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Desktop Linux Share Overtaking Macintosh
prostoalex writes "Business Week magazine is optimistic about desktop Linux's future, telling a story of Capital Cardiology Associates, whose 160 employees migrated to Linux desktops. Furthermore, Business Week expects IDC to announce desktop Linux installations to reach 3.2%, for the first time overtaking Macintosh market share. By 2007, IDC forecasts, Linux will be installed on 6% of the desktops. It's also worth mentioning that desktop Linux market share for 2002 was 2.8% and that year it was behind Apple's operating system."
Woo! Six per cent! Six per cent!
Fine while it lasted.
If the BSD guys wanted to win, they really should start using a better license like the GPL. :-)
i know for sure i'd be running mac os if it worked on intel
ok, just to get it out of the way:
Apple is dying. Macintosh is Dying
No its not. OS X rules.
Now onto some actual discussion.
As a Mac user, I guess I'm supposed to be foaming at the mouth now, extolling the virtues of OS X, and denigrating the virtues of Linux. However, I won't. I don't care about Apple's market share, as long as OS X (and its requisite hardware) is available to me. I will gladly pay the price. Long live the king!
Linux - 51%
and Mac - 49%
WE the Mac owners wish to be a small and exclusive club. (Too bad I can't afford the new G5) MM
Those percentages are probably new sales and do not reflect the existing desktops out there.
E
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
ANd to think the halftime ad in the Superbowl featured IBM's Linux ad...
History repeats?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
But shouldn't this be more a story of Linux gaining ground on Windows? I like and use both, but I hate to tell ya, Apple's core market is safe from Linux for the foreseeable future.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
The marketshare is there now right? Most linux installs are for home users who are nerds, cad engineers, and some servers here and there.
The server software is comming and cad software is just now being ported. Home software is still nowhere in sight.
Also most nerds now download iso's from Debian and Gentoo, and FreeBSD. They do not pay for there rpm hell anymore. Are these users being counted as well?
If there could be a way it would tell these software makers to port home software.
http://saveie6.com/
This starts making Linux a very viable software platform in terms of established software companies such as Adobe and Macromedia.
Being a designer, this is the key area I'd love to see Linux flourish in.
To be able to ditch windows and natively run applications such as Photoshop or Dreamweaver would be a dream come true !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Would these stats include Servers as well? A server is well defined, but the term desktops is not.
So would this actually be saying more computers will be running linux vs. a Mac OS?
Who cares if it's overtaking Mac- as long as the share it's taking over from is Windows.
If Linux was *replacing* Mac on the desktop, that would be worrisome. Instead, you're seeing municipalities, counties, even countries switching from Win to Lin. You're not hearing about ad agencies doing mass migrations to Linux, replacing Photoshop with the Gimp and Quark with... with... um, well, you're not hearing about it.
Meanwhile, the mac addicts will single-click along, content with their 3%- and happier still that they've got some stronger allies against the real threat to their desktop security.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
In the unparalleled words of Jerry Mcguire "Show Me The DATA".
I'll believe it when I see some kind of data. I have yet to see Linux being used in a desktop environment. I've seen a few macs, but a majority have been Windows based.
Google Zeitgeist still says Linux is 1% and Mac 3%
Everyone's got one.
This presumes the rate of growth for Linux on the Desktop will be as prolific as it has been for Enterprise deployment, not to mention OS X isn't once mentioned in the article, just the Macintosh Operating System.
Macintosh software? Could this article be particularly more vague? I guess being overly general is good to cover their butts?
Good luck on Linux overtaking OS X's momentum.
Since over 40% of pre-OS X has switched since its inception I would expect in a year from now another 30% and climbing, especially with the G5 and soon-after G6.
My daily OS is Debian so no I'm not coming from a Mac biased viewpoint.
This just goes to show that you don't need to be an 800lb Gorilla to succeed, you just need to be useful. This is where both Apple and open source competes. They are both useful to different groups (with some overlap) but since the user base of all computer users is so large, 3% is still a large number of people. I guess it's proof that if you are good at what you do, people will come to you.
One of the driving factors behind this is cost (especially in emerging markets). The change is coming in business environments, where the macintosh has always lagged far behind windows.
I can't see any of the traditional macintosh markets switching to linux. The same UNIX base is present on the mac along with other more exclusive things.
Anyway, I think that this is in fact a great thing for the macintosh. The compatibility of programs is much better between os x/linux then it is between os x/windows. And Apple has been showing it is more than happy to take up open-source created standards.
In conclusion: go linux, go mac os x, die windows die!
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
If desktop Linux starts to hit Microsoft where it hurts, it will happen not so much among typical office employees but among specialized workers. These include stock traders, bank tellers, engineers, customer-service reps, and warehouse employees. They rely on just a few applications and need PCs that are simple to use and rarely crash -- which Linux can handle.
The last part from the article is an understatement, but it shows BusinessWeek gets IT. It is a pretty well written, but short article, from the business perspective.
Some disadvantages do remain in the near future (eg., the home desktop user still has to get around to installing a working DVD player for movies), but even businesses see the snowball is gaining in size and will soon pass the critical mass (to mix metaphors)!
Why do game companies port to Mac, but never Linux?
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
How much are you paid by Sun to astroturf on Slashdot?
Sun's Java Desktop offers diddly over a regular linux distro besides a big brand name. If you want support Redhat or Mandrake will do you just fine and for less.
Plus, more peripherally, there's the horrible marketing department produced name of "Java Desktop". ALMOST THE WHOLE THING WAS WRITTEN IN C AND C++!!!!
Well, I think it's important to note that it's not the MAC which is loosing ground to Linux, but rather that it's Microsoft's Windows users who are primaraly making the switch.
I just don't think that the Mac is going to disappear because of linux. The Apple zealots are worse than Linux'es own!
Pathway
I think we're going to succeed in pissing off the Macophiles in the crowd with this one. I like OS X as much as anyone, and its multipedia capabilities are utterly obscene, but for general apps most people don't need it.
To be fair, most people don't need the capabilities of any modern system. I'm going to get a 64-bit based laptop, and the only people I can think of who need such power are gamers, video/audio editors, and the highest of power users.
Linux based systems tend to hold the line on excess hardware bloat. You don't need to stay on an endless treadmill of forced hardware and sofware upgrades for support; a skilled tech can keep your setup running. Security is potentially higher, with proper configuration. And virii are pretty much a null threat.
Most office productivity can be handled with F/OSS analogues of Windows tools. Programs like OOo and FireFox, The Gimp and the myriad SQL databases do a great deal of work.
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
I'm switching to Linux on Sunday. I'm still undecided which distro, although I'm looking at either Debian or SuSE. Suggestions?
I know that your distro of choice is very good, I'm looking for suggestions, not trolling.
Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
You need to replace the rear axle", Sir/Ma'am it's your alternator".
As much as I love the OSS movement, it really boils down to the teachers (educational migrators) and the flock. The numbered statistics are just # code.
Let's keep in mind that patents are in place to keep lawyers employed and keep them litigating. -CatGrep
...KDE is beautiful on this POS Toshiba Laptop I have.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
There strike me to be several problems with this: 1) Many linux users(myself included) download iso images, from which it is hard to get an idea of number of users 2) most linux installs are not traditional desktops, for Joe Schmo. Most are for more technical users. 3) When do they 'expire' a machine? For nubmer 3, I mean this: when is a machine no longer held to be in use? I didn't get Panther(it won't run on my Beige G3), does that mean I don't count? What about the Macintosh SE in the basement, still getting daily use? The other beige G3 here, still on OS 9? 2 or 3 years is fair for Wintel boxen as an average IIRC, but a Mac tends to outlast that. I know of several people using first generation PPC machines, simply because they do everything needed. This isn't as simple as OS sales in a given year, I would say harder for Macs than for other machines because the life of a Mac is so much longer than many other platforms, especially without any trackable upgrades. Without knowing from whence these numbers came, they are pretty meaningless.
You should use AdiumX on your Mac.
Actually, this should not be surprising nor alarming. /. post. What would be more relevent would be to compare Linux penetration across hardware architectures seperately. Saying Linux has more installs than OSX is rather slanted and not all that informative since there are many more x86 compatable PC's on the market than PPC compatables. Linux is not hardware, Microsoft does not make PC's. OSX is a desktop yes, but tied to the hardware needed to run it.
On the face of it this is a very misleading statistic and
So let's see the percentile of Linux installs on x86 PC's vs Linux installs (Yellow Dog et al) on PPC architectures.
That would give a better overall view of the marketplace and usage trends. For I'd suspect the migration to Linux from OSX would be microscopic at best while the real breakaway would those migrating from Windows.
Google's Zeitgeist still has Linux at 1% and Mac at 3%. I also find it not very encouraging that even with Longhorn delayed by 3 or so years predicted Linux desktop share gains are 3-4%. Maybe our New Years resolution should be to install Linux on at least one computer that was monopolised by Windows. I did just that :-)
A religious war is an adult version of a fight over who has the best imaginary friend
I'm a long time Linux user who's just about to purchase my first Mac, a G4 powerbook. I use Linux on the desktop everyday, and while I like it, I'm not afraid to admit that compared to an OSX desktop, it lacks polish. I don't blame X, Gnome, KDE, or anyone for this. I really believe it's simply a matter of Mac development being more focused due to Apple spearheading it's development.
Linux is awesome because it's affordable to everyone, and it's become a very nice alternative to Windows; however, I don't think that it's going to steal a significant number of users from the Mac market since OSX has a major geek appeal as well.
