Blocking in Pidgin

[Liam Proven]

2009/7/7 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
>
> It's not Linux elitism, it's beleaguered middle-aged stepdad elitism ;-p
>

:¬D Welcome to the real world of cynical old codgerspace.

Also, for all that you're a Colonial yourself, as ani fule kno, the
entire Web is in fact Murrican and therefore must conform to Murrican
standards of humour. Which means the bleedin' obvious (e.g., The
Onion) and no sarcasm or irony, because Murricans generally have
non-functioning irony-detectors and get very offended and sniffy when
they fail to notice it.

But back to the naughty distracting thread when I should be working:

The thing is, for many kids, The Intarweb is all that there is.

Q.v.
http://education.zdnet.com/?p=2770 - "Windows 7 is the same as Ubuntu"

For them, all it needs, apart from to be bloody quick to boot, is a
top-flight web-browser. Arguably, possibly, a chat client too.

Firefox is good, but we need Firefox 3.5 now - and even Getdeb.net
doesn't have that. But Linux Firefox is slow compared to Windows
Firefox. Even on the Mac, there's a good choice of browsers: Firefox,
Safari, Camino, Shiira, OmniWeb, Opera, iCab, etc.

On Linux, the options are much more limited. We have Opera, which is a
bit poor these days. We don't even have v10 yet, AFAIK, and I for one
don't want my PC to be a public-internet-facing server, which, believe
it or not, is the killer feature of Opera 10.

We don't have Chrome. Chromium now works - I'm typing in it, and for
Gmail, it's great - but with no plugins it's of no use to most.

We have Firefox and Seamonkey, but both are a bit slow and lardy
compared to Safari 4 or Chrome on the same hardware under XP. There's
no world-class Webkit-based browser, which is ironic, since Webkit
originated from KHTML on Linux. Konqueror is an ugly great lump,
imports a million KDE libraries if you run on GNOME, and can't even
run Gmail natively.

Linux needs better browsers, an all-singing all-dancing chat client
that talks to MSN and things with file transfer, audio-visual media
support, seamless contact list import and setup - e.g. point it at any
online profile and let it scrape the account settings off Facebook or
MySpace or Bebo or whatever.

And perhaps a modern equivalent of Bleem! or something. A VM to run
games in. (I figure a VM that can play some recent console games would
be more use for this market than one for Windows).

Fast boot, fast running, a killer web browser /or two/, a killer chat
client, and games, and you're set.

For the rest: OpenOffice needs a bit more work. Personally, I reckon
they should set everything except the WP and spreadsheet on hold, and
in those 2, aim at matching 100% of the functionality of MS Office 97.
Nobody much actually needs anything much more. It's 12yo code that ran
acceptably under Win95 on a well-specced 486; this should *not* be too
hard.

Forget Outlook for now. The Exchange back-end is too hard, MS will
probably sue, and people are moving to web-hosted email anyway. Let
'em use Outlook Web Access.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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