We are living in strange times. The entire economy turns out to have been a great big joke. Parliament appears close to collapse. The US is introducing new standards that could herald the end of gas guzzlers. Somebody or something called Tinchy Stryder has been number one in the charts.
And most bizarrely of all, we're excited about a flavour of Linux.
Moblin may be plain old Linux under the hood, but the Intel-backed project for netbooks has managed to pull off the unthinkable: it's made Linux look cool.
For the first time ever we're scanning the screenshots and watching the videos, and we're thinking "hey, that looks cool! And by cool, we mean totally sweet!"
Don't get us wrong, we don't have anything against Linux. Far from it. But while it's many things, it isn't cool - even the mighty Ubuntu doesn't float our boat.
With most technology, looking into it is like shopping for a new and exciting car. We'll happily spend days scanning brochures, reading reviews and coming up with increasingly imaginative and expensive configurations.
With Linux, though, it's more like shopping for a new central heating boiler. You know it's going to be worthwhile and you know it's going to save you money, but it's hard to summon up much enthusiasm. Oh look. It's a boiler. Oh look. It's another boiler. Oh look. It's a slightly different boiler. Oh look. I've wasted my life.
Good-looking Linux
Moblin, though, is different. It's not a boiler. It's sleek, it's slick, it's almost sexy.
So naturally, somebody's going to bugger it up. Of course they will. It's Linux!
Instead of a single version of Moblin, there's going to be loads, and netbook firms are going to muck around with it, and we're going to end up with the same old confusion that stops Linux from breaking through and becoming the OS your mum, dad and grandparents use.
None of those things have happened yet, which is why the Moblin project should be shut down immediately.
Again and again, we've seen early promise ruined because people don't know when to stop. The Stone Roses should have quit after their first album; Charlie Kaufman after Being John Malkovitch; Quentin Tarantino after Pulp Fiction.
But they kept going, with the inevitable disappointment and diminishing returns.
Moblin could be the OS equivalent of Kurt Cobain, of Bill Hicks, or of Jeff Buckley. All it needs to do is disable the download links, wipe the web pages and shutter the servers.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Liked this? Then check out Linux: the girlfriend test
Sign up for TechRadar's free Weird Week in Tech newsletter
Get the oddest tech stories of the week, plus the most popular news and reviews delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up at http://www.techradar.com/register
Your comments (3) Click to add a new comment
flymo
July 6th
3. Strange times, indeed....
It's a good general point - that it takes more than convincing competence to contact the airheads who sadly infest this planet.<sigh>
But glitz alone does not a successful OS make, or Vista would rule the world.
Did you never _try_ a recent Linux release? Or did you just go with the default desktop?
Ubuntu does come looking bland and brown, but a 13-year-old can hack it into 'seriously cool weirdness' inside a half hour. We've watched it happen.
Nothing can match the eye-candy cool of compiz, if you like that kind of thing!
My el-cheapo Acer laptop has a partition with a Spinny Pyramid desktop enabled, semi-translucent, with more things moving mysteriously inside it - take your pick... Wobbly windows, fire and rain on the desktop too - all on Intel integrated graphics and a lowly Celeron cpu. Not really to my taste, but teenagers seem to love it, and the word they choose is 'cool'. The same hardware refuses to run Vista Aero and crawls under Vista even without it - how uncool is that?
For me, with a dozen-odd family & friendly PCs to maintain in good order the coolest thing possible is to have something reliable that 'just works', like my original SuSE 10 installation, still trucking, never crashed after how many years? Still 30% faster than XP, too.
Ideally, a PC should 'just work' on the internet, but not with any flavour of Windows that I have used. Win users need (urgently) to add a proper firewall, good anti-virus, and probably two or three flavours of anti-malware. Did you notice that MS Morro was ranked lowest of all, lately? Again? (they used to call it One-Care)
Linux is just so cool in comparison with the deeply uncool alternative of being slaved to a spambot. Spammers do think Windows is cool! Oh yes....
After that, you might think I hate Windows, but that is not true - I have 100x more Windows hours than Linux, and I now run XP virtualised inside Ubuntu when I need it, which turns out to be every couple of months, typically.
Just keep MS products off the internet and they work OK. Bit slow, limited tools, but OK.
Alert a moderator
dubdii
May 29th
2. Utter rubbish! And take this from one who has used and tested different flavours of both OS. Microsoft has a lot going against it when compared with Linux. The obvious bias expressed in the write up can only come from one who choose to be blind to the frustrations users face daily using microsoft products. Do a simple search online and you get my point..
Alert a moderator
thegilb
May 26th
1. Looks great, let's see how Microsoft react to that then :-)
Alert a moderator
Tell us what you think
You need to Log in or register to post comments