Crispy, Chubby Penguins

By Moshe Bar

August 25, 2003

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I'd like to think that the people at the big Linux distributions (Red Hat, SuSE, Gentoo) and at the big desktop projects (KDE, Gnome, Ximian) are finally reading my articles. The perennially ugly and guru-friendly (as opposed to user-friendly) desktops of Linux are being addressed. The people at the big distributions have collectively addressed functionality and feature set these last six or seven years. Recently, they finally understood how important it is to make Linux beautiful and easy to use to catch the remaining share of the market.

I've often complained how much nicer Windows fonts were compared to what's available on a standard Linux distribution. Sure, you could copy and use fonts from a Windows machine, but that's—again—a guru-friendly process. It also seemed they would never get that by just adding many thousands of little—sometimes ridiculously immature—utilities and little programs they only make a distribution appeal to propellerheads rather than the typical, modern human being, especially one who has been exposed for prolonged periods of time to Microsoft desktops.

Well, the good news is things are changing. Ever since Red Hat 8.0, beauty is finally coming to my desktop. Never mind that particular release was born under an unlucky star when it comes to stability and quality assurance. Never mind, furthermore, Red Hat 9.0 being too bold (new threads library) on technology and too skimpy on QA (again). But thanks a lot anyway for a very nice desktop finally, both Gnome and KDE. Even configuring a wireless network card has become doable under Red Hat whereas a year ago, at Linux Tag in Germany, I wrestled with it for a whole day, only to utterly fail in the process.

The same goes for SuSE and everybody's favorite distribution, Gentoo, and probably most other distributions, as well. They all have nice looking desktops with lots of improvements in usability and ease of operation.

However, some offerings and sacrifices had to be made to the Gods of Pecunia. Red Hat stopped selling a boxed version of its distribution, except for the enterprise version which I never even saw being sold in a box anywhere, really.

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