It's silly to think that users have to be either here or there. I plan to continue to use both Linux and OSX after the purchase of my laptop, and I don't understand why everyone is so black and white about what you run on your desktop. Anybody that's used a Mac knows what the appeal is about. Linux has a natural attraction to anybody that wants a stable and cost effective OS. Why not enjoy both?
A musician without the RIAA, is like a fish without a bicycle.
Consumer: Hello, I just bought a new foobar2000 how come the monotior flickers?
Distro: The foobar2000 doesn't have drivers yet, go buy a foobar 1999 or wait 6 months.
As long as this scenario continues Linux will not "take over" the desktop market. I am on a ATI radeon 9600 and am using VESA drivers as we speak cause the Radeon drivers break X. So that Unreal2004 you all enjoyed. I sit here "waiting 6 months".
Although this situation has gotten significantly better we are no where close to windows or Mac yet. There are still too many cases where if you buy some new hardware you have to upgrade distros or recompile the kernel. Still not acceptable for joe.
Haha jokes on you, by the time you mod me down 100's of people will have read this and heard the truth! take that my slashdot overlords!
To run MacOS requires a PPC. Not just ANY PPC, a Macintosh. That's ONE breed of computer. Just one.
To run Linux, you need a computer and some means of getting linux onto it. Linux runs on Sparcs, Ultras, SGIs, Alphas, x86, m68k, several different PPC variants, pdas, cel phones, the Game Cube, the Dreamcast, digital watches, and the IBM 390 mainframes.
Not only does linux run on practically everything, it handles almost identically across ALL of these architectures. Your debian experience won't be much different on an Ultra III than it will be on a Dell or a Macintosh G3 (aside from hardware support, obviously).
I can install linux on any computer I can find in the dumpster.
Every other OS on the planet (BSDs excepted) are much less portable and available on a vastly narrower variety of hardware.
So. DUH. Of COURSE it's a growth industry. Linux is popular on the x86- and there's got to be at least 10 PCs for every Mac, just in terms of volume of existing hardware. Linux will continue to gain marketshare because it isn't tied to any specific hardware, making the cost of entry incredibly, amazingly cheap.
Can I get a HELL YEAH! ?
hmm, i wonder if they're taking into account the ever-growing usability of linux to casual desktop users when giving this projection. it seems to me that in 3-4 years, just observing the trend, adoption percentages will be much higher than that. it isnt linear because as it gets better, more people try it, recommend it, etc, and obviously the price factor is big. in addition, i'd think something like the walmart cheap PC thing will be multiplying greatly as linux is shown to be user-friendly, with many more major vendors pro-offering linux in some form on their systems. maybe i'm just being optimistic, but i'd hope linux desktop adoption in 2007 would be 10-15% or higher - i guess we can hope (:
There are lies, damn lies, and market share percentages.
Linux acceptance on the desktop should create a wake for further adoption by the Mac as well.
Proof that companies and/or individuals can successfully windows will also benefit Mac OS X.
It should break a lot of preconcieved barriers about the OS - especially in light of Linux's difficulties.
I expect as Linux share of the market increases, so will the Mac.
And all at the expense of windows - not each other.
That would be a very welcome thing too - we need stronger influencers for standards and common platforms.
it is interesting that OS X and Linux share their code freely, while Windows doesn't. They have more in common with each other than Windows does with either...
Anyway, I could easily see version 10.4 allowing Linux apps to run without any preconfig'ing of the OS if Linux does gain marketshare...that would be a savvy move by apple too.
Since real freedom fans are not out to destroy ms-windows but rather to make for a world in wich ms-windows is just another desktop this is good news. Apple and linux and bsd and beOS (whatever its new names is) SkyOS and tron and etc all have tiny shares. TOGETHER we are now beyond the 5% and closing slowly on the 10%. 1 out of 10 people is a significant number. That is the kind of number businesses have to respect or face loosing customers.
With Office on Apple uncertain this could mean that 1 out of 10 people need to get their documents in a more open format.
So this article shouldn't be about linux overtaking apple, wich is hardly a suprise considering it is happening on the office desktop and the gigantic price difference, but the share of non-ms-windows installations increasing.
No MS is not going to go bankrupt over this. But with these kind of statistics IE only websites are becoming just a little bit less good business sense. That can surely only be a good thing.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So with Sun's JDS sold in China and not to mention red flag linux -- naturally owned by the king's son -- all over the desktops of an extremely populous nation, and now according to the original slashdot posting, Israel and so forth, worldwide Microsoft is going to take a big hit.
I've also heard rumors that 75 percent of servers are running Microsoft. (I'd guess this is due to the "ease of administration"... probably can pay their admins a lot less.)
My guess is, once the desktop market gets chipped in to, the server market will also get hit since more capable admins will be easier to find (Since those on the bell curve who tend to be admins will become more familiar with linux.)
Thoughts?
Anyway, I always figured some day a tech company whose "technology" is only marketing would eventually fail, but it will still take years and years.
What is wrong with a Gay President?
Plus, more peripherally, there's the horrible marketing department produced name of "Java Desktop". ALMOST THE WHOLE THING WAS WRITTEN IN C AND C++!!!!
It's just marketing. Names mean nothing. Calm down. Take some happy pills. Enjoy life.
I can see how many years and years it will take :)
That would be the short term view. Sun executives have said that they intend to switch to Solaris on all these systems eventually. In the past they have been spreading FUD about Linux. All that has happened now is that they won't be talking about it out loud. And Sun is one of the two companies funding SCO activities against Linux.
I highly doubt that it will be a nice linear function, for a number of reasons -
It will most likely be exponential at the tipping point, then going more logarithmic as the market sorts itself out.
Honestly, I don't care if microsoft keeps a healthy market presence, if linux gets a good 30% share I'm happy, since that's big enough that it can't be ignored, and microsoft can't get away with the old monopoly games any more.
Interesting follow-up to that:
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I'm a long time Linux user who now has a nice Dual G5 AND Linux boxes. Who's market share am I taking away from or contributing to now?
Google is a M$ shill.
But what percentage are used for business purposes. 3% would suggest that 3 in 100 are Linux. I don't see any Linux desktops at my company. There are quite a few Linux servers but no desktops here.
I bet the discrepency comes from the fact that IDC is measuring installs and google is measuring hits. There are probably a lot of people who have Linux installed but still use Windows as their primary OS, and/or use Windows at work, and therefore visit google using Windows more often than using Linux.
SUN has asked my dad to test it and tell them what he thinks of it. So I installed it on my computer (booting win2k, gentoo and now JDS), and to tell you the truth it is missing a LOT of application and most of them are out of date. There isn't even a system where someone can grab a binary from the internet with a single click. So my thought are that if linux is going to prevail in desktop, it will eigher be with Mandrake or Lindows. Ximian would be my choice if I was looking for a free easy-to-use desktop because it is very easy to install applications and update with their Red Carpet.
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
The Linux "face", unfortunately, carries the legacy of Windows with it. If Windows does in fact go, then it lives with Linux. And if it were the fact that Windows is a good user interface, I would have nothing much to say. But it is not (if you live in Singapore, every kind of technological infrastructure relies on Microsoft, so my personal exposure to Windows is more than I'd like), and the combined efforts of the community at large aim more to emulate Windows than to create something new and special. That's effectively saying that the Windows market share may have never been removed at all.
Apple came close (it would have if Steve Jobs didn't inspire all kinds of nonstandard, stupid interface ideas like the brushed metal thing), but Linux can and should be a medium of true meritocracy, where the ideas that work best should thrive, and not just cheaply derived elsewhere.
But I'm a Mac user, you see, so I like to see the more artistic and social aspect of things. Money, market share, Linux saving money for businesses... it's not that they are less important, just that there are more people concerned about these than boring social rubbish.
photoshop is fine and well, but the real hope should be for open software to become equal to or better than their closed relatives such as photoshop vs. gimp, 3d st. max/maya vs blender etc. They may be far behind those today ... but tomorrow is another day.
hope springs eternal my friends.
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
Are the moderators on crack?
How, exactly, is a comment directly related to new desktop linux converts offtopic?
"By 2007, IDC forecasts, Linux will be installed on 6% of the desktops"
By 2007, Linux will come preinstalled on EVERYTHING. Its FREE. Microsoft will ALSO have MANY (even OS) products preinstalled (and not free).
Right now I have applications that battle among themselves for which is to be run automaticly when I click a file with a certain 3 character extension. (I play MP3's. No, I do - that's my job. No me me pick me to be default player!)
By 2007, the operating systems themselves will be actively begging the user to be default this or that. Promicing God only know's what.
I do know some Mac users who wants Apple to have more market shares. And of course, my boss wants more market shares so that he'll have more business. Almost all Mac users I've encountered runs their OS as admin. They have zero sense of security. As for Apple's sales pitch, "Solid as rock", I've encountered so many crashes of the OS in just a very short period of time.
Lindows is offering developer version free to kde developers. http://www.lindows.com/devmembership-kde.php
Microsoft is hiring hoards of *nix geeks in order to compete with Linux. They have a lot of stuff coming down the pipe you can bet. Just don't count your chickens before they're hatched. Microsoft is deadly. Let's kick their fucking ass.
I'm now regularly "reviving" old Windows desktop boxes that didn't have enough grunt to run as Win XP systems. They still make perfectly useable Linux systems.
