Slashdot Mirror
2003: Year of Linux in Asia?
Anonymous Coward writes "The Register has a story
about traveling to a magical country where seeing Linux laptops displayed in stores is perfectly normal. The author then goes on to predict that this year will see much more desktop action coming not from Red Hat or Euro-Distros, but from China and India. Makes sense to me."
" If all you do is browse the web or get e-mail, then yes, Linux is viable. But that is a much smaller market than most advocates want to admit. And even if someone thinks that's all they want, most are not going to go the "oddball" route "just in case"."
It's refreshing to see one other person on Slashdot that understands this concept. What's keeping my tied to Windows isn't going to be solved by a kernel update to Linux. What's keeping me using Windows has nothing to do with MS's monopoly or that I'm an idiot or any of those other stupid rationalizations I hear all the time. Linux is free so I should have no problem using it right? Wrong.
I use Outlook 2000 (no, not express, so spare me the virus bs.) because I choose to. It's the best for what I use it for. (Calendar, To do list, Spam filtering, synchronization with my PocketPC and Phone, etc...) There are probably clones of it out there, but so what? I already have my solution. I use Lightwave. I could switch to Maya or something, but I've already spent the money so where's the value? I use Photoshop. I could use Gimp, but Photoshop is what everybody uses. I like to play games, dare I even touch on that?
I have no incentive to switch to Linux. My computer works, it's quite stable (despite the FUD spread around here about Windows 2000 or XP), and it more than suits my needs. At some point Linux is going to have to stop playing catch-up to MS and start being better if they want me to jump ship.
Funny thing is, I'm not even pro-Microsoft. But I'm not interested in dropping everything just to enter the "I'm cool because I use Linux" popularity contest. A switch to Linux costs me a great deal, it doesn't buy me anything today.
With that said, more needs to be done to make Linux an attractive platform for companies like Adobe to port over to it. The opportunity is there. Movie Studios are starting to pick up Linux as a workstation. It ain't going to completely replace Microsoft or Apple until an artist such as myself is presented with an interface I can pick up and use. I have to be able to maintain my machine. I have to be able to install and run apps. I have to be able to communicate with people who don't run Linux (i.e. good Office port...). All of this completely fails if I have to memorize a bunch of text commands in order to configure my machine.
Solve the interface issues with Linux, and you'll see support from companies like Adobe. When we see support from these places, the interesting apps will appear.
You know, I hear that a lot, but I never see it. I've been running Chimera (and before that, Mozilla) for quite a while and I can't remember hitting a site I couldn't view. Some banks require user-agent spoofing* to work properly, but once I've got my foot in the door, everything seems to work great.
Got any examples of sort-of-high-traffic sites that just plain don't work in Mozilla based browsers?
*See this for more on that.
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the strongest word is still the word "free"
Unless Linux gives me something I don't have in Windows, then I just don't have the time to muck with it.
It sounds like what you're looking for is the hard sales pitch. Not sure if you're going to find that in Free software land.
You will find desktop environments that allow for seemless use of multiple desktops, server class networking, and front line applications that do a pretty fine job rivaling their rather expensive counterparts. All without having to troll the WareZ groups for hours on end.
The advantages of a Unix desktop aren't immediate though. You won't have a paper clip come flying out to show you around. It takes some time and curiosity to see for yourself why there are those of us who left Windows behind. The really rough part here is that it's not something I can describe adequately to you here. Oh, I could probably list off a stack of features that Windows simply can't do, but it wouldn't mean anything to you. It only has value or meaning when you get there yourself.
All that's assuming you can get past the app naming conventions. You can, can't you?
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Linuxers understand that it is all about the applications. In fact, applications are precisely the reason that Linux is eventually going to win out. Hardware is getting ridiculously inexpensive, but commercial software remains very expensive. You might be happy to pay thousands of dollars for Lightwave, MS Office, Photoshop, and whatever else you run on your machine, but lots of people would rather use Blender, OpenOffice, The Gimp, and the wealth of free tools that come with Linux. Interestingly enough, the hardware companies would especially like to see software become less expensive because that would leave consumers with more money for hardware.
Sure, the Linux tools might not be quite as powerful, and they might lack the polish of the commercial applications, but they are a heck of a lot cheaper, and they are actually pretty darn good. This is especially true in countries where the average computer user gets paid less than those of us in the first world. If it weren't for the fact that most commercial software is easy to pirate Free Software would already be the rule in the poorer areas of the world. The harder the commercial software companies try to stamp out piracy, the more prevalent Free Software is likely to become.
Even in the United States the only people that actually pay for applications like Photoshop are those folks that use it professionally. Most people use whatever photo editor came with their digital camera or scanner. The Gimp almost certainly kicks that software right in the head. Which is why, in the long run it is almost certain to gain wider use and acceptance, especially now that the Gimp runs on Windows.
Adobe isn't going to port to Linux, because they know that if their customers start experimenting with Linux they are very likely to start experimenting with other Free Software that comes included in most Linux distributions. Direct competition with Free Software would make it that much harder for Adobe to sell their commercial applications.
In the end Linux will continue its inexorable march towards ubiquity not because it is especially good, but because it is "good enough" at the right price. There are plenty of folks that would like to use their computers to do the things that you do with your computer, but that can't afford to purchase thousands of dollars worth of software. These people have no (legal) choice but to dig in and invest some of their time learning Linux.
I say that not just because of pricing themselves out of the labor market, with Asian and other labor forces offering cheaper labor. The truth also includes cheaper *methods* which Linux is a part of, long term. Higher costs imposed my closed source and proprietary (read: Microsoft) operating systems and application software will cause higher prices for those who choose them. This making Asian markets that choose Linux even *more* competitive down the road.