I’ve come to the conclusion that the Operating System is irrelevant, that the base that allows a computer to be useful no longer can or will be a primary focus. I arrived at this conclusion after having Laura’s computer completely die. Lately, she’s been using her old Windows 98 machine while I figure out what I’m going to do.
Yesterday I set up X windows for her under Cygwin on Windows 98 so she would have access to her Linux desktop on the terminal server.
X -query 192.168.1.3
and voilá there’s her desktop as if she’d never left it. I thought it was cool, but I started wondering, why would she need that? She’s got her OpenOffice under Windows 98, she’s got her jabber instant messenger client. She uses Firefox which doesn’t care what it runs on. She doesn’t use Gimp very often, but it’s there too. I can even install Inkscape if she should desire it. In short, I can’t think of, and neither can she, a single reason to use her Linux desktop. All the infrastructure stuff runs on the Linux server: the webserver, database server, filesharing server, access controls, filters, and whatnot. The email is accessed via IMAP so you can use webmail, or Outlook, or Thunderbird, or Outlook Express, or Evolution, or Kmail. Anything you can dream up and it’s all synchronized. It all works seamlessly with Windows or Linux or Macintosh. All her documents and images are completely divorced from whatever lies beneath, normally ready to strike and swallow up your precious data. Call it a reinforced hull so you don’t end up being fish food.
For myself, I am happy with my Linux environment. I do not like Windows XP or any of its ilk. It’s a personal choice, not an indictment on which is inherently better. You may like XP. I may like Linux. Both seem to run Free Software just fine, and make the issue mostly about personal taste or comfort. For example, I like the way my apps behave in Linux. I like my kpovmodeler front-end to Povray. I like Quanta for some webwork. I like vim for programming and webwork. I like GIMP for graphics work. I like xmms as my music player. I use K3B as my dvd/cd burner (I love it). I use Scribus for desktop publishing. But I guess for me the ONLY killer app is the bash shell… which once again is available as part of Cygwin, so I guess it’s a non-issue.
You see? It doesn’t matter anymore and I like it that way.