[plug] Linux viability on the desktop

[Brad Hill]

The main advantages of moving to linux are immunities to viruses, and the
main disadvantages are lack of support for various applications.  What you
must realise is that these are essentially one and the same.  If (or when)
the market realizes there's good reason to support a linux environment and
produce nice stable applications for users to run, and everyone starts to
move across to Linux, you'll also get more people writing viruses
specifically for linux.  At the moment to only reason both of these things
are lacking is because the userbase is lacking.

Sure Linux is far more robust than windows when set up correctly, but if Mr
Average off the street sets up a machine and doesn't maintain it, after a
couple of months security holes will become visible that can be taken
advantage of by anyone who does actually keep up to date with these things.
Mr Average might not keep up with it but Mr Virus writer will.

Your trade off for using open source over closed is that having the code
available means anyone can find a security hole.  The good thing about this
is patches become available when they're found by people with ethics, and
thus the holes get fixed, the bad thing is when the holes are found and not
patched, anyone can find out how to abuse the system.  With closed code,
it's up to the developpers to patch the code which is both good and bad: if
someone manages to find a security flaw in some code and doesn't report it
to developpers it'll be left open for a much longer time, on the other hand,
without the source code such holes are significantly harder to discover.
This is, like it or not, the main reason most organizations will avoid using
an open source platform.

Having said that, i am still personally in favour of pushing towards an open
source platform for desktop users.  It will just mean very smart
implementation of the network and individual user's workspaces, and a full
time employee to maintain everything.. that means less money going to
microsoft, and more going to Linux professionals, which is a Good Thing
(tm).  The hard thing is trying to convince everyone to go down this path:
software developpers (who wont write software unless there's users to sell
to), and businesses (who wont use the operating system unless there's
software to run on it) have gotten themselves into a viscious circle of
reliance on MicroShaft.  There are always ways to overcome this though.
Things like vmware or wine will let users migrate to Linux and still use
Windows programs.  The moment you find a piece of open source software that
exceeds the features of the Windows based software, make the change, untill
all such pieces of software have been migrated, and the need for vmware (and
the guest operating system running within it) will disappear.

(Apologies if this post is all over the place... that's just the way my mind
is working right now =P)
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