arstechnica.com — During a press briefing at LinuxWorld today in San Francisco, IBM announced a new partnership with Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical to offer "Microsoft-free" personal computers with IBM's Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony software. The goal is to provide a preintegrated stack that can serve as a complete alternative to Windows and Microsoft Office.
Aug 5, 2008 View in Crawl 4
lutianaAug 6, 2008
This will work great until an end user (like my parents) try install their new sparkly digital camera or some sort of software and it will go right back to the shop to be replaced with a vista based machine.Linux does not offer the ease of use that windows does (especially easily installed software/hardware). And this is why it is not used by everyone. It is getting better though....
jeffgtrAug 6, 2008
We were just talking today at work how most of the users would do just fine with Ubuntu and Open Office and how much money we'd save in Microsoft licenses. For most users where I work Office is a waste, truly it is.
lotusgrrlAug 7, 2008
The different with Lotus Symphony is that IBM also offers support for organizations that need it. With IBM behind it, they can capture bigger marketspace to force MS into working with Open document standards that Sun hasn't been able to.
djbon2112Aug 10, 2008
Hell, look how far LINUX has come! People still criticize it as "not being ready for the desktop" or whatever (bulls**t IMHO but a different argument), but look at how far it's come in the ~4 years Ubuntu's been around (from primitive support for a few components, to an almost completely working desktop OS that can do everything Windows can do), and even the HUGE changed in usability and support for hardware just between 7.04 and 8.04 (one year). While Closed Source bitches that sales are down, Open Source gets its s**t done.
djbon2112Aug 10, 2008
Google uses its own custom version of Linux on every computer it uses there, as well as Linux on all its servers. How much more "open source" can its "core software" be?
insllvnAug 12, 2008
Admittedly, sorting out the difference between .rpm's, .deb's, and .tar.giz and what to do with each would scare a new user off, but practically speaking the sort of user we are discussing here would likely never go beyond the preinstalled software and a few large mainstream downloads (itunes, aim, or firefox) or the shelves at best buy on windows, and would never go beyond what was offered in a graphical Add/Remove programs menu on a mainstream Linux distro. Just my 2 cents.