Why Linux is About to Lose

mpawlo writes "Wired ran an interesting piece by Russ Mitchell in the latest issue of the magazine. Mitchell focus on the so called war between Microsoft and Linux and why Linux will have a hard time winning such a war, and especially in respect of the desktops. The article was only available in the paper issue, but is now also available online."

Comments

Desktop shipments? Article disqualified.

[geschild]

To use the paltry 1.5% of shipments of Linux for desktop environments to disqualify Linux as a contender for the desktop shows how little the writer knows about Linux. And the writer worked for Red Hat? Please, somebody hit her with a clue-bat. The amount of shipments tells nothing about the installed base and for desktops you can rest assured that the number of shipments should be multiplied by a _much_ larger amount than with server-shipments exactly _because_ of the reduced licensing cost it can bring for workstations! Don't bother to read the piece, it's useless and shouldn't even have been posted here especially since it's a day old.

Karma? What's that again?

Re:Maybe in the short term...

[acroyear]

Dell has not dropped Linux totally. Dell has dropped linux for their cheap, low-end systems, your standard home desktop (so, yes, GNU/Gnome|KDE/Linux isn't "ready" to be a home desktop system...but in my opinion it wasn't meant to be and shouldn't be force-fed into that environment).

Dell DOES still support and distribute RH7.1 on their workstation and server lines, and states they will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

People don't just casually go "I wanna use linux" -- people pick Unix or Linux systems because they want to get something done and have decided that Microsoft products will cost too much and get in the way of actually getting things done. And if you have stuff you "have to get done", generally, you need a high-end workstation or server to do it.

Re:Why Linux isn't on the desktop or never will be

[zulux]

Were alrady there for some userse - I'm a consultant for a bunch of small businesses, and have been replacing the "front desk" computer operating systems with Mandrake 8.0 in KDE mode and AbiWord. The secretary types love it becuse they can't "break the computer" and they don't loose work. Just make sure your printer is supported with CUPS and away you go. Granted, the Linux desktop can't replace the whole MS-Office desktop, but in actuall use (for the correct type of user) I've had great sucuess with the above.