[vox] Fwd: Re: is the Linux desktop OS dead?

[Bill Kendrick]

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 08:50:24PM -0800, Bill Broadley wrote:
> Agreed.  I was surprised to find linux more common than I had guessed.  Home
> routers, many NAS, tivo (at least the old ones)

Eh?  Do you say "at least the old ones" because they switched at some point?
Or is it that you only know the full details of the old ones.
(I was under the assumption they've continued using Linux all along...
I can't imagine why they'd switch.)

I personally mothballed (at least temporarily) our TiVo.  No cable made the
DVR function useless.  Due to its age, the HDD was kind of whiney.
And then there was the fan.  It just sat there making heat and noise.
It had some additional online stuff it could do (e.g., music), but it
was fairly slow and clunky.  (As they added more features, it seemed to
get more and more sluggish.)

These days, it's all about the Roku NetFlix player.  Tiny, HDD-less,
fanless, built-in Wifi, totally silent, and it has a small and
super-simple remote control (my 2yo can navigate and find his shows).


<snip>
> In my opinion this was the peak of the microsoft mindshare where
> they almost managed to start pushing their own standards for
> everything.

Heh, then Firefox and OS X came around and people came to their
senses? :)


<snip>
> Amusingly the most compelling reason folks seem to have for keeping a windows
> box around the house is gaming.

And thank goodness for real gaming consoles. ;)  Weren't PC games going out
of style a while back?  I guess then WoW came out.


<snip> 
> That seems to be getting better and pretty good.  Seems like redhat's
> dependency hell, corrupted RPM databases, circular dependencies, and various
> other "oh crap I have to reinstall" moments are getting rather rare.

Only "rare"? :)  (I'm not _trying_ to be snobbish.)

-- 
-bill!
Sent from my computer