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Which Desktop Distro Will Die First?
Over at NewsForge, Roblimo asks the musical question of which of the several recently released "desktop oriented" Linux distributions won't survive the coming year. It's nice to see user-centric distributions at all, but it really is a niche market for now. Apropos that,
psykocrime writes "The fine folks at UnitedLinux have issued a Press Release announcing UnitedLinux 1.0.
Should be interesting to see whether this sinks or swims, considering the general ambivalence (at best) or even outright hostility (at worst) that most of the talk about United Linux has met, from the Linux community.
Questions about GPL compliance, per-set licensing terms, etc... is this the future or Linux or just another albatross?" And J. J. Ramsey writes "BeyondUnreal reviews not only Xandros Desktop's installation, but also shows what this distro's $99 price tag actually gets you. Read more here. LinuxPlanet also has an in-depth review of its own."
Lindows. If they have any success in 2003, Micro$oft will just sue them into oblivion. If they fail during 2003, Micro$oft will just laugh at them and label them as the Open Source failure. If they break even.. they'll probably just sue anyways to get it over with.
Why? Because the one with the most votes already has widespread consumer awareness about its distro. The one that nobody knows about is the one that should be the most concerned.
1. Bad marketing plans redolent of dot-bombs.
2. Onerous licensing not in keeping with Linux's mission.
3. Just plain bad distros.
4. Unprofessional behavior.
The latter will kill a company that deals in Linux very quickly, I've found, since the Linux community is very aware of a company's behavior, far more so than most other communities. If company X with distro Y is seen as "in bed with the enemy," they're going to get shunned faster than a sweet potato that's been up Rush Limbaugh's butt for safekeeping during the winter.
Maybe this is why small companies like Slackware are still around: they cater to a specific need, they do it well, and they don't try to shoot themselves in the foot with pretentious We Need To Grow Our Business jargon/corporate newspeak.
It has far too many license issues :) :) :) :)
The package quality is too high
It seems to have files in sane locations
You can upgrade to the latest version far too easily
It supports far too many archs
The swirl logo has lost its hypnotic appeal...
Of the 'real' companies, I'm afraid the small will die first.
Redhat (possibly et. al.) have the best chance of success in the business world because the have:
a) Industry credibility
b) A half decent support organisation
No serious business customer is going to invest any money without those...
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
I'll take the plunge and post for the first time in my life.
No one will pay for desktop linux. Why? Because people who pay for OSs are generally businesses, and businesses want productivity. There's just not enough of that in Linux desktop apps. If you're going to pay, you may as well pay for what's going to give you the most bang for your buck. And that's Windows.
I am not anti-Linux, at all. I cringe at Windows-based servers, and I fully realize Unix-based server power and flexibility, and encourage my clients to consider it. One of my clients moved to Red Hat and they pay RH some nominal fee for every RH server they ship out. Not even for that RH Network thing. They just pay some ammount to ensure that RH continues its development.
And yet, these guys use Windows on the desktops in the office. They are all Unix professionals. But for shit they need to do on the workstation, Windows can't be beat.
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Completely free distros do not disappear, but those that require pay-per-seat because they have proprietary components are at much greater risk of disappearing. If the company loses interest, the distro goes away, as distributing it without their permission is not legal.
This is one of the things that puts Lindows at risk.
this is not Insightful.
I don't believe that they should merge. If they did I would have to put up w/the tons of shit from Mandrake and RedHat while all I want is Debian.
What's wrong w/Mandrake? What isn't? That's my opinion and that's yours... That's why I don't want Linux distributions to merge.
Why is UL crap? b/c they are trying to band against what they believe is an attempt by one distribution to gain too much power.
I don't think that UL will gain much ground but that doesn't mean it's crap.
I think Red Hat will succeed because it has essentially become pretty much the de facto standard for Linux.
I mean think about it: here in the USA when people know about Linux they definitely know about Red Hat Software. And Red Hat Linux is the commercial distro that is by far the most used in the corporate world. Even IBM's well-funded Linux research uses a variant of Red Hat Linux.
Slackware may be better for the highly-experienced user, and Mandrake may be great for newbies, but for the corporate crowd Red Hat Linux is pretty much it.
face it.. the general population is not ready for linux desktops. hell, the genereal population isn't even ready for windows XP or OSX.
True that. But the thing is, XP and OSX are ready for the general population. Linux is not.
Give me an AIM client that doesn't look nasty, a browser that doesn't crawl and swap on a machine that runs MSIE effortlessly, and an Office suite that doesn't look clumsy.
