience as an end user with linux as my desktop has been fairly 
positive. In my opinion, what linux really needs is to consolidate the 
efforts to create various applications which tend to be redundant. While I'm 
not advocating "one method, one approach" it would be nice to know that there 
is a tool for a given task that is "the benchmark application". Things like 
"linuxconf" get in the way, and are extremely confusing to new users who 
don't always understand that these "tools" just don't work. We'd all be 
better off if we said up front that in order to change your hostname, just 
open /etc/hostname with your favorite editor and change the name. Configuring 
things manually is NOT hard, even for us new users, but it is confusing when 
you are bombarded with a collection of "tools" to acheive the same task and 
half of them don't work. 

That's my 2 cents on the "desktop controversy". There's always room for 
improvement, but overall the community has done an excellent job making linux 
useable by us "non-computer people". 

Doug