The majority of these are used as firewalls or Samba servers, but some are running Mepis. There's nothing like taking a "junk" PC from someone, then "reviving" it for use as a Web browser/email/simple office PC. Many, many home users are upgrading their old PCs, and I suspect a growing number of these are now retaining their old PCs and redeploying them as simple Linux SOHO desktops.
After all, a ~500MHz, 128Mb RAM desktop PC is barely useful for Windows 2k or XP, but still works fine as a Linux desktop.
I doubt that these PCs are showing up as Linux PCs on any survey - they usually were originally sold with a Windows licence. As they're often "second" PCs, they might rarely get used for Internet access; instead Mum or Dad use them for work stuff while the kids are playing games on the shiny new PC.
I mean, not any geek could hack on a purple box.
It's not purple, it's grape.
Besides, purple is for pussies. I hack on a "Flower Power" iMac myself.
Win32 is getting a pretty nice grip on this market. Almost all of the MCAD (mechanical CAD) companies offer win32 versions of their software.
Smaller, niche CAD players, do offer both Linux and Mac versions. PTC, one of the bigger players (for a while longer at least) does Linux today, with Mac coming.
The problem is the number of users running strong win32 based programs. (AutoCAD, Solid Edge, Solid Works) While none of these packages offer the level of capability the bigger packages do, their numbers are creating a significant network effect. Very few mechanical engineering departments, found in small to mid-sized enterprises, run anything other than win32 systems. The big players still make good use of UNIX, with Linux being rare at this point and OS X being more rare or non-existant at best.
These systems are increasingly being tied to back-end PDM (product data management systems) that aim to drive the product knowledge throughout the company. The reasons for doing this are sound, but the platform in the lead right now is win32. Given the strong intergration between win32 and office, additional intergration involving engineering and CRM software, Microsoft is getting hold of manufacturing and product design companies in a big way.
Both Linux and OS X are going to have an increasingly hard time cracking this nut. All of the MCAD sales people use win32 running laptops. Older UNIX products are being ported and adapted to run win32.
Many folks in this market do not even have Linux on their radar yet.
Given this is my area of expertise, it is a depressing story really. Linux and OSS in general are a great story that almost never gets told in this space.
Microsoft has been growing at the expense of commercial UNIX vendors, in this space for the last 8 years or so, almost unchecked. This is an area that Linux is ready for in many ways, due to its technical nature. The ECAD people along with the movie studios demonstrate this clearly.
I'm afraid, without ports to Linux from the big players, the mechanical engineering and product design markets are going to be win32 for a long time to come yet. Even with the ports, the mid-range packages (having the majority of users) are win32 only at this point, because they leverage Microsoft tools at almost every level of the software.
I fear the home software will come first. Maybe I am wrong, I hope I am.
Blogging because I can...
The Mac OS X kernel itself is a derrivative of Mach. This is were essential kernel services plug in. A lot of the userland and driver space is based on BSD in general... some bits are from 4.4BSD Lite 2, some from FreeBSD, and some from OpenBSD. In fact, there was an article somewhere in which the author ran the latest Darwin (the opensource, non-gui part of Mac OS X) source through some scripts to discover that there's more OpenBSD in Mac OS X than there is FreeBSD.
Remember, Mac OS X is based on NeXTSTEP / OPENSTEP, which were based on 4.3BSD and did not have any FreeBSD or OpenBSD code (in fact, NeXTSTEP probably predated FreeBSD).
As far as the "Macintosh" side of things, only the Carbon runtime libaries were ported over for legacy semi-ported Carbon applications. Native Mac OS X apps are Mach-O binaries and use the (NeXTSTEP "NS") Cocoa library for GUI. There is also a "Classic" virtual machine for running Mac OS 9.2.2.
most of will be really old, and not give a shit!
It needs to happen much faster than that!
Blogging because I can...
You are correct. Market share figures represent quarterly or annual sales figures. It doesn't take into account old CPUs still in use, so it cannot measure the total user base. The last figures I saw (can't remember where, unfortunately) puts Mac at about 10% of all desktop computer users, at the same time market share is 3 or 4%.
It reminds me of an old slogan I heard when I was a kid selling lawn mowers. One small mower company, Poulan, was more expensive but defintely more reliable. Their slogan was "the only competition for a new Poulan is an old Poulan." And it was true.
And that's true for Macs too. People keep Macs longer than PCs. Their investment holds its value longer. Market share figures will never account for systems like my 1996 G3/400 server, running MacOS X 10.3.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
But BSD is dying!
Well, I just spent the better part of my day building a new mail server.
It's a Power Mac G3 B&W running Mac OS X 10.2.8 (6R73), with Sendmail 8.12.11, Cyrus SASL 2.1.15, Cyrus IMAPD 2.2.3, GNU Mailman 2.1.4, SquirrelMail 1.4.2, Berkeley DB 4.2.52, etc, etc--all downloaded and compiled from scratch with GNU GCC 3.3 (except Sendmail, which doesn't work with 3.3, so I used 3.1 for that).
*And* all of this works with SMTP AUTH through SASL linked through PAM to the NetInfo database. I've done this on Mac OS X 10.3 as well.
I could do this on Linux, too, I suppose, but then I wouldn't also get all the really cool features of Mac OS X or Apple's really cool hardware.
BTW, just saying "Linux" is kind of misleading. Even if you only looked at the major distro's, you're still talking about several different types of systems that have significant compatibility problem between them. So, if you're going to lump all of these into one big "market share", I'd say why not lump all the commercial *NIXes together? I'm sure AIX, IRIX, Solaris, etc could add a percentage point or two to Apple's share, at the least. Hell, you could even toss in all the *BSD's, for that matter.
The bottom line is, no matter what flavor you feel like using, it's all basically a (nearly) POSIX compliant system under the hood.
Just so long as it's not more Windows...
I was listening to NPR briefly today with some silly girl from Wired talking about the MS source code leak. Doesn't it amaze you how much people are talking about hackers taking advantage of the source code to attack Windows?
Don't these people have any memories at all? I would venture to guess that *none* of the writers of the very well publicized virus attacks of the past few years needed access to the MS source code to effectively attack a large portion of the world's Windows systems. Can you say MyDoom? Melissa?
Bah! Windows is a plague on humanity. Hopefully, the combined power of Linux, UNIX, and BSD, especially with the help of Apple, will wipe this incontinent excuse for security off the face of the world once and for all.
Quote from the article:
:) [CodeWeavers is doing a really good job, with full disclosure of the limitations, which leads to a sense of psychological well being, rather than the feeling "they are trying to take advantage of me."]
..., similar to a few other OSs. The lack of such status is hard to get used to, for a new/non-expert user.
:)
Munich went with Linux, but the city fathers may rue that day. BusinessWeek has learned that the project is behind schedule, bolstering Microsoft's message that Linux still isn't ready for prime time. "I haven't seen any of our customers use Linux in a mainstream way," says Martin Taylor, Microsoft's general manager for platform strategy.
[End Quote]
Some things a Linux desktop still needs (in my opinion, in random order):
1. Good DVD player & CD-RW that just work, without mesing around. If this software is not part of the distro, simple instructions on how to get/install it (one click?).
2. Friends who are familiar with the OS/Distro, for the network effects and piece of mind in case something goes drastically wrong. This is where having a "critical mass" (fuzzy value) comes in - this is already happening, but the more, the better.
3. Better Wine, but that will come with age.
4. Better default settings for Desktop/Window managers that make sense to a majority (and keep the ability to tweak). The "usability" improvements and surveys will help here, a lot. More needs to happen in that field.
5. Use easier "language" - eventually (in 1-2 years) e.g., non-cryptic commands, or a *standardized* set of aliases that work on all distros. [And continue to evolve the GUI so the user doesn't HAVE TO use the CLI.]
6. Better Grub/Lilo/equivalent that is less intimidating for new users that want multi-boot. Preferably with a easy to use GUI that detects all HDDs & partitions and tells you what's on them (with as much relevant information as possible).
7. Some packaging system with less dependency problems. [Yes, there are a few that show very good promise, with only occasional issues surfacing.]
8. The equivalent of a "tray" where one can see the status of the firewall, proxy server, network connection,
9. Few, well chosen default applications on the distro (not "give them four of everything"). [Lot of progress has already happened in this area in a few distros.]
10. Other stuff that's been talked about in other places.
-srr
Right now, we occasionally fight, but we don't have to.
Especially because in theory, both sides can run apps compiled from the same source code. It's easy to port a Cocoa app to GNUstep, and it's easy to port a Linux X11 app to run in XonX. Yes, I admit that the apps don't always Just Work(tm) together; for example, you will often get the menu bar in the wrong position.
commercial entities will probably always keep their software ahead of free stuff. theres a HUGE market with stuff like 3d studio max and it seems like they can always add features to that. with operating systems new features seem to be getting fewer and far between allowing linux to catch up. also some people will always pefer the adobe interface - once youve learned it you can pretty much be comfortable with any app of theirs.
only this time we'll GIMP in a linPod, the finest portable virtual reality immersion device on the market.
Good idea, but what plans do you have to make it more usable than Nintendo's Virtual Boy system, which flopped? What technology do you foresee invented between now and 2024 that might enable this?
Como? Donde?
Okay, I feel dumb. I knew this. Thanks for pointing out my flaw though.
But it does pun nicely in the sense that at the time I posted it, the very next listed poster attempted to (jokingly I presume) project the future desktop share of linux in concrete terms.
Sorry again for the spelling error. Good catch.
