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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?
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.
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