v10.5

No, maybe YOU didn't read my comment. I didn't ever say that those programs WERE on par with their commercial equivalents right NOW, I said they would EVENTUALLY be.

I'm not too familiar with iPhoto, but from what I've heard you can't extract back out all the organizational metadata that you put into it. The pictures (I would guess) are just images on your drive, but I'm talking about the additional info that these programs capture, which is what provides their value. If it's stored in an open database format, or even completely exportable via XML (or similar) then that's fine, but from what I've heard it isn't.

aren't market leaders for the mainstream except Firefox

Mainstream = average user

The guys on that podcast, that you regard so highly, even said those programs are not where they should be in regards to comparing them to iPhoto and iMovie. Did you listen to it all? Maybe you heard what you wanted.

Branch off and create something better, oh that's easy for the "average user" or should the average user just wait? And there we go with the comment I already stated, the programs aren't where they need to be.

I still don't get that whole notion of proprietary formats with iPhoto, it stores the full res photos in their entirety and you can easily get them into another app since they are in jpeg format or tiff (the original format). As for iMovie you just export your movies to the format you want. Mail.app could be an issue but if the user just used IMAP it wouldn't because I use mail.app and thunderbird on linux and it's fine through IMAP, as it should.

No, it wasn't the same guys. The guys I posted about on my blog were from the Geek Nights podcast. This show was the Linux Link Tech Show, and they were interviewing the guys that do the "Linux Action Show" and are long-time Apple developers and users. All three sets of guys are totally different and separate. Despite what you may think, there are quite a few people who are VERY familiar with Apple and have been for a long time who also don't really like Apple, so it's not a very big coincidence.

Re: market leaders - so you're saying that Apache (running on Linux) isn't a market leader, eh?

I don't think that Firefox works worse on Linux. When I use it it seems to work very well; I can say for sure that it doesn't "crash constantly". :)

All those types of apps are coming along pretty nicely. Off the top of my head, Digicam is a decent photo manager, and apps like Kino for video editing look pretty promising.

The great thing about the open source community is that there are a whole bunch of these projects out there, some of which will continue to progress and eventually overtake any commercial offerings you can think of. Even better, if they can make them work the way they (or any given group of target users) want them to, rather than waiting around for Apple to dictate to them the way that they should do something (use a particular application, etc.), and if anyone doesn't like an aspect of a program, they can branch off and change it, which will never (and can never) happen with Apple or Microsoft.

Also, down the road when they want to export the content (images, music, metadata) of whatever they put into these programs into a new data storage format (if they did decide to switch programs) they wouldn't be totally screwed like they would with Apple's (and others) proprietary, lock-in based storage systems.

Those guys on the podcast that were being interviewed were the same guys you talked about from another podcast about how bad garageband is? It would have been too big of a coincidence if not.

As far as market leaders on Linux your examples aren't market leaders for the mainstream except Firefox which I read is worse on Linux then Win or OS X.

I'd like to see an iPhoto replacement or an iMovie replacement that works as well if not better.

Time will tell and lets just hope that fedora and Ubuntu don't do the same things as SLED, since SLED is not free.

I don't think you should insult the intelligence of average users like that... :)

As for that podcast link, just in case there's any confusion, this was a different set of people than those other ones I mentioned before on my blog. The two they were interviewing on this show also did mention a lot of drawbacks to Apple's products, but they are in addition to the others I mentioned before.

[Podcast reference explanation: Dan's talking about episode 150 of the Linux Link Tech Show, which is one of my favorite podcasts at the moment. The shows are usually around two hours long, but are very enjoyable (to me at least). They get a lot of great interviews with leading people in the Linux / Free Software community, yet also do a very relaxed and "unprofessional" show, which I like.]

Regarding open source software, that's a pretty broad brush you're using there. There are plenty of open source applications that are the market leaders (Apache being the primary example) and also plenty of desktop open source products that are enjoying increasingly rapid user adoption daily (Firefox). When you say "quality", I think that's a bit vague, since there are a lot of factors (some objective, some subjective) that go into one's assessment of "quality" of software.

