Re: after two years, XD2 launches...

begin  Timothy R. Butler's  quote:
| > actually, it seems to have launched pretty well, with scads of
| > reviews in lots of places, including outside the linux press, all
| > last week, and they're favorable.
|
|   If they talk to the press, that is. My inquiry to them last week
| went unanswered.

i'm surprised. even after having heavily criticized them on several 
occasions i've never had any trouble getting through. (yes, i know it 
has been claimed here that i am somehow financially attached to them, 
which i'm not, but i guess there are those so accustomed to whoring 
that they understand nothing else.) i think joe barr and several 
others have had much the same experience. if you drop me a note 
offlist, i'll pass along the contact information i have.

|   I am a bit surprised about the lack of Mandrake support, after
| all, Mandrake is the most popular desktop Linux according to most
| surveys.  I've actually deployed several Mandrake desktops in
| business environments, and so have many others:
|
|     http://www.mandrakebizcases.com/
|
|   The fact that Ximian supported Red Hat didn't suprise me, but not
| supporting Mandrake did (since Mandrake is generally known to be
| more GNOME friendly than SuSE).

there are several possible reasons for this; i am speculating here 
because i have not specifically discussed it with the ximians. one is 
that mandrake tends to be a bit more of a moving target than others; 
another is that mandrake's prospects seem a little dimmer than 
others; a third is that for broad business adoption -- big companies 
-- suse has europe sewed up and red hat has north america. there are 
exceptions, but if one is running a business and does not want to be 
gobbled up by support costs, one develops for the one or two biggest 
distributions with the idea of making your stuff work perfectly on 
those. even presuming that the surveys are accurate -- which i don't; 
polls get freeped all the time -- i suspect that the majority of the 
mandrake use is among standalone machines and hobbyist installations, 
as well as the core cohort of broken-glass mandrake users (and 
mandrake is of course not alone in having users who would stick with 
a distribution even if it meant crawling over broken glass). ximian 
is simply not seeking these users. they're glad to have them, and 
they're happy to allow them to download and install their desktop, 
but this isn't their target market. instead, they're trying to get 
businesses to migrate linux onto the desktop, and in order to do that 
they've produced a very easy to use, very consistent desktop (in many 
ways doing for gnome what that annoying UI guy from corel did for kde 
a few years ago), and making it very easy to support. the suse 
enterprise edition will be shipping xd2, and users of current red hat 
seem happy to have something other than the desktop as shipped with 
that distribution.

which is to say that, while there are no doubt exceptions, the typical 
mandrake user does not seem to be the user they're seeking. remember, 
they're not targeting debian or slackware, either.
-- 
dep

http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within
the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.

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