LWN: Comments on "Plugging the Linux holes (News.com)"

Plugging the Linux holes (News.com)

rwmj — Fri, 07 May 2004 09:31:54 +0000

It's called Crossover Office, and it works fine. I have a bunch of
W95/W2K stuff running on my Linux box right now.

Rich.

Plugging the Linux holes (News.com)

ekj — Thu, 06 May 2004 08:03:21 +0000

They're rigth and wrong. It is correct, I think, that the main thing holding us back at the moment is lack of familiar applications. The main reason when bussinesses and individuals don't change to Linux is plain and simple that often the applications they need ain't available for Linux. And even more often, the applications they know and use aren't available for Linux.

For example, for a bussiness with 50 desktops, mostly doing word-processing, spreadsheets, email and some web-browinsg, Linux would work perfectly, except, as it turns out their accounting-package does not exist for anything but Windows. Nor are there any tools for accessing the ten years of accumulated financial information in this package, other than the package itself. The cost of "starting from scratch" or paying someone to reverse-engineer and extract the data from the proprietary app are completely out of the question. So it's not happening.

On the other hand, we had this problem from the get-go. And the lack of applications did not prevent us from growing from 1 user and a dozen ported apps to ~20 million users and thousands of apps. So I don't see why we won't conquer this problem like we have in the past: by adding software to fill one hole after another, and by continuing to win one user after another.

Offcourse, for the 90% or so of the worlds population who has not yet tied themselves to any particular OS or any particular application, this is less of an issue.

Plugging the Linux holes (News.com)

Wol — Tue, 04 May 2004 11:52:47 +0000

I suspect MOST non-MS niche software will, even now, run "just fine" on linux. It's probably not been updated much since the WFWG days (certainly true of a lot of my stuff).

What we want is some idiot-proof way of getting WINE to run all this W9X stuff. It's already fine for non-idiots I gather, but that's not the majority...

Cheers,
Wol

Plugging the Linux holes (News.com)

maja — Mon, 03 May 2004 20:05:09 +0000

On install, SuSE looks first for braille 'keyboards'.

High quality printing

proski — Mon, 03 May 2004 17:52:27 +0000

High quality printing probably means 16-bit per channel, i.e. 65536 shades of each primary color.

Plugging the Linux holes (News.com)

kwacka — Mon, 03 May 2004 08:54:57 +0000

For voice recognition look for blinux (linux for blind users)

Paul M

Plugging the Linux holes (News.com)

utidjian — Mon, 03 May 2004 06:25:43 +0000

Well there are or have been some:

1) OCRShop from Vividata (http://www.vividata.com) was really outstanding. I still use it. Very plain interface but was very fast and very very accurate. Much better than any Windows or Mac based OCR software I have ever used. They used to make it available for only $99 for "personal use". It was about $700 for a full on single "concurrent running instance" license. Which meant that anyone in the organization could use it via the network... one at a time... or another way to think of it is the software was installed on a single machine but anyone could use it. They now have OCRShop XTR Lite for $995. Their prices go up from there.
So there are products out there that are certainly "worthy of the name" they are very expensive for the SOHO user. If ones organization seems to need OCR a lot then the price is very reasonable. In my experience OCRShop as compared to Omnipage and others made them look UN-worthy of the name. Which is strange since it is based on the Omnipage engine.
You can download a 30day free trial of all Vividata products.

2) IBM used to have ViaVoice available for Linux. I bought a copy. It was fun and interesting but not really all that useful for me. While there are certainly cases where speech recognition is useful I think you will find that most people do not really want to talk to their computers. It seems that IBM has moved the ViaVoice stuff over to ScanSoft Inc. ScanSoft has a virtual monopoly now on OCR and voice recognition software.

3) Not sure what you mean by "high quality colour printing". With the cheap color printers (but expensive cartridges) that are flooding the market I am getting better results with each new set of CUPS drivers. For most printers it is on par with Windows and Mac OS X. Mac OS X uses CUPS and Gimp-print for its "high quality colour printing" as does Linux. Have you tried a recent distro and drivers?

I am not too sure how important the first two items are for most users. Many people don't seem to even know what OCR is... nor SR.

-DU-...etc...

Plugging the Linux holes (News.com)

csawtell — Mon, 03 May 2004 00:27:47 +0000

There are 3 major 'holes' in desktop Linux:-
1) No character recognition worthy of the name.
2) No voice recognition.
3) No high quality colour printing.
( #3 probably won't be for a long time because of patent issues. )
All the other perceived lacks are misunderstandings and lack of knowledge by the authors of all the various 'journo' scribblings. Everybody should understand that while Linux drives the same PC, it is totally different in many ways, and they should not expect functions to be presented identically to what they are used to.

Plugging the Linux holes (News.com)

chovy — Sun, 02 May 2004 03:50:08 +0000

With the speed at which the linux community addresses security issues, and the lack of security issues in the first place, Linux is still a much better OS than it's Microsoft counterparts.

Plugging the Linux holes (News.com)

tjc — Sat, 01 May 2004 17:02:53 +0000

Linux is self-plugging.

Well no, it's not, at least not within the context of userland applications for Linux, if that is what you mean.

OpenOffice and Mozilla may make Linux usable for departmental deployments in some cases, where users are told what software to use, and the where the organization has the resources to deal with missing applications (by writing in-house applications or keeping a few Windows systems around, for example). But the general case is much more difficult.

It's not the big applications like Microsoft Office that are hard to replace, it's the thousands of smaller, specilized applications written by ISVs that are a real problem. Most people use at least one or two of these specialized applications. It's unlikely that the free/open source software community will be able to muster either the desire or the manpower to replace all of these applications in our lifetime.

It would seem that the surest way to success is to make Linux a more attractive development platform for ISVs. This of course is the tricky bit. :-)

Message to app authors: jump in now, or there will never be a market for you

leonbrooks — Sat, 01 May 2004 12:09:17 +0000

The GIMP 2.0 hasn't yet aced PhotoShop's market, although the addition of some "little" things like visible menus on every image window (ie, the interface is now closer to what people are accustomed to in other programs) has helped enormously. However, if Adobe don't dig themselves some presence there within a year, GIMP 2.x/3.x will have grown, hothouse style, to the point where people would have real trouble picking between them if the price-tag were the same (which it ain't). We're talking 16-bit colour, proper colour correction, direct import/export of raw camera images, and all of the professional-level features which are curently lacking or weak.

If IBM don't pull their corporate fingers out soon and GPL Lotus SmartSuite, that too is going to languish. I'd like to at least see them commit up-to-date SmartSuite filters to OpenOffice and/or OpenOffice filters to SmartSuite so that theuir existing customer base isn't left stranded.

And so on, across the board. One year for many apps, maybe as many as three years for a few, and there won't be any significant Linux market demand left to fulfil. Open (free-speech) and costless (free-beer) apps will have captured the lot. Get in now, last chance to develop a new market before your old one dries up.

Plugging the Linux holes (News.com)

pythagoras — Sat, 01 May 2004 02:21:02 +0000

Linux is self-plugging. That's what makes it such a threat. As the first
generation of linux hackers turned the next on to a windows-like desktop
and an eminently configurable playground they became comfortable playing.
Now that they're older, they see the need for business or music or art
related programs, and have done and are doing them well. Anyone tried
Gimp2? The name sucxs cuz a gimp is a cripple to a lot of people, and so
there's a skewed response in a psychological dimension that has affected
the casual user, at least in America. (IMO) Which brings me to my point:
Advertising. Not educating.
/p/