The linux desktop is progressing very quickly, this gives us the opportunity to frequently review what is missing from it. I've been using Mephis Debian desktop now for a week or so running in a Microsoft Virtual PC session within a corporate windows XP desktop. Using the fastest up and coming OS within the most common OS gives you the chance to compare the two and see what is missing from Linux.
Here are the standard improvements that need to be made. Some distros are better than others at these things:
* improved mobile support - APM, ACPI, PMU, software suspend etc
* improved sound support - only the Soundblaster Live seems to work perfecly (artsd gets hung up on processes)
* improved wifi support (mind you XP isn't that great either)
These improvements are just a matter of time for distros like Ubuntu (and thus debian). Otherwise, the majority of issues that I have had are related to improving mozilla (browser/mail) and open office (gnumeric/abiword) . In particular I'd like to see a high productivity development environment setup. This would allow developers to quickly and easily create productivity apps, which are available offline as well as online - and in windows. 100% compatibility with MS Office will never happen. I'd rather see work done in lobbying governements to use the Oasis document format as a standard.
Money could be made selling a MS plugin to "save as Oasis" and an Oasis to PDF conversion tool.
One idea I have is for a ultravnc type application which when you connect automatically shows your local hard drive. eg you want to use gimp to resize and touch up some jpgs. You connect to a site which opens a vnc connection to the server. With gimp you open the local files, resize them and then close the connection. The files on your hard drive appear to be local to the server you have connected to.
Posted by Anthony at January 14, 2005 10:39 AM | TrackBack