linux still is far behind...

[atheistkun]

Don't get be wrong..ubuntu (or linux is general) is cool, themeable, fast,secure but..
at the end it's about getting things done.
Ever tried syncing a mobile with evolution? it is fairly complicated.

i have used linux and windows both for over 7yrs. linux made great progress. but then with so many distribution i think over all effort for improvement has decreased. every coming up their distribution, theme etc etc (see distrowatch) !!
in my view we should focus on--
Writing up better Gui front end--simple ones !! gone are the days for manually editing config files for each and every option. i mean which better to use--firestarter or manually editing configuration files !
i have seen many people using synaptic then command line apt-get--reason- it is simply better !

i remember there was a day when installing linux and software in it was itself considered a hack ! it was only when better gui installer came it became better.

some ideas-
gui sync tools between mobile & evolution, sunbird etc
front end for vsftpd etc etc

so at the end we need more, more gui--learn more and more gui programming and u have made far better contribution to linux community then creating yet another theme !

[SunnyRabbiera]

well mobile technology is still a work in progress, but linux is actually a lot farther then you think it is.

[hyperair]

I agree with SunnyRabbiera. Linux has a lot more than what's shown on the surface. However, ahteistkun has a point. GUI is still sorely lacking for many programs in Linux. Even in Ubuntu.

[aysiu]

I've never synced a mobile device to any computer, and I don't use Firestarter or manually edit iptables either. So I don't really see what the hoopla's about.

[popch]

Ever tried syncing a mobile with evolution? it is fairly complicated.

some ideas-
gui sync tools between mobile & evolution, sunbird etc
front end for vsftpd etc etc

Complicated it may be. But why does the title of this thread read 'Linux far behind?'

Where I work we have only one version of Windows, one version of Outlook and one version of Oracle's Collaboration Suite (OCS).

Each minor upgrade of OCS, each update of Outlook and every single purchase of a mobile device to be synchronized with Outlook creates quite some hair pulling and easily costs - in terms of manpower - up to the price the PC and the mobile device combined.

And this also includes mobile devices running some kind of Windows and synchronizing with Microsoft's Active Sync.

[MetalheadGautham]

linux is awssome on mobiles, but not (yet) with mobiles, as it lacks offitial support. We need to do things ourselves. The handset manufacturers don't exactly acknowledge their existance.

Take Moto ROKR E6 for example. It rocks as a mobile, thanks to Linux. VLC on pocket linux is a real boon. Also, linux has negligible viruses, unlike Palm OS, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc which can be extremely infested.

The reason there are very less linux mobiles is because like the iPhone's Mac OSX, Linux too has rather high demands from the hardware. But that means that simultaneously, we hardly see a cheap linux mobile, but lots of high end phones and PDAs run linux :lol:

And I think you are wrong in saying that multiple Distros have fragmented linux. Thanks to GPL, anything in one distro cane easily be transplanted into another. The distros just exist because people want more and more choice. Although confusing, its very useful when you look at it properly.

[23meg]

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContributeToUbuntu

[pjkoczan]

i have used linux and windows both for over 7yrs. linux made great progress. but then with so many distribution i think over all effort for improvement has decreased. every coming up their distribution, theme etc etc (see distrowatch) !!

I've said it before, but a big part of the reason that Linux has improved so much in recent years has been internal competition. KDE borrows from GNOME (and vice-versa) and Red Hat improved the dependency hell that was RPM when Debian showed what could be done with apt (I've used pre-RHEL Red Hat distros, it's not fun). There are so many more instances of internal competition being good for open source software that it's almost impossible to do without it (MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, NFS vs. AFS, BSD vs. Linux, etc).

i remember there was a day when installing linux and software in it was itself considered a hack ! it was only when better gui installer came it became better.

I think better dependency checking made installation a lot better than a GUI ever could.

Plus, I think improvements to the base kernel overall and having major companies backing Linux (Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, etc.) made Linux better, moreso than graphical installers. I'm not saying they didn't help, but I think you overestimate their impact.

There's no one magic bullet (or a few bullets for that matter) that would make Linux perfect. There's no one thing that vaulted Linux to where it is today. The same could be said of any software, proprietary included.

It's a concerted effort towards quality and a chaotic but effective implementation of new ideas that has vaulted Linux to where it is, and will push it to where it will go.

[tigerplug]

No to far behind for Microsoft to rely on it for search:
http://searchdns.netcraft.com/?host=microsoft.com&position=limited&lookup=Wait..