3 ms·

>At the end of the 90's people believed that there is just a limited amount of desktop software and once open source has implemented Office/Photoshop/etc. this

• batou 11y ago
  I still believe that but we went past the mark and dissolved our communities into the same pitfalls as the commercial software. I consider windows 7, office 2010 and conversely Ubuntu pre-Unity with libreoffice to both hit the mark perfectly. Stuff just worked and we had control over our data. That was the last software I needed. Since then I've been dragged forwards into the future, the cloud and all the things that it brings. Now it's going backwards again and we're losing control. I'm not saying that we shouldn't improve but that was feature peak.
  • walterbell 11y ago
    Fortunately, virtualization lets you run old operating systems on modern hardware.
    • keithpeter 11y ago
      And CentOS 6 with the epel and nux-desktop repositories enabled has support until 2020 (relating to the pre-Unity Ubuntu reference). And you can have MATE on current stable Debian and not notice the difference. But I think the OA was talking more about the network and what we reveal through it rather than the client devices we use.
• quonn 11y ago
  It was a common idea at open source conferences.
• coldtea 11y ago
  Lot's of people, including several major open source communities and FOSS proponents. That was the goal of projects like KDE and GNOME, and smaller ones like Gnumeric, Evolution, GIMP, etc. If not as a fully explicitly stated belief (which some did that too), the idea was nethertheless very prevalent that the endgames is: "we just replicate those programs and we take over the desktop with FOSS".