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Debunking Linux-Windows Market Share Myths
bc90021 writes "Nicholas Petreley has a great article over at LinuxWorld explaining why it seems that Windows has such a high market share when 40% of developers are focusing on Linux. From the summary: "There are dozens of reasons why people have underestimated how quickly Linux has been grabbing Windows' market share. Windows starts out with a false boost and maintains its illusory market share even as it gets replaced by Linux. In 2004, don't be surprised when Linux overtakes Windows to become the main focus for developers.""
You may recall that lately he wrote yet-another-gnome-sucks editorial (completely disregarding the notion of "user preference," which generally disregards technical aspects of a situation in the first place).
I hope he's right about this, but I look at it with cautios optimism. One can never really know for sure whether what you are getting is a factual account ot the way things are, or the way he thinks they oughtta be.
If 40% of developers are developing for Linux, where are the commercial apps? The big ones seem to be a handful. Freshmeat is great but doesn't represent the huge crashing wave of developer support. We all have our short list of apps we wish were ported.
I have a very hard time with this article - (1) no methodology is given, so the results are as suspect as Microsoft funded surveys; and (2) if 40% of all developers of all sizes are focusing on Windows, wouldn't driver support be 1000% better?
Nick appears to be dressing up wishes in the emporer's clothing of misleading "facts". Again. Anyone else remember his weekly diatribes of the vast superiority and impending market conversion to OS/2 in Infoworld?
Default setting:
/forums/all HTTP/1.1
/forums/all HTTP/1.1
kio_http: (638) ============ Sending Header:
kio_http: (638) GET
kio_http: (638) Connection: Keep-Alive
kio_http: (638) User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.1; Linux)
kio_http: (638) Accept: text/*, image/jpeg, image/png, image/*, */*
kio_http: (638) Accept-Encoding: x-gzip, x-deflate, gzip, deflate, identity
kio_http: (638) Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.5, *;q=0.5
kio_http: (638) Accept-Language: en, POSIX
or the same browser prentending to be a MS OS:
kio_http: (638) ============ Sending Header:
kio_http: (638) GET
kio_http: (638) Connection: Keep-Alive
kio_http: (638) User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
kio_http: (638) Accept: text/*, image/jpeg, image/png, image/*, */*
kio_http: (638) Accept-Encoding: x-gzip, x-deflate, gzip, deflate, identity
kio_http: (638) Accept-Charset: iso-8859-1, utf-8;q=0.5, *;q=0.5
kio_http: (638) Accept-Language: en, POSIX
So what you're basically saying is that Linux OS's are lying about the fact that they are Linux?
Many browsers are lying, but Linux doesn't. I would normally suggest you try nmap against a Linux box, but I don't believe you're technically competent enough to understand any of this.
Are they ashamed?
You clearly do not understand the reasons for doing so, and I do not intend to explain it to you (Why waste my time and get RSI?). Suffice to say that Opera (Which also runs on Windows) regurlarly does this, as do many Mac browsers.
I'll start believing the hype around the Linux takeover the moment I see MS sales going down.
You also don't understand markets. Both Windows and Linux are working in a growth market. There is room for both of them to expand, without causing the other the shrink.
Still, whatever. Someone who can't understand browser spoofing or simple market dynamics will not be missed in five years time when you're looking at job openings for Linux developers.
Sure, first of all I use Eclipse. Which is made by sun and IBM. Also I use KDevelop which eliminates the need for me to write makefiles.
Other than those I use emacs/nedit and a bash shell. I guess all those things like documentation, intellisense, autocompletion and makefiles are a real pain. But I prefer to write my code in a standard text editor. I never really had a need for any of that stuff.
I guess the difference is that I have always coded using a text editor and a shell. You have spent years using Borland's tools, and you have come to rely on things like autocompletion. I usually use books to look up things I can't remember. And that's rare, because not having autocompletion forces me to remember.
I just feel that when I'm writing code I can do a lot more in linux than I can when I'm constrained by something like VS.NET. But when I'm doing anything else doing it in linux seems like too much effort.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I am using mozilla and "faking" my useragent.. I dont want to but I have to, in order to use my "internet-bank".
The way I do it is adding
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)"); to my prefs.js.
I have the feeling that this is common practise. I would prefer to have (like some other brilliant browser) the ability to "fake" the useragent for specific urls only.
Could you please explain which tools are you using for development, so I can use them too and make my life easier?
GNU Emacs.
no context-sensitive help
Meta-X man with cursor on a keyword. By default the man page for the word under the cursor is displayed. Context sensitive help.
no organized documentation (yes, lots of documentation, but no "central" organized index which means a research job for a fucking function declaration)
Use doxygen (external tool) or oo-browser (integrated into emacs). Indexes EVERYTHING in your program and search path. Doxygen draws pretty diagrams too.
no intellisense
WTF is "intellisense"?
no autocompletion
Untrue. Use etags.
and having to resort to home-brewed makefiles is just a pain in the ass.
