It’s one thing to talk about open-source software like Linux becoming easy to use and a joy to look at, but it’s quite another to actually fund the development of such improvements. Mark Shuttleworth has talked a lot recently about desktop Linux becoming as easy and beautiful as Mac OS X. Now he’s ready to fund the talk. - Matt Asay - Cnet
There’s been a number of articles recently about Mark Shuttleworth, his company Canonical and Ubuntu Linux concerning improvement of the Linux user interface so it exceeds the beauty and ease-of-use of Apple Mac OS X.
The thinking is an improved GUI will open doors to the enterprise and user desktops allowing Linux (Ubuntu) to win more acceptance as a main stream operating system.
I have to say I agree with this approach. The core of Apples OS X is BSD, a cousin to Unix and Linux, so there’s more similarities then differences between the two. The main differences is the user experience in terms of presentation, functionality, friendliness and ease-of-use.
If you want your OS to be popular with those who aren’t computer experts then you have to build an OS for those same non-experts which is highly functional and at the same time visually inviting and easy to use.
Pursuing an effort to improve the user’s experience, vs. the technical developers experience, is a good plan for gaining acceptance of Linux on the desktop.
What do you think?
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