Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption (SearchOpenSource) [LWN.net]

Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption (SearchOpenSource)

Posted Feb 9, 2006 19:33 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
Parent article: Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption (SearchOpenSource)

Preinstalled Linux is what counts in bigger scale desktop adoptions. And OOo / AbiWord / KWord eventually outdo the other point. I think the main problem is the battle for media content in various proprietary formats - Windows has WMV, Mac has Quicktime, Linux has nothing or maybe RealPlayer which is against the free software theme (though perhaps okay for pre-installed computers' manufacturers and Real of course is not entirely evil with its Helix etc.). RealPlayer is also available for Win/Mac, but is currently probably less popular on each platform than their "own" media content formats (MS & Apple can affect a lot on their behalfs to lure customers to their formats). On the audio side, MP3, DRM or not, is not out-of-the-box playable on Linux, though Fluendo's plugin probably semi-solves the playback problem for the Linux-from-the-supermarket customers and related distributions (like Ubuntu with some closed source additions by the computer manufacturer).

Ogg (Theora) is of course the way to go, but it has a lot to do win something, even more so than Vorbis or FLAC which are gaining some (deserved!) momentum on the audio/music side. Theora development is apparently finally getting true development resources behind it now and we'll most probably see advancement and 1.0 final this year (even though it's perfectly usable for any use already, "alpha" or "beta scare people away), but still even technically Theora is not as great when compared to competing formats as Vorbis is to its competitors. Of course, Theora is quite good but being at the very top wouldn't hurt either.

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Theora and Dirac are great...

Posted Feb 10, 2006 15:31 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

And, in my job, I am using Speex right now.
And I use Vorbis/FLAC in my personal music files.
So yes, if we can popularize those (iPod linux anyone? :-)...

Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption (SearchOpenSource)

Posted Feb 11, 2006 12:05 UTC (Sat) by sylware (subscriber, #35259) [Link]

Don't forget that there are dirac and snow video codecs which use wavelets.
Speaking sabotage: I'm a gnome user, and mono/.net is a kind of trojan horse. You can clearly see the will to make gnome depend on mono/.net uselessware. For instance, we had a very good seed for a "more than usefull" picture manager, gthumb, but their is a strong will to let this project die in order to promote f-spot (the bloated mono one). The XGL demos pushes f-spot forward.
Moreover you can see some strange opinion switch over, like Havoc Penington who was *really* against inclusion of this "strategically M$ driven framework", and now he is almost recommending to include it.
Something is happening. I feel the shadow of M$ behind Novell.
Additionally, it's a commercial handicap: on a project here what I got from the boss: "Want to write a mono app? Why? M$ is the leader of .net, better go with them. And .net 2.0 is about to come, mono is obsolete, I'm sorry my friend, but mono=.net--"! Commercially speaking, adopting mono/.net is sabotage.

Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption (SearchOpenSource)

Posted Feb 12, 2006 4:31 UTC (Sun) by hp (subscriber, #5220) [Link]

I don't know what you mean about me changing my opinion, I haven't really said anything one way or the other in a long time (that I remember at least).

Two ways Microsoft sabotages Linux desktop adoption (SearchOpenSource)

Posted Feb 16, 2006 11:51 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Stop disrupting a nice conspiracy theory with your blasted 'facts'. ;)