Bonum Certa Men Certa

Is Silverlight About 'Killing' GNU/Linux?

It killed kwin for me

PERSONAL experiences are good at teaching oneself about the nuisance some Microsoft technology can bring. Such is the case with Silverlight, whose presence forced me to restart my entire session today, with minor data losses. Yes, my whole KDE session practically became unmanageable, which is exceptionally rare (could not see an ad in Firefox, so tried Konqueror, which had it frozen, needed killing, which then brought down kwin.). This happened after I had received the following message from another regular reader who experienced difficulties:






I've seen the interminable battles about whether Silverlight is supported by Linux (aka "is Moonlight the same as Silverlight?"). Try this experiment. See this page:

http://www.parismatch.com/parismatch/Dans-l-oeil-de-match/Rep...

Hopefully, you will find an advert for a Windows mobile device made by Samsung. If you click the link for the advert, it redirects you to a page on Microsoft.com for the full spiel:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/startdoingmore/...

I notice that some text at the top says "CE SITE EST PLUS AGRÉABLE À VOIR SOUS SILVERLIGHT INSTALLEZ-LE MAINTENANT" (i.e. This site is better viewed under Silverlight <link>Install it now</link>) I tried to "install it now" under my Linux-based Konqueror browser and it told me that "My hardware or operating system are unsupported." That should put to rest the silly debate about whether Moonlight is the same as Silverlight (it's obviously not!) and about whether Silverlight is supported under Linux (again, it is obviously not supported under Linux!) Anyone who disagrees can easily repeat the test above and see for themselves (bonus points if they actually have Moonlight installed, which I don't.)




People need to abolish Silverlight, whose only supporters are Microsoft and Novell (virtually the same entity these days). Moonlight is not Silverlight for GNU/Linux [1, 2] and both plug-ins need to be fought away [1, 2, 3, 4] while still in their digital diapers.

What was Samsung doing with Silverlight anyway? Samsung, as we have shown many times before, is close to Microsoft not only because it stabbed Linux with a ludicrous patent deal. Those two companies collaborate a lot and then there's also Korea's trouble with Windows lock-in to take into consideration. Samsung is one of the largest business entities in Korea, but a very corrupt one nonetheless.

Silverlight toilet



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