I'm assuming for the sake of discussion that we're talking about the readiness of the public to embrace Linux on the desktop, as a replacement to MS or OSX. I'd agree that that transition will probably take a while, and I'm really not expecting it to happen overnight. HOWEVER, I think that at this point the hurdles are mainly marketing / perception related, rather than technical (other than hardware driver support, which I think is the only significant technical disadvantage). In almost every other area, the Linux platform is making such quick strides (take XGL for example, which hasn't been around that long at all) towards overtaking Apple and MS that it is only a matter of time before most features you could ever want in an operating system will be done better by the open source community.

Like I said before, hopefully the lock-in strategies and other anti-freedom initiatives of the proprietary vendors will only serve to push people towards freedom that much quicker, but I think the day will eventually come.

Yeah the apps that you can't imagine are the ones that the average user uses, like little wrapper apps for a google calendar.

Realistically it's going to take awhile for everyone to embrace the free environment that you're talking about. Event that long ass podcast that you sent me, with the losers I've talked about before said that it's going to take a while and my personal opinion about OSS is it doesn't have the quality yet in order for people to really take it seriously.

They do have commercial apps for Linux, but for the vast majority of "average" users (like your mom, for example), I think it would be difficult to imagine an application they would need that *wasn't* in the repositories. Worst case scenario - even if you did find one, you could just download and install it manually, which would be the same thing you'd have to do on Windows or Mac anyway.

Yeah, I did see that there were other notes in the linked article, but I just thought that I'd comment on the excerpt that you quoted since that seemed to be the emphasis of this post. Like I said, it's probably a good idea (for them) to capitalize of the work that the excellent open source developers have done. I'm just hoping it will work out to be a good thing for the open source community as well, via people getting a taste of free software and that whetting their appetite for a truly free (as in freedom) total package (operating system, etc.).

I'd also like to point out the link to the forum thread has a lot more then just what the excerpt brings up. A lot of great features for developers to make awesome apps.

That's not really my point though, the repositories are easy but if you need an app that isn't in the repositories good luck. For example, if my mom wanted to install the beta version of firefox on Ubuntu I would just say forget it and deal with the version you have. A more realistic example would be a program that isn't supported by linux because the developer doesn't deem it necessary, and that's why linux won't be a major player for a while. At least until wine gets better or devs start supporting Linux. But that would be extremely weird to see, software that you need to pay for to install on linux. You don't see that very often.

Can I quote you on that last sentence from the first paragraph? I don't necessarily agree with it, but I think they may revoke up your honorary iEvangelist status if they heard that. :)

As for the last one, actually, installing software from the repositories is one area where I think "Linux for the average user" has already surpassed the commercial alternatives. The more popular user friendly distros now have pretty much all the software most users would ever need in the repositories, along with pretty easy to use GUI front ends to their package management systems. It doesn't get much easier than browsing through a list and clicking the ones you want and having them automatically be set up on your system, as opposed to buying software off the shelf or even downloading from individual sites.

Firstly it's not a bandwagon if the OS has only 7% of the market share. MS has pretty much said OSS is their enemy.
But of course I agree. This should be done more. And the way I see it, people will start trusting OSS more and more and finally realizing the GUI of OS X or Vista is no different then gnome.

But it only makes sense for Apple to do this. I assume they know that these OSS are the best and why reinvent the wheel. Instead they add to it to make it a better product in some circumstances.

But thinking about installing software on Linux is still a task for any "normal" user. If that program they need isn't in the repositories of what the distro uses, good luck.

Hmm, I wonder if MS should jump on the bandwagon and start bundling a bunch of open source apps with their systems too. Just a guess, but I bet they'd take a lot of crap for it if they did.

I do think it's a good trend that should continue though. Hopefully as these proprietary systems become composed of higher percentages of "free" pieces, people will realize the benefits and start to want to use one that's completely open and free.