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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.
90% of the end users wonder "what is Linux ?". To them - Windows is the computer.
But I prefer to use the Google Zeitgeist, and it still says that only 1% of the people accessing Google are using Linux.
Trying to be totally unbiased here, but all these stats are making me confused about the "truth".
Dave
Its articles like these that just annoy me. Numbers get played with to come out the way they want it to, so they can stand on their pedestal and ramble off things that in the end most people will ignore. Of those who don't ignore it, most will not believe a word of it and hold it up as an example that the linux community is out for world-domination or something silly like that (not that everyone in the linux community isn't out for that...), and a few people will actually believe the words, hold them as true and walk around spouting off these numbers until someone slams it in their face.
I'm all for linux in the enterprise and (for me) the home use, but I don't think the way to get linux into those places in the mainstream is to go around saying "Windows is better than Linux" and then stopping. The only way I see linux making strides further into to the server market is to just show people how it compares to other platforms on levels of cost, performance, and maintenance. It won't happen overnight, and it won't happen just because someone spouts off numbers that don't really mean anything - it will take time. But with the people doing the development on linux and linux apps, it will happen.
Just my $0.02....
--Joe
Actually, I don't know anyone of my friends besides me who uses Linux at home. No one.
I used to work in the telcom-business at a company with 120 employed (50 developers: C++/Unix/SUN), where four(!) used Linux at home. The reason for the others to have windows? Games - games - games- games - games...
Id Software and a few others have tried, but... And, Microsoft is working very hard to redirect any proto-Linux-users to MS; and when it comes to games, they still have a magnificent lead thanks to their DirectX efforts. That lead may even be reinforced by the XBox.
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?
I have to take this article with a pinch of salt - I know it's hardly empirical evidence, but almost every developer I know is not installing Linux over Windows, rather they're dual-booting their systems to run both Linux and Windows. Maybe this will change in the long run, but I doubt the swing will have been made by 2004.
I'd love to believe what he says, but it doesn't quite ring true from my own personal experience.
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
Developing in a windows environment, even with something like cygwin or Visual Studio.NET just plain sucks compared to actually being in linux.
How is this? Sorry but having coded for many years using Borland's tools in Windows I found it very very difficult to adapt to Linux development: no 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), no intellisense, no autocompletion, and having to resort to home-brewed makefiles is just a pain in the ass.
Could you please explain which tools are you using for development, so I can use them too and make my life easier? :-)
So 40 % of developers "focus" on Linux. Even if we accept that statistic at face value (which is itself ironic in an article which seems to be at least partly about dubious statistics), it doesn't mean what I think the author intends it to mean.
There are a disproportionate number of developers who work on Sun boxes relative to the number of Sun boxes in the whole computing market, for instance. That just means Sun machines are being used in situations where there is more custom development work going on, and in situations where companies need and can afford to pay for more people to maintain code. The proportion of Sun developers doesn't speak at all to the broader market share of Sun machines vis a vis Windows machines.
I always get a laugh when I see an article about the misuse and misinterpration of statistics, which trots out its own to-be-misused-and-interpreted statistics. What's that old saw about lies and damn lies ?
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!
Not how the linux developers don't support the cause:
1. They usually download it for free rather than buy a distro.
2. They wiped the hard drive free of windows, meaning they didn't buy from a white box Linux vendor.
With friends like this who needs enemies.
A large number of users buy a computer with windows xp installed. I've been looking recently and can't find a cheaper "mainstream" retailer that sells linux boxes cheaper than windows. In fact I just bought a laptop. Dell had the cheapest one that I liked, and it came with xp. Finding anything comparable with just linux on it I found I would be paying out the ass to get linux over windows.
Sometimes windows is cheaper, and definitely easier to find on new computers...plain and simple