Since real freedom fans are not out to destroy ms-windows but rather to make for a world in wich ms-windows is just another desktop
You are new here, aren't you?
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
LOSE
NOT "loose"
If work wants me to work @ home they can provide the hardware and software.
And see a pink slip the next day because another employee was willing to buy her own hardware and her own Windows license. Remember that in a recession or in jobless growth, competition among employees is fierce.
I hope you don't claim this is fake.
Running Linux on this Imac right now. Hmm... who am I helping indeed lol. Ahh well. Linux cares for market share, apple zealots dont, So its good either way. What would be nice is to see Linux being offered on those HP or compaq computers at best buy. Then I will say that Linux has finally made it.
They may not be the users of those desktops, but it is people who make the choice.
Another poster had mentioned that windows as well is forced upon some employees. This poster also mentions that home users try to stay compatible with work by choosing windows at home. Who thinks microsoft might use this as a marketing ploy if the desktop becomes so "fragmented" with "different" "non compatible" operating systems?
It's worth noting that IDC #s are based heavily on sales figures. IE sales of box sets of Linux aimed at desktops (Lindows, Mandrake, Red Hat person, Suse) or systems preinstalled with the OS and not necessarily people downloading it for free, making copies of copies and such. The reality is that there is a high possibility the number of Linux desktops is SUBSTANCIALLY higher then their sales based estimates.
'Talkback's are funnier...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
I dunno dude. Like you, I'm a designer (print and web), but I think if you ask around, you'll find that the reason a lot of designers prefer working on Macs is that the Mac is somehow inspiring; it drives people to be creative; it feels less like a computer and more like an extension of your creative soul. The Mac has that special je ne sais quoi that Windows lacks, and--I'll probably get modded troll for this--Linux desktop environments, in my humble estimation, lack too. And I think that to a lot of people, that mysterious something is worth the Apple premium.
So it's not just about market share. It's about how many graphic artists actually want to work on Linux, and while I don't doubt there are a lot of talented designers who would be more than happy to switch to KDE or Gnome, I don't think that number is going to be anywhere near the number of people who for some reason or another are attached to the Mac environment.
Thoughts?
yours
You must be crazy, in case you haven't noticed in operating systems linux is hardly catching up, open source development in practice is generally about 5x as fast and yet significantly more stable with fewer bugs and tighter security.
Open source simply hasn't significantly concentrated on this particular area yet, that doesn't mean that it never will and that when it does it won't blow commercial development away like it has in every other popular area of development.
Actually, I just don't care about market share, with either Linux or the Macintosh. I settle for showing people(who show interest) some of the neat things about my powerbook and OS X. I'm very reserved about recommending it for someone, and there's no point in trying to get someone to switch- they have to want to, otherwise, it'll never meet their expectations.
I mean, not any geek could hack on a purple box.
Are you talking about SGI? If so, that'd be indigo, not purple- and one of the first Unixes I was exposed to was Irix on an old Indigo(IP12 with the "Song and Dance" graphics card, not nearly enough ram, and I think maybe 1-2GB of disk- but man, it could do some nifty graphics for the time, and it was an OLD system by the time I got my hands on it!)
People say OS X is the first unix desktop-friendly unix(ie, no command-line necessary), and they're dead wrong- SGI had them beat by almost ten years with Irix.
PS:hard core SGI people started on brown computers, not "purple" ones. Why Indigo, by the way? Well, the color supposedly perfectly matches Lotus Coachworks's Indigo paint(one of the top SGI execs owned a Indigo Lotus Espirit Turbo- guy had taste...)
Please help metamoderate.
I have yet to see Linux being used in a desktop environment. I've seen a few macs, but a majority have been Windows based.
What you see yourself is what's called an anecdote. Sales statistics, surveys, referrer logs on web servers, those are reliable facts.
My anecdote is that I am writing this right now on a Debian machine, and 5 out of the last 6 years of my development work have been purely on Linux machines. I can't remember the last time I saw a Mac in use.
That's why we shouldn't base our opinions about statistics on our personal experiences, but by examining trends over a broad base.
Nope, this doesn't even count that, it only counts systems that come preinstalled with linux. If you buy or download a linux distro and setup a dual boot that doesn't get counted.
So Linux may be gaining some ground, but if all of the companies that make a kinder, gentler Linux can't afford to keep developing their product, how far can Linux on the desktop go?
And before you say "Linux grows because of the community development!", no, it doesn't. Linux's core code may become more advanced through that method, but drudging Linux up to desktop usability levels comes because companies work to make more intuitive experiences. The Linux community, short of providing feedback, has little to do with this advancement.
"As long as this scenario continues Linux will not "take over" the desktop market. I am on a ATI radeon 9600 and am using VESA drivers as we speak cause the Radeon drivers break X. So that Unreal2004 you all enjoyed. I sit here "waiting 6 months"."
Hi! I'm using an Aureal sound card and W2K just came out. Do I have to wait 6 months? And if I do and nothings done, will Microsoft suddenly stop "taking over" the desktop? Why not?
" There are still too many cases where if you buy some new hardware you have to upgrade distros or recompile the kernel. Still not acceptable for joe."
As opposed to the buying of a new Windos version to get that new-fangled hardware, or software to work (win95 and the USB devices, or W2K and Games) Glad Joes ameable to that (or did anyone really ask Joe?)
"70.2 percent of Mac users online have a college degree, compared to 54.2 percent of all Web surfers."
This could have as much to do with price as anything - maybe the proles can't afford the 'Jobs Tax' attached to being an Apple user, so only people with degrees and associated rates of pay can even consider buying a Mac.
"Mac users are 58 percent more likely than the general online population to build their own website."
Oh Kent, people can use statistics to prove anything. Forfty percent of people know that. You could use the above statistic to extrapolate that Mac users are more likely to be lusers with no social life and as such have time to sit around building websites.
"8.2 percent of Americans who surf the Web at home use a Mac, even though Apple's total computer sales amount to less than 5 percent of the overall US PC market."
Hmmm... maybe it's possible that this means Apples are unsuitable for most serious business applications, thus their market share is diluted by the clone army of PCs that ARE used by business.
Ah well, thanks for giving me a good laugh, anyway.
Read Pynchon.
Linux OS XC% and Mac OS X%
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Most of us have little desire to join you...
Read Pynchon.
...because the Linux folks are interested in interoperability and open standards. My Mac stuff will play nice with their stuff.
Anything that takes desktop share away from the poster child for proprietary standards and vendor lock-in is a Good Thing.
Apple users have total freedom to choose their OS... I mean, how many people get an Apple and say "hey, I'll get a new Mac, I think I'll run Windows"?
Read Pynchon.
I mean, it is significant if there is another genuine alternative to Windows, isn't it?
From Apple's point of view this is not necessarily great news, and suggests that Linux uptake is accelerating substantially faster than Apple uptake. Presumably a large number of people who choose Linux do so out of the same spirit of rebellion that has traditionally drawn people to Apple, thereby reducing the appeal of shelling out for a G5 when you can get a very nice x86 architecture machine running Linux for much less cash.
Read Pynchon.
From the article, "Market researcher IDC expects to announce within weeks that Linux' PC market share in 2003 hit 3.2%, overtaking Apple Computer Inc.'s... Macintosh... software."
My company, SurveyComplete, programs online surveys for market research companies. That's all that we do, and we're damn good at it. In fact, I'd say that we're the best in the world at what we do at this point in time and I'm proud of my work. Last year we completed nearly fifty research studies, covering over 800,000 interviews.
This story really ticks me off because we performed an Awareness and Usage study across Internet Users (just two weeks ago) on the topic of Operating Systems and found that Linux is absolutely not overtaking Macintosh.
While 26% of the 1,100 respondents we interviewed were aware of Linux or one of its many distributions, only 1% use it on a daily or weekly basis. Macintosh comes in at a healthy 6%.
One of the most interesting findings in the study came from when we examined techies against the rest of the population and found that "Respondents who are male, aged 35 or more, use broadband, and are college educated (some college or more) are far more likely to be aware of Linux than the rest of the population" to the tune of 43% awareness of Linux in techies versus 15% in the rest of the population. That's a huge gap, a gargantuan gap. When we examined the operating systems respondents currently use, 3% of techies are using Linux versus less than 1% of the general population.
When I read the results, it really shocked me. Why, this means that 2004 is not going to be the year of Linux on the desktop -- this goes against everything I've heard on slashdot! All those hours I've spent reading articles by people in the open-source scene talking about how this year, was going to be it. But this makes more sense: Nobody has really heard about Linux outside of nerds.
Which is probably why the results of our study never appeared on slashdot (even though they were submitted last week.)
It's really frustrating that this pro-linux propaganda gets through onto the front page while articles like ours which have results that make sense, get dropped.
You can read our study results and find out if BSD is truly dead, here:
2004 SurveyComplete Operating System Awareness and Usage Study
This is like saying "Taxi use outstripped Mercedes sales".
Actually, Microsoft makes more money on Office for Mac than they do selling it for Windows. This is mainly because they sell the office package for $500 for Mac, and also because of bundling office on Windows.
Who moved my sig?
If Mac wants to be serious about being a home OS, they need to figure out a way to release games before windows.
Linux will always have that server/unix advantage against windows. With Mac's unless you were ichatting or hooking up digital cameras 24x7, there's no reason to have one. Games would be a damn good area to improve.
