Jason R Thorpe wrote:

> And how does providing a nice desktop environment for those who wish
> to use such a thing change that?  After all, the underlying mechanisms
> are still there for people who wish to use them.

Isn't this the promise of GNOME, KDE and Mac OS X? Why does this 
have to be an either/or game? Why can't one have a well-designed 
responsive desktop (a gestural interface, if you like) with access 
to the power of the command line tools? Until Fink came along, OS 
X was unusable as far as was concerned. It bridged the gap between 
the commercial apps (the lingua franca of computing: even Office 
98 is perfectly useable) and the open source world.

what are we arguing about anyway? I think the subtext is that UNIX 
is hard and as such, keeps the tourists away, and Windows is easy 
but broken enough to give the morally superior among us something 
snicker about.

-- 
Paul Beard
8040 27th Ave NE
Seattle WA 98115
206 529 8400

"He's the kind of man for the times that need the kind of man he 
is ..."