I am a comp sci major with pretty good Linux/Unix experience behind my belt, and still I would be neither happy nor productive if I didn't have windows on my system.
The simple test is this: I never have a moment like "I am in Windows, and I have the need to boot to Linux to do something." But I often have the "Ah shit I am in Linux, now I need to reboot to windows before I can do this" moment.
The general public doesn't care about open source, community effort, MS monopoly, none of that shit. They want features and smooth interfaces. And Linux isn't ready to give them that. Will it ever? May be. Probably. Remarkable strides have been made by RH, for example, to make Linux more usable by "regular people" during the last 3-4 years that I've been paying attention to it. They seem pretty adamant about continuing in the same path.
Oh yeah, another thing Linux needs is the ability to work on all the hardware windows can work on. Whatever's in my computer, windows handles it. If the best linux can do for me is a fuzzing sound card, a modem that drivers don't exist for, and a TV tuner I can't use, then I am not switching. I don't care if this is due to companies keeping their data proprietary. To the end user, it's the same shit: it doesn't work.
And Linux's fabled reliability isn't worth shit if it doesn't support your hardware and you can't do what you need to do.
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It's all about what businesses decide suits them best. If enough companies have an incentive-- be it open source, community effort, [or] MS monopoly. All of these factors can provide a reason for a company to invest money in an alternative. More importantly, any one of these reasons may make it worth a significant investment to switch.
The last wave will be the US; other countries have much greater reasons to invest both public and private money to refine Linux to serve their own needs. (Namely that Windows and Mac are both American products and money spent on them has almost no ripple effect on the local economy.)
How much would it really take to make Linux viable, given sufficient corporate resources?
Once companies switch, it isn't much of a step for their employees to do the same...
Those two things are related. As soon as you get a real rush of programmers and popularity, you can kiss your consitency goodbye. You're always at the mercy of some idiot who thinks that his "revolutionary new idea" (bitmapped buttons / custom window frame / dark grey on black text) is worth throwing own consitency and ease of use. You just can't win, they outnumber you. Enjoy it while you can.
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Easy to install? The last few versions of Red Hat I've installed (6.2 and 7.2) were significantly easier than my last few installs of Win2K. Do I have the right drivers? How many times will I need to reboot to get working drivers installed? Anyone who has ever installed Windows 2000 has all of the skill necessary to install Red Hat 8.0.
Usable? Well, after installing Windows 2000 out of the box, I have an email client, a web browser, a few games, a nearly useless stripped down word processor (Write), and not much else. Without purchasing additional software, Windows 2000 isn't terribly useful for much other that basic internet access. With Red Hat 8, I get a word processor, spreadsheet, photo editor, and bunch of other useful, usable software. The various productivity packages that ship with Red Hat may not be perfect, but they're good enough for 95% of users and come with the operating system.
Good? That's in the eye of the beholder. I am certainly much happier with Red Hat than Windows. Sounds good to me.
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I know some people will be upset at this, but Red Hat has more staying power than all of the other Linuxes combined (other than Debian and Mandrake). I don't have anything against the other linuxes, but let's face it what easily sets RH apart is that they have the most clout with major businesses here in the US and abroad. I think even Linus still uses RH! No other Linux has that kind of credibility factor going for it. With RH 8.0, the look and feel of the desktop seems professional and appears to be striving towards some type of consistent feel, look etc....and this is where linux IMHO is really lacking. A business linux on the on the server and even more importantly on desktops has to have some level of consistency. I hope RH understands this concept. What I think the linux distributors really need to do is to get together and finally decide on a standard configuration for /etc and init scripts....the resulting linuxes then can be called standard linux. That doesn't mean there can't be non standard linuxes, but I think it would go a long way in getting linux accepted. It's clear to me that RH knows they are on the way to being the standards leader for linux and they don't have much competition.
"You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -- 1976." --George W. Bush, to Queen Elizabeth, Wash
There are too many editors in the market place:
.NET features, DRM and XML and anything else I read on cnet this morning. And that non-expert users will abandon emacs and vi in favour of GUI editing environmnts with intelligent paperclips that assist with more complex editing tasks. The market just can't support nearly a dozen text editors!
- sed
- ex
- nedit
- pico
- emacs
- vim
- elvis
- notepad.exe
Our insanely expensive consultants report says that the minor editors will be driven out of the market by Microsoft's better integrated offering that will support
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"