Having to resort to "pre-build-steps" and "post-build-steps" in MSVC is a pain in the ass.
I hear that "kdevelop" is an IDE which is good for GUI-pointy-clicky-folks, but for the power programmer, nothing beats Emacs.
What he was saying is that now its 50%/40% in favor of Windows, but according to the study's "plan to focus primarily on windows/linux" data, it was going to shift to something like 38%/52% in favor of Linux, but that the margin of error is enough that those numbers are essentially the same as switching it to 40%/50% in favor of Linux next year.
Of course, he also mentions that the overall statistics are 60%/40% in favor of windows now, and based on the "plan to" questions, it will be 40%/60% (in favor of Linux) next year. So you're numbers would be
Microsoft developers 606 people
Linux developers 404 people
of which
202 used to develop primarily for windows
121.2 used to develop for other unixes
80.8 used to develop for something else
It's a matter of philosophy. UNIX traditionally had a "do one thing very well" approach. So a compiler should compile, an editor should be used for editing and so on.
This led to the development of a lot of excellent tools, e.g. emacs, the GCC, CVS and hundreds of little helpers like grep or diff. grep actually is good example for a very specialized software.
So, with Linux, you usually have an excellent tool for every task. As most of this tools are free software, no one is trying to lock you in, and you can configure (or simply change) every tool until it matches your need.
The typical Windows-IDE follows a totally different philosophy: "Do all with one software". Normally it's configurable to some extend, and normally it tries to lock you in and to force you to buy further software from the same company (e.g. for version management).
So developing on Windows usually drives UNIX/Linux-Developers mad and the other way round.
While a Linux-developer will miss many tools on a Windows system and, of course, the possibility to change everything (even in the source code, if necessary), a Windows user with a Linux box will miss integration.
Example: google is running (by their own admission) on the order of 50,000 linux rackmounts. How many times do you think they downloaded the disto?
So, what you're saying is,
1) I'm an idiot for buying a product that's supposed to work, and expecting it to work, and,
2) I'm an idiot because I'm able to use E Machines as reliable servers by putting Linux on them.
I suppose most of humanity must be ignorant morons, because they pretty much all fall into #1. If everyone has to reinstall Windows, then why bother pre-installing it?
I think that *YOU* are the ignorant moron, and a self-righteous and mouthy one at that.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
> No thanks. I'll stick with Windows, which allows
/usr/local? Oh, that's a separate partition. No need to worry about those programs. RPMS? They're all in one directory. rpm -U *.rpm Configuration? Maybe 1/2 hour of copying files from the old backed up /etc to the new one, and all user files are saved on /home, which is a separate partition. No fuss, no muss, no bother.
> me more time to make out with my girlfriend.
Hmmm.
Windows: BSOD + trashed disk for the second time in six months. I'm sorry hun, I can't go out with you now, I have to reinstall my Windows box AND all the applications, AND all the configurations.
GNU/Linux: Redhat XX has been out for awhile now. Hmm, girlfriend is going away this weekend. I suppose I'll upgrade.
Which saves me more time? I like GNU/Linux because computer maintenance and projects fit MY schedule, not me slaved to the schedule of an OS that is little more than the equivalent of a petulant child.
Oh, and my girlfriend runs GNU/Linux too. All of our computers work all the time, 24/7/365, no matter what we do with them.
The Beetle is one of them, by the way.
Dumbed down is fine for the first week or two. After that the dumbing down may get in the way (that's my experience, but I'm a geek so I discount that anecdotal evidence). On the other hand, I've recently experienced some non-geek rommates, so their experience is more relevant to this discussion.
When, my old roommate got to go from WIndows to Linux. His first week was like: "Hey, what's this sucky OS? Why doesn't anything work like Windows? why can't I do this?".
After the first couple of weeks he seemed to be getting used to Linux, and after a month or two he was more of a linux missionary than even I was. I was actually surprised by his enthusiastic embrace of Linux.
I got him using Linux because it was easier on me (he was using my box). With Linux he had his own account with it's own settings and I even had xdm set up so that ctrl-alt-F7 was him while ctrl-alt-f8 was me. No need to even logout. that was RH5.2 ~ 6.1.
My new roommate has a friend who's WIndows box self destructed. After recovering the data on his old disk, I installed RedHat 8.0, downloaded the MP3 extensions for XMMS, set up mplayer and let him take it home. I only got 1 or 2 support calls in the first couple of days -- After that, silence. It was so quiet, I was actually wondering if he'd given up and gone back to WIndows so I called him. He was quietly happy. Linux was doing everything he needed. It just wasn't doing anything wrong.
Now my roommate, who originally pretty much swore that he'd never move from Windows ("Everything I know how to do is on WIndows. Why would I learn another OS?"). Is starting to use the 7.3 installation that I dropped onto his system (a disk from an old computer of mine that died). I didn't even know that he was making any real use of it until he mentioned that now was a good time to install the upgrades that I'd wanted.
You know you've got a kickin' OS when the support people are worried by the silence.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.