Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

Comment by globular-toast | Hacker News Reader

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> Fragmented gui development. There were too many projects with none focusing on really making a better gui than mac/windows.

Not really true. Windows has copied loads of stuff from Linux GUIs over the years. I began to notice this around Windows Vista.

> A lack of bread and butter 1st class "business" apps - you know, office. OpenOffice is fine, IF you are ok with the janky ui and no one knowing how it works

This is valid. Shouldn't be so bad today with web apps being a thing.

> lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc server and outlook-like client). Holy fudge, I tried to get this going and people just crapped on me for suggesting it.

Yeah, because MS locks other mail clients out. Thunderbird is an excellent email client. Outlook is some proprietary business messaging thing that also happens to support email (badly).

Fragmented meaning if I was taking a year or 2 to get a code base up for a linux port, I have to take one of a few roads. 1, my app is specialized enough where we dictate the rules and probably it runs well on just one distro, or I have to account for all the different flavors of GUI and windowing systems to target users with their current setups. The former I think happened all the time with specific apps, the latter kept commercial devs far away.

I think the situation is less bad now, but my point was the boat had mostly sailed.

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Thunderbird is fine (i use it daily), but nothing touches the functionality of outlook (on windows - not the limited versions that exist on the web and elsewhere). And I was as anti MS as anyone back then, but once I had to actually implement exchange servers as part of my job vs using sendmail and a bunch of random crap - there was just no contest. I always knew it was important, but it really is the killer business app.

And now that you dont need to hire 1.5 people minimum to manage it, and pay for servers and infrastructure etc to get the benefits, it is now more a killer app than ever, to those who need it. (really, I hope to never manage on-location exchange ever again)

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