Yawn… Tomorrow’s headline is gonna be, “Google to take a crap. Call it Goo-poo,” and the subhead will read, “Beta expected until ‘Poo is ready for production”
Google is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop, in a possible bid to take on Microsoft in its core business – desktop software.
A version of the increasingly popular Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, based on Debian and the Gnome desktop, it is known internally as ‘Goobuntu’.
Google has confirmed it is working on a desktop linux project called Goobuntu, but declined to supply further details, including what the project is for.
It’s possible that it’s just one of the toys Googleplex engineers play with on Fridays, when they get time off from buffing the search engine code or filtering out entries about Tiananmen Square.
It could be for wider deployments on the company’s own desktops, as an alternative to Microsoft, but still for internal use only.
But it’s possible Google plans to distribute it to the general public, as a free alternative to Windows.
So today’s Google non-news is that Google may be tinkering around with a custom version of Ubuntu, an “easy to install” version of Linux. Yeah right. First of all anyone who’s gonna dare to run Ubuntu already has it installed, or has installed it and deleted it.
Secondly, and here’s the big one… Linux sucks ass.
There, I said it.
Don’t hand me some shit about it being stable, secure, blah blah blah blah blah. What the hell ever. While propeller-heads rush out to recompile their kernel everytime they want to plug in a thumbdrive, I’m using my stuff. I’m editing video. I’m editing photos. I’m editing audio. I’m writing posts for my site with W.Bloggar. I’m doing whatever the hell I want to do while chatting on Trillian with other folks.
But I’m not using Linux.
There’s only one desktop-worthy version of Unix that exists in the world right now, and it’s commonly known as Mac OSX. The only people who use Linux on a home desktop are people who think it makes them some super 133t hacker who can show off how they shoehorned it onto their 15 year-old PC cobbled together with parts that came out when George H. W. Bush was president as if having a 15 year old PC was something to be proud of.
Face it folks. Linux is never ever going to be a Windows killer, or a realistic Windows alternative because it’s not geared for 99.9999999% of the people using PC’s, has crappy software (anyone who compares Gimp to Photoshop should be shot), and never keeps up with current hardware; when it does, it requires recompiling your kernel.
Weeeee. Sounds like fun. I mean, if you want to spend more time tweaking your system than actually using it, enjoy. If squeezing 1 more instruction out of my cpu means I have to do it with Gimp, GAIM, KDE, Open Office, and other community developed crap, screw it. I’ll stick with what works. A Mac or a Wintel machine.
[tags]ubuntu, google, linux[/tags]