Thursday, September 14, 2006

Linux is not just for geeks anymore

Today someone brought to my attention this osnews article with the title "Why Desktop Linux Will Not Take off, and Why You Don't Want It to".

Although the author makes some very good points describing geeks (at least it described my geek side perfectly). He makes the wrong assumption that Linux is still just relegated to geekdom.

Linus Torvalds criticism of Gnome, for example is actually its praise.

As a geek I think that one can use Gnome for the every day things and still have access to 'under the hood' stuff using the command line console (actually as a geek I don't like Gnome limitations either so I use something else).

Linus displays the clear traits of a geek. So what? Some other people that aren't technical geeks have joined the Open Source movement and are slowly making their mark obvious. They are layering simplicity on top of the complexity.

Linux is very fast approaching the "Easy for beginners to do easy things, Easy for experts to do complex things".