Linux Going Mainstream

Gossi writes "The BBC is carrying an excellent overview of the growing use of Linux, by many different fields. The article says it all, really, and is probably something you should show your Boss."

Comments

Government, yup

[tcopeland]

Linux is also proving popular in the public sector. Governments like the idea of not paying a proprietary vendor huge licensing fees for years and years.

So true. Running on Linux baby!

Re:Government, yup

[The Slashdotted]

It's interesting to note the similarities between the desires of governments and small businesses. Right now, as a Linux newb, I've set up SmoothWall and Red Hat on old computers in a back room. The owner's only demands are that it be near free (as in beer), and it be customizable. With CUPS and OpenOffice out of the box, I can type basic memos. I can hardly wait for OSSuite to come out with the next release (I need product attributes), and he'll be ready for the future on some Pentium 2s

Do your part!

[chrispl]

I carry a variety of flavors of Linux CDs in my car and use live version to show friends and family what they are missing. Suse 9.0 live-eval works great for showing people what this "linux thing" they have read about is.

Makes up for their recent writeup on SCO

[Heggsy]

This ons still makes me slightly cross:

Earlier BBC story

Still, I suppose that the latest story is written by someone who has Clue. I'm told that they exist, even at the BBC.

how can it go mainstream?

[queen of everything]

Ok, I'm a software developer. I want to port my software, written for windows, to linux so that the average joe will be able to use it. Is it so simple? Well, which distro will I do first? Mandrake? Redhat? Suse? Debian? Then what about those who use *BSD? There are so many choices. I mean its a great kernel, I use different distrobutions for all of my servers. I have no desire to mess with Active Directory or IIS.. But how can it take over the mainstream market when each distro is different.

"Mainstream" is such a funny word

[saskboy]

My Mainstream is not always your mainstream.

Government computing is not homebased computing.

To be mainstream, could mean that the software is being embraced by the majority of teenagers using computers, or it could be that the majority of corporate users will start using Linux somewhere in their business this year.

I've seen Linux evolve a lot since I first tried to use it in 1997. I couldn't figure it out then. In 2000 I used Red Hat 6.0 for the first time, and found it easier to understand, but still not useful to me. Now in 2004, I could make it be almost as useful to me as my Windows machine. Do I really think that this year there will be some killer distro that will blow Windows away? No. But it is possible...

GNU/Linux, Windows, and refusing to support MS

[ValourX]

As with most people in the IT field I get a lot of requests for help from friends and family. It's almost never a hardware problem that they have -- it's always some virus or spyware program or some Windows corruption someplace. I found that I was reinstalling Windows every time I worked on someone's computer. And I was using my copies of Windows because they never had their own.

The first thing I want to know is, just how many people are using pirated copies of Windows? I don't even know one person who is now using a legitimate copy of Windows. Why pay when your pal can get it from work, or now from the net? How does this figure into the estimates of Windows domination and market share? Surely if you only counted legitimate, purchased and properly licensed copies of Windows, the home user market share would be drastically lower. Businesses are more or less forced by threat of litigation, fines, and raids, to be legitimate. That's why the first wave of GNU/Linux migration has been happening in the business sector. No matter how many bullshit Gartner studies "prove" that Windows has a lower TCO, it just doesn't. It costs more to buy, it costs more to maintain, and it costs more to upgrade.

I think the best thing that could happen to GNU/Linux right now is for Microsoft to crack down on home user piracy. Activation schemes are a step in the right direction. With more hassle, increased costs and the apparent (or at least, apparent to those who don't know how to get an activation crack) inability to get a copy from a friend, GNU/Linux will look like a much better choice to home users.

But back to my main point: service. I have continued to refuse to service a Windows machine unless it involves replacing the operating system with a Free alternative. Don't like it? Find someone else to do the work... but it'll cost more. I think if more people refused to work on Windows for friends and family, the death of Windows as a dominant desktop platform would be much more speedy.

-Jem

Mainstream, maybe, but not at my home....

[ithilienrp]

I'd been a happy Linux user for years, and used it for everything, from works (scientific research) and my own entertainment (music, movies, etc).

However, things changed a big bit for me a year ago: I've got a girlfriend. Being a typical person who can uses computer to a level (M$ Word, IE, WinAmp, etc), making her use Linux was difficult. It was just simply too difficult for her. So I had no choice but to installed Windows for her. Even that, I tried to make her use Mozilla or Firebird for web browsing. That failed, too. She simply use IE whenever possible. So, forget about OpenOffice.org, etc. There are people who refuse to use any other word processors because "it's not Word", and any other browsers because "it's not IE"... (the list goes on).

That's fine with me, whatever, I can still use Linux in another partition.

But, there was a problem: I usally run process as backgrounds and I want to do that when she's using Word or we both watching movies. And having all my works in Linux partition wouldn't allow me to do this!

So, I decided to get a Mac. OS X seems to provide me a reasonably good solution. First, it is a nice and very user freindly Desktop OS, one of the most friendly out there. Learning to use anything in OS X was painless, even for my girlfriend. Second, if she insists on using Word, then there's Office v. X for Mac (even though there're some compatibility problems). Third, it's UNIX with X11 so I can recompile most of things I need to do my works.

So, while I hope that Linux will eventually become more favorable for Home Users, I don't expect it anytime soon. This is simply because, more than anything else, convincing people who don't really know anything but stick with "name" of programs is very difficult. (Ex. There are people who won't buy anything but a computer wih Pentium-brand CPU, regardless of what he/she's doing with it.)

Re:When Matlab hits mainstream

[be-fan]

But my point is that the target market is *not* necessarily home-user desktop computing! Linux is certainly mainstream at my campus, where all engineers have at least a basic intro to UNIX, and where many of the CS classes are taught on Linux. Linux is certainly mainstream (if not dominant) in the graphics workstation market where major movie studios like ILM use it for their artists. Linux is certainly mainstream in the embedded market, where many embedded products use Linux. And Linux is on the verge of becoming mainstream in the corporate desktop market.