[BozemanLUG] Interesting times for Linux gaming

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

Just a couple of comments to all of the discussion that has happened so far...

1) Microsoft Office documents and Linux - Try SoftMaker Office and see if it works for you.  I don't deal with MS Office documents too often but SoftMaker Office has always worked for me with the documents that OpenOffice / LibreOffice had trouble with.

2) Active Directory - Hey, FOSS hasn't given up yet.  Samba has hit 4.0.0rc3 and is pretty darn close.  Of course that is an attempt to clone the server side components and doesn't really address the client side... at least so far as I know... and yeah, it's only a clone of Microsoft's Active Directory rather than an open alternative.  I'm not that fond of adopting Microsoft's standards but hey, you can if you want.

FreeIPA, sponsored by Red Hat, builds on top of the LDAP-based directory server (Project 389) and aims for Identify, Policy and Auditing.  It has been making progress.

One of the many features of the upcoming Fedora 18 is just-works integration with Microsoft AD for authentication.  It is just the first step.  While many services have had Kerberos integration for some time, Microsoft AD is a different flavor.  With Fedora 18 they goal was AD integration... which sort of breaks standard Kerberos.  They plan on fixing that in the next release.

So, my point is... that the FOSS community has not completely written off directory services and policy-based management.  It is just taking a while.

3) The future of the PC -  Will it be the cloud?  Will it be a tablet?  Will it be a smart phone that is finally powerful enough to, when docked, replace your existing PC?  Will it be a combination of all of those?   I think it'll be a combination of all of those... but yeah... I think the future moves much more slowly than the vendors want us to believe and the desktop PC and laptop will be around for sometime go come.  They will definitely be losing much of their marketshare as the plethora of devices continues to fragment.

The future I'd like to see would be one where hardware functionality is very component-ized... where you can take a small generic computer and add to it the functionality you want... to create whatever form-factor you want... with some degree of interchangeability.  While the commercial software/hardware vendors want to continue to close and control everything, I hope the future has room for FOSS hardware that will continue to run FOSS software.

4) Gaming - Ok, my original response was satirical in nature... but seriously... why does any one or two things have to win and everything else has to die?  I just don't see it happening.  I see gaming doing what computing is... fracturing into a large number of options... that all continue to do quite well as the numbers grow... as the rest of the world moves from digital third-world to digital native.  With the dominance of Facebook (which I'm still not on)... they recently reached 1 billion users (or something like that)... BUT how many people are on this earth?  In reality, the vast majority of the world is NOT on Facebook so I'm still in the majority. :)  I think we are still crawling with regards to technology adoption by mankind.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
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