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.""

Comments

About Nicholas Petreley

[lord sibn]

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.

40% of developers?!?

[TrailerTrash]

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?

Re:keyword

[Apreche]

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.

Re:Say what you want...

[MrHanky]

That's partly true, but Opera (the only "major" browser to lie about itself) does identify itself as being IE on Linux when it's configured to report as IE. Its user agent string is something like:

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Linux 2.4.20-ck4 i686) Opera 7.00 [en]"

It doesn't even hide the fact that it's Opera. Konqueror can be configured to report as IE on Windows (Or Mozilla 8.0 on VIC-20 or whatever), but it doesn't do it as default. (A nifty feature is to have IE 5.5/Windows as user agent string for difficult sites like Hotmail only.)

Re:Say what you want...

[JayateMo]

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.

Re:Who cares about developers ?

[darkonc]

I actually disagree with you, I think a Linux user going to a Windows environment has a much easier time. In part because many things in Windows are specifically dumbed down to make them single click applications.

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.