I suspect Linux would require several orders of magnitude more installed clients than Macs before these companies would even consider targetting it. The figures of explicitly purchased Linux boxes rather than just old machines with Linux installed on them would be more relevant here, which I suspect is still much lower. It's difficult to compete on a platform which probably already comes supplied with the likes of the Gimp and Openoffice.org for instance.
Please remember that "market share" refers to the percentage of units sold in a given amount of time. (In this case, the idea of "sold" has to be a little fuzzy.) IDC is saying that the market share of Linux per quarter is approaching that of the Mac OS.
But the Mac has a 20-year headstart.
By most estimates, there are something close to 40 million Macs in use today. (About half of these run Mac OS X, and the other half the classic Mac OS in one version or other. Many of them, of course, are older machines that are not capable of running OS X. Apple's market research says that of the users who can run OS X on their machines, something like 75% do.) There are about 400 million desktop computers in the world, total, so Apple has about 10% of the total installed base.
It'll be a long, LONG time before Linux starts approaching those numbers.
What IDC is saying here is that they think the rate of new installs of Linux is approaching that of the Mac. Which only makes sense, if you think about it. Linux is the hot new thing, while the Mac's growth has been pretty steady for the past six or seven years.
What'll be illuminating is what happens to the rate of adoption of Linux after it surpasses the Mac's new adoption numbers. Will it keep going, or will it peak out and then drop off?
(Honestly, based on past trends, it will almost certainly peak out and drop off. But time will tell for sure.)
Honestly, I think Macs are better home computers, and im not sure Linux will ever truly cater to the nontechincal home user. The people just want to use their computer and aren't the tinkering poweruser type. The Macs at home will cooperate well with the Linux desktops at work. At work linux can be set up to do the work tasks and left alone, using a (thinner)client/server model. They might also shine as technical workstations, but then again so do G5 powermacs. Basically, in my opinion, home type users are better off with OSX macs because they are using them as PCs=(personal computers) whereas linux is a much better server/client choice, which seems more appropriate in a work environment. Whether the "workstation" class business machines are OSX or linux would probably depend on whether the business was small with little tech dept. (OSX) or big/corporate (linux).
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Linux is displacing WINDOZE as a desktop, not MacOS. I look at it more like people are choosing to use LINUX instead of Windoze, mainly because the Mac market share hasn't disappeared, and most LINUX distros run on wintel hardware, which is not where MacOS is. More misdirected anti-Mac hype...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I'm curious --- who were these people that you surveyed? Were they in the US, or worldwide? Does the fact that you conduct online surveys make the user pool somewhat self-selecting? What makes your research methods better than IDC's, anyway?
I definitely think your research should have made Slashdot, but at the same time, I see no compelling reason to believe that your results are more accurate than those of other companies.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
websites too. A LOT of developers i've been around design pages for the mac and pc, and dont care about linux, it works somehow. But, I am increasingly peeved at web content that is windows only (IE and Windows Media Player) eg. launch.yahoo.com and many other streaming Windoze audio/video, IE jscript & other IE only web content. This fact should be made as public as we can so I can get rid of my windows partition once and for all.
Error: Id10t detected
The original poster plays up one line in the Business Week article and completely skews the tenor of the article. To wit: Linux is becoming attractive in "business" -- never an Apple strength. The article's mention of Macintosh marketshare is a journalistic technique used to provide a frame of reference. Iraq is roughly the size of California, etc.
But Macintosh and Linux have more than marketshare in common. Both platforms are committed to open standards and interoperability, the former out of necessity due to its historical role as outsider, and the latter out of philosophical conviction of its adherents. If Linux leaks into the business world, IT folks will find that the formats and APIs they're using work just as well on Macs. This could lead to a more equitable situation where people use the tools they like, rather than the tools that Bill Gates wants them to use. Joe the Administrative assistant will while away on Windows, Jane the database nerd loves her Linux cluster, and Johan the turtlenecked web designer makes merry on his Mac.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic. IT monoculture is so annoying.
I just talked a windows admin over the phone through a mepis install. He had the machine up and running in under 20 minutes...
Got Code?
I've been using Linux since '96. I've tried most of the major distros out there. I really like Linux.
However, yesterday I got my first G4 PowerBook. I wanted to actually do some multi-media type things with my computer without having to spend hours (days) trying to get things to work. I wanted to do things like burn DVDs, edit video, play Quicktime movies. Sure, you can do these things with Linux, but I've got other things to do than spend hours/days/months trying to get everything sort-of-kind-of-working.
So, I got a Mac. Seems like the best of both worlds.
Am I going to dump Linux now? No way. Linux is great for lots of other things. I have to say that I actually prefer KDE or GNOME to the Mac's Aqua. The Mac doesn't have virtual desktops, it doesn't have enough mouse buttons and what's with the toolbar having to be at the top of the screen instead of on the actual application window?! (seems to harken back to the pre-OSX days when MacOS wasn't a true multitasking OS). On the otherhand, I can stick a DVD-RW in the Mac and copy a movie to it that will play on my DVD player, no muss, no fuss. I can hook up a digital camera to my Mac via the usb, download the images from it and edit the pics without having to spend hours trying to get it to work - I really like that. Now I can get on with getting some work done instead of being a sys-admin.
Windows is not asking. It just overwrites the MBR.
if they were any bigger then they couldn't contain their slide but also they can't survive getting smaller and smaller. The core apples business is one of diminishing returns, the devout users have just got their heads in the sand.
On the other hand, Linux is for poeple who don't give a damn about the looks of their machines, for the people who aren't afraid to search the net about ten hours for the piece of code they need, and will read the docs and compile for about ten more hours. Oh, yeah, and for people with a certain cash affection.
Oh, so you said desktop boxen! So? Check the prices: same machine, same capabilities: one computer, one operating system, one office package. Which is cheaper?
However, gimme a Powerbook running Linux and I'll change my mind :)
On a different level: applications. Industry uses Photoshop; industry uses Macromedia stuff, industry uses specific software which runs on more standardised systems, such as MacOS or Windows. When Photoshop and Dreamweaver and Flash and QuarkXpress, and all the software that equipment get deliverd with will work on Linux, TOO, than you can speak of a choice. Till then, you need to be extra carefull when you shop, because you new laser printer might not work on linux (been there, bought that).
Cheers and power to the Penguin
Bite my shiny metal... oops... Nevermind!
BSD may be invisible on the desktop, but I've had a lot more interaction with BSD (primarily through my former ISP) than any version of Mac OS. Then again, I also use Solaris (both Sparc and x86) on the desktop.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I just converted a whole damn school over and I can show you a bunch of first graders that feel right at home on a mandrake thin client. Oh yea and get this the total investment for 75 machines was a $2000 for refurb dell server. Every one of the client machines was taken from a free recycling program.
Got Code?
"The people who's desktops really matter are the people most ignorant of the technology that runs the desktop"
And if you play the above post backwards you can read: "The people who's desktops really don't matter are the people least ignorant of the technology that runs the desktop"
Free clue: Developers, developers, developers.
No makers of desktop technology. No desktop to gawk at.
Thanks for making us aware of this study. It's great to have clear statistical data to draw on, even if we're not necessarily pleased by what we discover.
For those who are feeling depressed by these results, remember that this data is presumably representative of the general consumer population in the United States. Other populations may present very different demographics.
That's funny... I have slack 9.1 running on this laptop, with a mobile Radeon 9600, using the 2.6.2 kernel, and I seem to have full 3D acceleration using the fglrx drivers... if it runs on just-released software, you'd think it should work on your system.
That result is so far of base I can't even begin. 43% amoung techies? Hmmm... where did you give this survey? Was it only posted on some Windows tech site? Did you send it out as HTML formatted SPAM? Give me a break. Techies work with computers, they love computers, they spend time learning about them. This is akin to saying that only 43% of jockeys are aware of Palaminos or that only 43% of mechanics are aware of Lotus. Sure, they may not be intimately familiar with it, but they most certainly ARE aware of it. Christ, even the most non-techie people I support at work (the ones that need support when the dialog box that only has an "ok" button on it comes up) have heard of it.
BTW, what was the name of your company? I want to make sure they I never pay attention to any of the stats you post. After all, 43% of us know you made them up :)
We run CFD now on linux machines as we found out they out perform windows boxes by nearly 50% for our solutions. Better performance means alot less machine licenses and no locked up boxes in the middle or running a solution.
Got Code?
...you'll find that the reason a lot of designers prefer working on Macs is that the Mac is somehow inspiring; it drives people to be creative; it feels less like a computer and more like an extension of your creative soul.
;-)
So they are zealots too, in other words.
According to this site, desktop Linux usage to access the web sites of this site's clients barely tops usage of Windows 3.1:
. ph p
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/January/os
Kind of puts it in perspective, don't you think?
Did your survey include the huge number of Linux desktop deployments in China this year? I doubt that most of the end users of those Linux boxen will be able to participate in your online survey.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I went to my son's parent-teacher meeting yesterday and lo and behold - his classroom got a brand new iMac. So did a few others. Why doesn't this surprise me? Because much of the primary educational market is still Macintosh.
It's when you get into secondary schools and colleges that PCs take over. As long as there's K-6 they'll always be an Apple Computer.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I mean, not any geek could hack on a purple box.
c t00.jpg
Back in the day, I knew a lot of geeks that dreamed of being able to hack on a Silicon Graphics Indigo2 Impact or an Onyx2...
http://futuretech.mirror.vuurwerk.net/apps/i2impa
http://www.hpc.susx.ac.uk/images/onyx2.jpg
(Besides, how many "grape" iMacs were ever sold? It wasn't a popular flavor and the whole 5-flavors thing only lasted about a year or two).
