Weekly news wrap-up: Linux made easy; the never-ending text editor debate

A couple of NewsForge/Linux.com stories seemed to touch a nerve — or at least inspire some lively discussion — this week. Robin “Roblimo” Miller, our fearless editor in chief, gently scolded advanced Linux users in his opinion piece, Making Linux harder than it is.

Miller’s point: The command line-loving veterans can scare newbies and non-geek users of Linux off by making it look like it’s beyond the abilities of a user who just wants to browse the Web, write documents, make pie charts, or balance a checkbook. In reality, Linux can do all those things in a way that looks much like most other operating systems. Check out the comments on the story; as I write this, there are more than 90.

A much geekier debate, but a fun one nonetheless, was one sparked by Joab Jackson’s EMACS vs. vi: The endless geek ‘holy war’, a history of the good-natured fight between devotees of the two popular Unix/Linux text editors. It’s a good read, and the comments are entertaining, too.

In other news this week, one LCD maker is predicting that Linux will grow to capture 10% of the handheld market by 2003. Jocob Lin, general manager of Taiwanese LCD maker Picvue Electronics, predicts Palm will lose its market lead to Microsoft, partly because of Linux’s growth.

Along those lines, Sharp Electronics this week debuted its remade Zaurus handheld, powered by Linux. The new Zaurus features a 16-bit color TFT screen, a 206MHz Intel StrongARM processor and 64MB of memory, and if it goes over well, Sharp may roll out other Linux products.

In quasi-related news, one publication is questioning whether embedded Linux is a bust. Embedded.com suggests that Linux isn’t exactly fit for small systems. Hmmmm, that seems to contradict the last two news items.

In news from out favorite monopolist, Microsoft’s Bill Gates admits to a British teen that his computer crashes sometimes, too. Well, Bill, we hate to tell you this but it might not crash so much if you used some other operating system.

Despite an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in its antitrust case, Microsoft seems to have some continuing legal problems as well. Nine states and the District of Columbia want the software giant to open up its source code, should the company not comply with proposed restrictions on its business practices. Should that happen, Bill, we’d welcome you into the Open Source community. There’s room for one more!

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