What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views) [LWN.net]

What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)

Posted May 22, 2005 3:12 UTC (Sun) by neoprene (guest, #8520)
Parent article: What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)

"...any commercial software vendor pondering to sell his product or service on the Linux platform is horrified by the complications he has to deal with."

Monoculture is nice for launching a commerical app, but not even MS sports totally equal OS's, version differences exist. These differences are not that big a challenge as to prevent apps from being made for win95,98,me,nt,2k,xp etc.

As Linux adoption grows the commercial players will crank out their calculators and find out that its not to hard to make adoptions for different Linux packaging systems, or even .bin files like Sun Java, Doom3 etc.

I hope the vendors horrification will be exceeded by their profits after ignoring weenie pundits.

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What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)

Posted May 22, 2005 6:23 UTC (Sun) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

> Monoculture is nice for launching a commerical app, but not even MS sports totally equal OS's, version differences exist.

In fact, another big change is about to hit all Windows ISVs - WinXP 64-bit edition (for x86-64) doesn't run 16-bit software at all. MANY installers, even many programs are still 16-bit, so whoever wants to play on the new 64-bit version will have to provide at least a 32-bit version of installer and software.