After reading your "note on methodology" it is pretty clear to me why your survey showed less desktop usage than a survey like IDC -- you claim to have measured "internet using" adults. You are welcome to provide more of the specifics on how your data was normalized, but I'm going to make some educated guesses about factors that are specifically relevant to linux and mac demographics that may not be so relevant for other topics.
1) Mostly American - seems your entire website is in English only and despite the FAQ stating that you have thousands of worldwide members, I bet the number of Americans is an order of magnitude larger than non-Americans.
2) Mostly Home (or non-workplace) Internet Users -- not many companies are going to be ok with people taking for-pay surveys on company time or equipment.
These biases help to explain some of the numbers in your survey related to Mac usage. First, you showed 6% regular or semi-regular mac usage, which is twice what surveys like IDC's show. Unless you happened to get an unexpected spike of people who use Mac's at work (like a bunch of marketing droids were pulled to make this survey pool), it is reasonable to expect that these Mac users are are either home or public-terminal (think public and school libaries)- they may only use windows, or think they do, at work (as indicated by the 98% number) but it suggests their access to your survey is through a Mac that is not at work.
Similarly, your "puzzling" result of high Mac usage and intent to use among employed minorities also suggests free public and school access systems. I am equating minority to "less better off" than the average white guy, but I also expect that employed minorities (versus unemployed minorities) are more likely to understand the value of a buck and make use of public-access systems like that at a school (continuing education, night classes, etc) or library.
Meanwhile, consider the kind of desktop usage that we see reported in the pro-linux press - point-of-sale and other task-specific uses sure seems to get mentioned most. These users may not even know they are using Linux. The more general use deployments, where Linux and apps are displacing both MS-Windows AND MS-Office seem to be in foreign, non-English speaking countries (Germany, China, Peru to name a couple off the top of my head). These users are probably under-represented in your survey population. If you had compensated for higher than "normal" foregin usage, I don't think your reported margin of error would be as small. Based on my assumption that your foreign pollees are significantly less than your domestic ones.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yeah, basically. :-)
Everyone here seems to be foaming at hte mouth, "Mac vs. Linux". No. You've got it all wrong.
That market share increase for Linux came out of MS's market share, not Apple's. This is progress.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Marketshare of Macintosh among designers: 50%. Marketshare of Linux among designers? Not quite as much.
You don't even need to do a survey - just look at the Google Zeitgeist for evidence.
Only 1% of Google users are using Linux, it's languishing down there with Windows 95. Macintosh has three times the usage.
I am a Linux fanboy. I'm using my Linux system now, and my primary desktop system has been Linux for quite a while. However, facts are facts, and the Mac is doing much better on the desktop. Linux is ready for the desktop, but only certain desktops (corporate desktops, where competent sysadmins run the systems, developer's desktops, like my own, desktops installed on other people's behalf, like my Dad's). However, it's not ready for the mainstream home user. Macintosh has been ready for all desktops since the 1980s.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"But with these kind of statistics IE only websites are becoming just a little bit less good business sense. That can surely only be a good thing."
I think Apple's Safari may well have killed this anyway.
When Safari first came out (I'm using 1.0.1 so I don't know if this is still current) it had a "report bugs to Apple" feature so whenever a website failed to load or BLOCKED Safari I and many others dutifully sent out reports back to Apple.
I can only assume there was a very polite and persuasive phone call because the sites I came accross insisting on IE no longer do.
GO LINUX! DIE MICROSOFT! WOO!
Have you metaroderated recently?
Someone failed to teach you the difference between a constant and a variable, I'm afraid.
This is...
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I know one of the techs that got this going. One day it was announced that they were switching. A timeline was developed and _bam_ the desktops rolled out.
They didn't have time to figure out an e-mail client, so everyone used "pine" for several weeks (in a terminal window) until somone figured out a GUI e-mail client (evolution I think, possibly kmail).
My impression is that user satisfaction was not exactly 100% with the move -- which is a major problem for people contemplating a migration away from windows.
Of course longer-term people will probably get used to it and be very happy with extra stability etc. Just don't get the impression that this was a case of warm-fuzzy feelings and friendly guys with beards floating around and making all of your computer problems go away by putting linux on your desktop -- this was the shotgun approach. Like it or not it's happening. Suddenly it got harder to do your job.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Hold up a moment and read what you just quoted.
:(
Male.
At least 35.
Uses broadband.
College educated.
This does not equal someone who 'works with computers'.
You got caught by marketing lingo that just gives a particular demographic a cute name. In this case, 'Techie'. But, hey, we don't need to be so biased as to say Computer Geeks are the only techies in the world.
The sample as stated includes any college education, so you've got all the French & Business majors in there as well (and those that failed).
It's still not too bad for statistical data. Except in it's implications for Linux, which still, to me at least, sound pretty accurate.
From talking to a bunch of first year Computer Science students (I decided to go get a degree *shrug*), I wouldn't expect more than 2/3 maximum to know about Linux when starting.
The computer labs use OpenBSD & KDE.
I mentioned to a second year student (apparently doing pretty well) I was maybe going to try the same setup at home, and they told me to get the KDE distribution of linux.
Close enough I guess.
---- I've fallen, and I can't get up.
Don't you just love the accuracy of these reports? They don't just say '3%' they say '3.2%'. Maybe its just my experience with math and statistics, but I would be far more confident if someone said 'around 3%'. Of course, trying to predict as far ahead as 2007 is just a joke.
Please, can't we just keep Linux desktop installations in corporate environments? I don't want to see my dad buying a new computer and having Linux on it. If there's ever a problem, he's going to have to spend 3 hours on the phone, get charged $450, and end up returning his computer, because there's no way I'm going to sit down and start digging around in the internals to try to get it up and running again.
On the other hand, if he's using Linux on his desktop at work, I'm happy, because there is a paid support staff (made of people like you!) who must administer the machines, and he gets his job done just as well (if not better), while the corporation doesn't have to pay the Microsoft tax (and thereby support the Republican party [and thereby support terrorism]).
I don't think I'd want my dad using Macs at work though, because he'd be complaining all the time about how "foo-foo" it is. He'd make little limp-wristed gestures and talk about the pretty pictures and bouncing icons. I'd try to explain better to him, but he wouldn't care. "Too foo-foo," he'd say.
[I use a PowerBook as my main computer. I'm typing this on an Amiga right now. No joke. Still almost posted this as AC to avoid flamebait accusations. Darn you all.]
To be fair, Apple has flirted with porting the older Mac OS to x86, and the underlying OS X Darwin layer is available for x86, so its not like Apple isn't keeping this option open.
Also consider if Apple did use x86, it doesn't imply you could use beige box PC's; it would simply mean that inside the apple box you'd use x86. I don't really see that as a religious issue; it would mostly be an issue of how you transition applications to x86. But that's a marketing issue, not a technical issue.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Another story about marketshare. Maybe it's only me, but I find the constant micro-battles about market share to be just a little on the boring side.
However, what instantly caught my attention with this story is this: IDG is essentially predicting that *NIX desktop OS's will grow to about a 10% share in a couple of years, and with two mature versions driving the increase, which has both momentum and is predicted to continue growing versus Microsoft's offerings.
Now that's news.
And you've been sucking way too much cock.
Seriously, your breathe stank like jock itch.
"not many companies are going to be ok with people taking for-pay surveys on company time or equipment"
Oh brother. Nobody watches computer users this closely, particularly companies who are fielding Linux, since they are typically smaller companies trying to save money using Linux.
The companies with the Nazi-like lockdown policies on internet usage are typically large Windows shops.
So just stop it. I love Linux, but its use is not exploding on desktops. It isn't. Stop. Cut it out. Stop trying to convince me the sky is green or the grass is purple or Linux is "really big" on the desktop.
I think the only *thing* these surveys show is that 'Market Research' is basicly a load of old bollocks. In a recent survey of mine I found that you can bullshit 100% of the suckers 100% of the time.
siggy played guitar
Your study says it has an error margin of 2.9% (not 2.9% of the percentage value but 1% +/- 2.9%. That makes IDC's value lie within your error margin and the two results *don't* conflict.
It doesn't matter really how convincing the perpetrator of a survey is, you still have to take it with a pinch of salt and avoid relying on them too heavily. (Unfortunately govt.s often ignore this).
Because yes, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
The points laid down in your post precisely illustrates why people from the mac community, those who have been utterly disgusted with microsoft's two decades of bad usability and non-innovation, should take their ideals and ideologies about how technology should be designed and migrate these ideas to their own Open Source linux desktop project. The "Linux Macs" (for lack of a better term) could then make use of the cheap x86 boxes that Apple could never take advantage of, and finally compete on the points of usability and user experience that were always obscured by a higher sticker price.
I say that it's about high time to we mac folk take the Mac vs. Windows battle into linux land, creating a third desktop environment that give GNOME and KDE a serious run for their money.Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
I have a Master degree in computer science. I studied together with a 100 people at my faculty. I work as an IT consultant at a rather respectable company, yet I have never seen a Mac in my life (just in pictures). Suprised ? Well, I live in Poland (approx 40 million inhabitants).
Apple is pretty nonexistant in my country and probably in many others as well. The barrier in a country where the average salary is $500 and there is 20% unemployment is the price.
