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Should you care if your desktop is 100 percent open source? Of course not.
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- by pythonwannabe July 14, 2008 11:53 PM PDT
- Well, after using Linux on the desktop for a couple of years now, I find it's a double-edged sword. On the one hand it provides me with access to devices such as my Nvidia Graphics card - to enable me to play games utilising the 3D graphics performance of their cards.
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(5 Comments)On the other hand, I generally find most of the problems I have on the Linux desktop are with proprietary apps such as Adobe Flash or Java. Although, I will say it's getting easier to install these apps these days, it takes a hell of a lot longer to get bugs resolved or for the application to be ported to a different architecture, such as 64bit. As an example, I am not even sure if Adobe Flash works on the PPC arch yet, so you can't play YouTube in YellowDog Linux on the PS3. Can 64bit Linux use WMV files yet?
In an ideal world, I would like to see as much Open Source software on Linux as possible, but until there is more market share, you're not likely to see this... so in the meantime, it might be worth setting aside the purist approach (at least for the mass-market) until there is enough persuasion in the market for Linux to demand either better support from proprietary vendors (ATI drivers are a good example of this), or open up their code and embrase the fuzzy warm light of OSS. :)
I appreciate distros like Ubuntu that make it easier to get proprietary software working, too... installing codecs is way easier these days than it has been in the past. :)