Free Software Linux

There are some very interesting browser share statistics over at Ars today…

Between September and August, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 1.26 percentage points (from 66.97 percent to 65.71 percent) and Firefox moved up a sizeable 0.77 percentage points (from 22.98 percent to 23.75 percent). Safari increased 0.17 percentage points (from 4.07 percent to 4.24 percent) while Chrome once again moved further away from Opera: it gained a worthy 0.33 percentage points (from 2.84 percent to 3.17 percent).

Why are Netbooks such a threat to Microsoft? It’s not just the abundance of Linux shipping on them. It’s their profitability flying off the shelves (or via UPS these days…)

You know MindTouch (news, site) for its enterprise class wiki and collaboration portal. They consistently bring out new solutions to help you collaborate faster and smarter in the MindTouch environment. Now the open source collaboration vendor brings you a new suite of productivity tools for your desktop.

As a long time fan of the Linux desktop I was interested to see the the Linux desktop usage number for personal computers increase to over 1.02%. I suspect it’s partially fueled by the popularity of Linux netbooks from the Dell (who offers an Ubuntu option) and Asus (that’s uses a special version of Xandros Linux).

Hmm, lookee here: Microsoft wants to hire a Director, Open Source Desktop Strategy. Here are the details:

The Windows Competitive Strategy team is looking for a strong team member to lead Microsoft’s global desktop competitive strategy as it relates to open source competitors. Our team mission is to gather intelligence, create business strategies, and drive action in the marketplace for the Windows Client business. In this job, you will be asked to think strategically, put yourself in the mindset of our competitors, influence multi-million dollar marketing campaigns, and drive high-level executive thinking around business strategy.

Not long ago I wrote that KDE 4 might produce enough changes to its look and feel to help Linux become more Mac-like.  At the time, Windows Vista seemed to be trying to move in the same direction.  Interestingly, someone has noted that Windows 7 now appears to be moving towards Linux's direction with the Windows desktop looking more like KDE 3.5.

Not long ago I wrote that KDE 4 might produce enough changes to its look and feel to help Linux become more Mac-like.  At the time, Windows Vista seemed to be trying to move in the same direction.  Interestingly, someone has noted that Windows 7 now appears to be moving towards Linux's direction with the Windows desktop looking more like KDE 3.5.

Titanium is the first open platform for building rich desktop applications.

Interesting news out of my employer today. Here’s the thing, everyone who hear’s “Linux desktop” has a knee-jerk reaction and thinks of all the things they do on their own PC, laptop, Mac. The reality is you’re probably not the target market for virtual desktops. The market is large desktop environments that have thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of users and who are not doing consumer-oriented work (or shouldn’t be). The cost savings of moving from physical PCs in a 1 user to 1 PC model to a managed model with virtual terminals can be significant. We’ll see where the market goes for this model, but I know of a few very large companies that want to make this model very real.

I love this theme NeoDave posted in his screenshot of Ubuntu. I can pick out many of the technologies that he used to create each aspect, but why can’t we have simplified, comprehensive theme packages at this point? I haven’t looked into it, and perhaps it’s more a Gnome issue than any particular distro, but it would be nice to just download his theme in a package and run it easily. Not just the window colors/elements, but the dockbars, the position of elements, widgets, all of it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neodave/2752500743/sizes/l/

Despite using Linux to organize my pictures, I’ve always had to boot into Windows to print them properly. I have a Canon i960 photo printer which Canon has stoutly objected to supporting on Linux. Where there’s a gap, there’s an opportunity and TurboPrint has stepped up to fill a void due to printer vendors’ lack of support.

I can’t tell you how long ago I switched to running 64-bit Ubuntu and have been frustrated by the workarounds to get a 32-bit flash player working. While Ubuntu tries to make it painless, it creates havoc when you make changes to the “standard way”.

I have two younger sisters who are currently in college - both at the same school. It’s a private college and has what I would consider your average IT setup for a campus.

Within the first two weeks, both had their laptops infected by viruses separately - different viruses, different times. One was running XP, the other Vista on you basic Dell laptops. Of course, who did they call? Answer: me.

My how far we’ve come when Adobe releases a Linux version of its Flash player concurrently with other platform releases. Great news! Now if only Apple would let them release an iPhone/Safari player..

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/15/200226

An insight into why it is difficult to have a standard widget set API. The failings of the extremely good and extremely comprehensive GTK2 and QT4 widget sets are pointed out, when compared to a widget set that is effectively a wrapper around the DOM model of a web browser - http://pyjd.org