The IDC survey, as I understand it applies to users worldwide and new computers! Your survey measures existing usage, which is something much different
- Web usage (IE)
- E-mail usage (Outlook/Outlook Express)
- Office/Productivity Suite [word processing, spreadsheet, etc.] (MS Office)
That's pretty much all I ever see my non-unix-head/non-gamer friends using their machines for. Each of those categories has obvious, mature, and very functional replacements or analogs in the open source world (Mozilla, Mozilla, and OpenOffice, in order. or Firemumble, Thunderbird if you prefer that to the integrated moz). Heck, all of those even have windows ports that work very well, so you could give people a springboard to the world of software freedom without having to walk your non-technical friends and family members through hard disk partitioning or shell usage.Now, if you mean games and stuff like tax programs or garden layout software, yeah, linux isn't there yet. I suspect it won't be long though before the linux market is large enough that small ISVs will be tempted by the low development costs to release programs like that. (The software overhead alone for a traditional programmer's workstation in the MSFT world can reach into the thousands rapidly. The software overhead for a linux development system is... however much a couple of CD-Rs is these days.)
I would not be at all suprised to see something akin to the shareware/micropublisher model bloom in the linux "space" as the desktop market grows. Personally I don't have much need for payware (almost everything I use and need is free), but if I can get, say, a $10-20 program to do my taxes with that runs on linux, I'd do it in a heartbeat. (That's not a terribly unreasonable pricepoint either, TaxCut basic is about $15.) I'm sure there are lots of other little niche products like that out there that could find a market with the open source community.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
And I think that to a lot of people, that mysterious something is worth the Apple premium.
...
Thoughts?
C'mon, admit it -- it's the black turtlenecks that really turn you on.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
your dad sounds like an asshat.
They said 1999 was going to be the year of the Linux desktop.
They said 2000 was going to be the year of the Linux desktop.
They said 2001 was going to be the year of the Linux desktop.
They said 2002 was going to be the year of the Linux desktop.
They said 2003 was going to be the year of the Linux desktop.
Now they're saying 2004 is going to be the year of the Linux desktop.
Does anyone notice a trend here?
Every year it is announced with great fanfare that KDE and Gnome have reached some new evolution, along with distributions in general, and that Linux will arrive like a biblical flood over the course of the following year. But each year ends, it hasn't happened, people have forgotten the predictions made at the begining of the year, and the process starts over again. Although Linux has become more usable on the desktop over the last 6 years, the number of people using it has not increased substantially. There is no strong upwards trend in the numbers using it. The number of people using Google from Linux is only at ~1% - and technical users would do far more searches than the rest of the population. As much as you may love Linux, or are convinced it should take over the world, or how good we think the technology is, it just is not arriving on the desktop at any meaningful speed.
The truth of the matter is that despite how WinXP has all sorts of security mess ups, few average people either know what Linux is nor see any good reason to use it if they do. Linux is still primary a server/professional operating system and a geek toy. As much as the strong vein of Linux zealotry on Slashdot may want to dismiss this, it is true. If you want free software operating systems on the desktop, there're better vehicals for that task.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
If your dad ever installs linux on his home desktop it will be because Linux (or more like the distro he's chosen) has over come the short coming your reffering to. You've made a moot point.
When Linux is ready it will be as easy to use as either Mac or Windows. And to really grab mindshare it will probably have to do the same things better then those other too.
Quack, quack.
I'm doing IT for a London based architectual firm that is all OS X. We run VectorWorks on G4 and G5 class hardware (I get to play with dual 1.8 Ghz G5s all day, weee).
Anyway, during the hight of the MyDoom attack, we were swamped with e-mail, but the Viri could not touch our Workstations 'cus we're OSX.
We won two jobs in that period due to the fact that some of the practices we were up against were out of action, or had lost critical work time due to MyDoom.
Two jobs is a HUGE amount of work, in the Million pound range just for fees alone!
Our main supplier who sells apple hardware to lots of other architects says that they have had a massive interest in OSX migration since MyDoom was released.
I'm guessing that other industries are looking into alternets to Windows due to Viri, and OSX is the obvious choice for creative/critical design work.
I suggest that the Slashdot comment box have a little sidebar next to it with the correct spelling of the most commonly misspelled words on Slashdot in it.
Top of that list would be 'lose' and 'losing'.
Lindows, Xandros and Mandrake meet your specifictations.
1 Lindows sells a DVD player for Linux for the very low cost of $5! For any distro.For writing CDs, use K3B
2 Linux has an online community, plus linux users arent that hard to find. Most have heard of linux.
3) Better wine will come in time. The most important apps already run well, the minor apps that use weird libraries will come soon
4) Most desktop distros use KDE these days, and KDE of course is very tweakable.
5) Yes, most commerical distros have simple language, with printed instruction manuals with lots of help
6. Most distros autodect windows/other os partitions these days, and KDE comes with a LILO configurator. Grub is a lot easier than lilo
7) Lindows has click and run, Xandros has Xandros Networks, Mandrake has RPMdrake (graphical) and urpmi (command line), Fedora has yum and Debian and Debian based Distros have synaptic (graphical) and apt-get (command line). Dependancies have been solved ages ago.
8) Both KDE and Gnome have a "tray", in gnome they call it "notification area", and they have standardized the tray so they can share each others icons See here
9) It depends on the distro. Some distros are lighter than others. But many legacy files are being removed (How many distros come with fvwm any more)
10. The other stuff is being solved too. Try Mandrake 9.2 and you will see that most of your points have been solved!
found here
So let's tell these designers: Linux is customisable.
Your Mac looks just like everyone else's Mac - except for the background picture. An Apple desktop looks the way Apple want it to look; if they suddenly decide the Finder should be brushed metal, the Finder is brushed metal. Don't like brushed metal? Deal with it. You're only a graphic designer, what do you know about style?
On Linux, though, your desktop can look like anything. You can customise it completely. You can change the way it behaves to match your working preferences. You can make your own skins, so your desktop fits in with your personal graphic style. Is the problem the old "PC == beige box" thing? What, haven't you heard of case modding? It's Apples that all look the same. A PC can look like whatever you want.
Give Linux the same apps as the Mac has, and we'll see whether Apple's design dictatorship is really as appealing to creative professionals as you say.
Depending on how you present your solicitations for survey-takers (Are they pop-ups?) I would suggest that alternative browser users are less likely to see them. Thus IE users (Windows users and until recently Mac users) may be overrepresented.
I think the number of people who have predicted the death of Apple in the past is directly proportional the number of times Apple has bounced back.
I think Linux is gaining in business desktop use because it is x86 and most businesses already have a large investment in hardware that is easy to convert to Linux rather than replace with G5s.
In this house we obey the laws of Thermodynamics!
Didn't you know that IBM is currently working on desktop Linux (in fact it already exists) called Blue Linux? John Dvorak wrote an article about it on PC magazine. I predict a rapid Linux desktop increase when IBM releases it to the public.
It appears they are comparing desktop installations of Linux with market share of new sales of Macs. Several major flaws :
1. Having Linux installed and used occasionally should not count as an entire desktop installation if the computer is not primarily a Linux box.
2. Mac market share numbers != Mac share of installed desktops. Macs have a far longer life span (I have both PCs and Macs, each Mac lives ~4 years, each PC about 2.5). Mac share of desktop installations is actually more like 6%.
A big unknown here for me is how the extra long life-spans of Linux boxes affects these numbers. Just because I keep a couple of old P III's around doing various Linux tasks, do those count as "desktop installations"?
1. Good DVD player & CD-RW that just work...
DVD player: mplayer, xine, videolan, just name a few.
CD writer: xcdroast, gtoaster, k3b, not counting commandline apps.
They either come with your distro, or are really easy to get. Apt-get, rpmfind.net, emerge, you name it.
2. Friends who are familiar with the OS/Distro...
This is more of a result than a cause. Not like linux users are snubbish and unfriendly, but you can't buy linux savvy friends from venders, so how can we help?
3. Better wine,...
This one is a no no, for two reasons: (a) If a windows software is useful, we better have a native version, for the sake of reliability/performance/freedom. Write a clone or have the vender port it, just don't count on running an emulator as a long term solution. (b) If you have to use Wine to get something done, what would a new/non-export/prospect user--which seems to be your major concern--think? "Look, linux must suck, because it doesn't even have that!"
4. Better default settings for Desktop/Window managers...
Not sure what you refer to. Maybe you should have named some Gnome/KDE default setting that's wacky? On a side note, "usability" is overrated. Gnome's default wm, metacity, is a prime "usability" example, made by "usability" export Havoc Pennington after consulting "usability" surveys, and it ends up being one of the most unusable piece of software in the Gnome packages. If this happens to be what you meant "improvements and surveys will help", future looks quite dark to me.
5. Use easier "language"...doesn't HAVE TO use the CLI.
This totally depends on what you do with you desktop. Try come up with a GUI that can do things such as putting ".virus" suffix on all .eml files scattered all over you directory tree. CLI does it easy.
6. Better Grub/Lilo/equivalent that is less intimidating...multi-boot...
If you are a really new user who wants to dual boot, you should install windows first, then linux, otherwise windows would overwrite MBR and point the boot partition to itself, thus making the linux install unbootable from HD. If you install linux after windows, most installers recognize win partitions and will add them to bootloader list anyway, what to worry? Not to mention grub.conf really doesn't take much effort to understand.
7. Some packaging system with less dependency problems...
Ideally I am with you on this one, but the strength of linux is the varity and constan improvements, which so happened often break dependencies. I just don't see a solution to this problem, but OTOH, say you are using RedHat, and install only RPMs from them, there really shouldn't be any problem at all.
