Comments on: It’s Coming

By: Jon Levell

Jon Levell — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 11:51:15 +0000

Neil: Win32 SWT might look better than GTK SWT but Fedora Core 4 comes with a version of Eclipse compiled to native code – it doesn’t look any prettier but as improvement to gcj (java compiler) happen it’ll get faster and faster…at the moment I try to avoid using Eclipse on anything but recent hardware so I’m looking forward to seeing how this evolves. I know that making things work under Wine can be a pain but for Fedora, IBM apps are easy because somebody has taken the time to package them. You download a config file (from the Fedora C4EB internal site) then just type “yum install notes6-client” it will get all the bits of software it needs and install and configure them. The same goes for Ubuntu (I’m told). External people have a job on their hands but internal people might find it easier than on Windows 😉

Darren: I once heard someone say that at a conference he asked he asked a room “Hands up everyone that has used Linux”, a few hands went up. He then asked “Who has used Google?” and then argued that everyone who has used Google has run Linux. A little facetious but you both have a point I guess.

By: Darren

Darren — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 20:44:02 +0000

I think that’s a good summery Jon, but it also feels like more and more of the applications we use are delivered through a browser. A lot of those applications are running on Linux servers so even Windows users (like me) are sort of running Linux applications remotely.

It’s the same with Java. I run only a few Java applications on my desktop, but a lot of web apps I use daily are J2EE ones.

By: Neil DUnn

Neil DUnn — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 15:56:29 +0000

Your definately right about this, I still think the productivity and simple setup keeps a lot
of people on Windows at hursley. Plus the Windows implementation of SWT is just so much
nicer than the GTK one and when you spend most of your life in Eclipse it’s definately a plus side.

While I was on Extreme Blue 2/11 people were using Linux (Ubuntu) most of the time, I know
a lot more of the guys would have if you didn’t have to jump through so many hoops
for reading mail (Lotus Notes on Wine http://www.opentechsupport.net/forums/archive/topic/30866-1.html).
Once you can read your mail and keep your IBM life up to date on Linux I think a lot more people will
switch!