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Old 11th March 2011
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Oko Oko is offline
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Ecosystem diversity is what makes our world beautify. Linux on the desktop is inconsequential just like BSDs. In U.S. it is very difficult nowadays to find any Linux desktop installation even at the major research Universities which are traditionally strongholds of Unix. Most of top notch U.S. research universities use OS X these days. Linux has nothing to offer on the desktop neither to a casual computer user nor to a serious user with a well developed taste for computing. Discussion about udev or HAL is pointless. Neither of those things have any importance on a typical BSD user. Less so about X-Org.

The major strong hold of Linux is as a platform for a High Performance Computing. Unfortunately due to the combination of cannibalism and market forces Unix looks dead. It is so bad that even such a wide spread applications like MATLAB do not anymore support technically inferior platform Linux in favor of Solaris. But HPC is a niche market and if couple crazy dudes decide to port CUDA and Open64 to NetBSD we will have different conversation.

Linux has a large market share on the embedded but so does BSD and based on technical and business (BSD license) merits should have even more. The same goes for network appliances. Small server market is dominated by virtualization craze. Large one could be easily scoped by Solaris if Oracle decides to do so.

So what were we talking about? Xfce?
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