Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

I wasn't the only one who noticed that Microsoft's loss in shares of the desktop market has gone not towards Linux but towards Mac.  But if people in the linux world want to have any hope of achieving greater acceptance rates in the desktop arena, they need a strategy, a focus and a good key phrase to bring these elements together.  That phrase should be:

Just make it work.

A recurring theme for people who switch to Mac, or those who might employ an X-Box for games and those who go through any reasonable amount of trouble with a PC want that one thing of having things work.  Again, transparency.

One frustrating aspect of the Linux world is that it reminds me of the video card world: just too many choices.  Having choice is a great thing.  It's democratic and allows people to pick something based on their personality.  However, if you go  to a site like DistroWatch.com, you'll see a huge number of distributions, each more or less doing the same job as the other.  It's kinda like when python and ruby came out.  You could still do the same thing in perl, but just with different syntax.

Just as I started warming up to (K)ubuntu, a new more friendly distribution comes out called PCLinuxOS.  What?  Another one? 

I think it's wasted effort from the Linux community in having so many distributions.  Why not simply focus on hardware compatibility and improving the interface for what's available?  Focus on certain core packages that people seem to be interested that have traditionally been well supported like OpenOffice, mplayer, gaim, gimp, xmms, etc. and allow people to check out similar ones on their own.

The main thing is that people don't need so many different software packages; they just need ones that work for certain purposes.  Until those ones are done well enough and marketed well enough, people will continue flocking towards the Windows and Mac OS of the world.