8. The equivalent of a "tray" where one can see the status of the...
There is a "tray" in both Gnome and KDE, but they can't possibly show every thing. An average linux box is doing way more stuff then an average windows box. Imagine a tray filled with icons for httpd, sshd, smbd, sendmail, procmail, syslog, lm_sensors, ntpd, iptables, privoxy, spamassassin... Heck, you don't need a tray, you need a new monitor.
9. Few, well chosen default applications...
This is one reason why I left windows. IE for browsing, outlook express for mail, notepad for text and minesweeper for entertainment. You know what, they all suck, but you got no choice unless you pay big money. Choice is good, it's even better when it's free, and nobody would be too stupid to pick a favorite.
10. Other stuff that's been talked about in other places :)
I can't disagree with this point, as there is no point to disagree with.
It's Apples that all look the same. A PC can look like whatever you want.
Maybe you've never heard of ShapeShifter. And you can change the look of your Apple box, too, it's just that it actually looks good to begin with. I had to spend three hours before I finally had a desktop that looked good with Linux. My iBook looked good the first time I turned it on. And every app looks like it belongs in my desktop environment, rather than out of some random other person's. Sorry, I *like* the consistency.
You can also install hacks that change the Finder's brushed-metal look. Or the look of the entire OS. By default you can change to have the "Graphite" theme as well; if you truly want to be different then you can do that.
Macs are for people who just want to get on with what they're doing, rather than screw with settings infinitely to get something that looks decent to them. Sorry, but I want something that looks good to begin with; I can tweak it later if I want.
Designers don't want them customizable. Being about to tweak every fucking thing on their computer is infact the OPPOSITE of what they want.
They want a computer that works right, is logical to their way of thinking, and is consistant.
Out of all the machines, the Mac OSs of the day have always been more uniform and perfect around the edges than anything else.
Seriously, this is the problem with Linux users -- they think users want more choices. They don't want more, they want the right choices.
I will say this -- I design Windows Applications for a living. A lot of my clients claim they love my apps because it does exactly what they need. I generally think in terms of Mac users when I do this. No extra features just because it can be built into it. At home, I use both Mac and Linux. Yeah -- I have a PC as well to take care of my office needs, but the G4 and powerbook CAN do most of it. The G4 is for my creative business -- I do music technology consulting. Its the PERFECT OS for the creative end...if you don't understand this, you aren't one that truely focuses solely on the creative end. Some of these folks would rather not think about the computer as anything but a pallete and never have to go into mechanic mode -- which honestly, I do more in the PC than I ever do in Linux.
When I really need something to work towards the geek end of things for myself, I pull up Linux -- but with OSX, I'm slowly abandoning this platform for anything but server activities. The only reason in my mind other than religious reasons not to go with Mac is that you can't afford it...in which case, a Linux box is perfect.
So no, Graphic Designers don't go nutty about things like brushed metal...the only folks I hear about the lack of customization are generally geeks. They think that by changing a theme on a windows manager it means they are truely creative...I'm sorry that doesn't get the bills paid.
I know few people using Linux at home. Linux is being deployed as a business desktop, a cubicle box, which was the area traditionally ruled by Microsoft. Apple's generally stayed with niches.
The fact is, you can *combine* the Apple and Linux desktop market share to calculate (desktop UNIX users) and watch happily as it rises. Mmmm....
May we never see th
all the serious geeks will be looking for something else to champion. Linux geeks are like the Mac faithful. They LIKE being a part of something small and exclusive. When grandma begins using Linux, it will no longer be the "cool" thing to do.
The issue with designers is not customizability. It is a well-designed OS and software paradigm. Apple has it. Linux is still in the experimental stage when it comes to interfaces and developing UI guidelines. Applications don't have the requisite consistency and elegance that Apple fans like myself find invaluable. The Linux desktop is definitely usable, and it's even very approachable and discoverable for experienced desktop users. But it isn't up to the level of Mac OS X.
As for your characterization of Mac customizability, you have a lot to discover! There are thousands of applications, preference panes, screensaver modules, menu-bar add-ons, contextual-menu add-ons, daemons, etc., etc., that exist to customize the Mac OS X desktop. Konfabulator is a prime example! There are even alternative file managers like Path Finder if you need more power and geekiness than the built-in Finder provides. (Check both of these out, by the way. There is nothing comparable on Linux.)
Skinning alone is not the essence of customizability. I do like the fact that there are so many alternative window managers for Linux, and each one has a unique approach. Nautilus seemed especially interesting last time I saw it.
-- thinkyhead software and media
This is exceptionally good news for Mac OS X. Linux and Mac OS X have a much stronger affinity than Windows-Mac or Windows-Linux (or Windows-anything).
/etc while they read SlashDot in Safari and play a DVD in the corner.
As more users install Linux and move away from Windows they'll discover they don't need to upgrade their hardware as often. So they'll take the extra dough and get an iBook or a PowerBook. They'll discover very quickly that using "make" on the Mac is just like using "make" on Linux. They'll download the Mac OS X versions of all their favorite Linux stuff. They'll trip out on Path Finder. They'll be hooked by the superior window manager and rigorous attention to detail. In short, they'll start using the Mac even when they want to do Linux stuff. They'll VNC or SSH to the Linux box and tweak
At least, all the Linux geeks I know have gotten hooked on Mac OS X. And my Windows buddy keeps saying stuff like, "That's how it should be done! Those pathetic nerds in Redmond have had their thumbs up their arses for 10 years!"
-- thinkyhead software and media
I am going to point fingers at you and laugh out loud when linux makes it big.
It's just a matter of time. I think the corporate deployments are coming this year, and home use in a year or two/three.
1. Good DVD player & CD-RW that just work, without mesing around. If this software is not part of the distro, simple instructions on how to get/install it (one click?).
Fair enough. MPlayer and xine are both good (though MPlayer doesn't have a WMP-style GUI that's usable in fullscreen mode, and may put some folks off), but I know that currently neither is part of out-of-box Fedora.
2. Friends who are familiar with the OS/Distro, for the network effects and piece of mind in case something goes drastically wrong. This is where having a "critical mass" (fuzzy value) comes in - this is already happening, but the more, the better.
Mmmmf. I dunno about this. I agree that it could be higher, but I find that the same techie people that get asked Windows questions tend to also use Linux.
3. Better Wine, but that will come with age.
I'd modify that to "better Linux binary packaging". It's a bitch to package a single binary that runs on many Linux distros, and there's no approach that allows a user a consistent install interface. Native apps will come -- I don't think WINE can be a long-term solution, since "works most of the time" isn't really good enough for most users, but they *need* to be as easy to package and with the backwards compatibility that Windows has.
4. Better default settings for Desktop/Window managers that make sense to a majority (and keep the ability to tweak). The "usability" improvements and surveys will help here, a lot. More needs to happen in that field.
I can't agree. Everyone that has used a current Linux distro that I know of was pretty comfortable. There's a bit of exploration time, while folks find the equivalent of "Control Panels" and the like, but out-of-box, things tend to be pretty easy to use. I personally think that the defaults are toned down enough that most power users should blow away the default KDE/GNOME WMs, as neither is nearly as powerful as some of the other options available.
5. Use easier "language" - eventually (in 1-2 years) e.g., non-cryptic commands, or a *standardized* set of aliases that work on all distros. [And continue to evolve the GUI so the user doesn't HAVE TO use the CLI.]
I cannot agree. A Joe User office type does not have to use the CLI. Someone with any sort of administrative responisibilities does. As for aliases, no. Windows did fine with "del" and "type", and UNIX clones are fine with "rm" and "cat". Forcing everyone to learn a new set of aliases is ridiculous.
6. Better Grub/Lilo/equivalent that is less intimidating for new users that want multi-boot. Preferably with a easy to use GUI that detects all HDDs & partitions and tells you what's on them (with as much relevant information as possible).
Done in the installers for major distros. I don't think current users need to poke at grub.conf or lilo.conf at all to multi-boot with Windows.
7. Some packaging system with less dependency problems. [Yes, there are a few that show very good promise, with only occasional issues surfacing.]
I cannot agree. Dependency problems are *not* the issue -- all current major distros have auto-download and install systems that handle dependencies. The problem is that it's still difficult to build and package a single binary that will run on multiple platforms, and until that is the case, people will *continue* to try to run, say, Red Hat packages on Mandrake and become frusterated when problems pop up. That is not an issue for a packaging system alone.
9. Few, well chosen default applications on the distro (not "give them four of everything"). [Lot of progress has already happened in this area in a few distros.]
No. That would be incredibly agg
May we never see th
We're really nearly there .... the default/stock Fedora Core install has built in CD writing - just insert a blank CD, drop files into the folder that pops up and hit "Burn" (built into gnome). Couldn't be easier. Right click ISOs to burn them. Just need to nail burning audio CDs in an integrated fasion, maybe with RhythmBox.
Totem is a great DVD player. The only problem is that it doesn't work out of the box thanks to the DMCA problems with libdvdcss. I think a better "start here" trail for new users would help this, as it's not hard to install the needed RPM (just download and click it, really).
2. Friends who are familiar with the OS/Distro
I think this isn't so bad. You know, nearly everybody I talk to at my university has heard of Linux. I mean, 99%. Most of them know a friend, or friend-of-a-friend, who uses it.
7. Some packaging system with less dependency problems. [Yes, there are a few that show very good promise, with only occasional issues surfacing.]
Yup! :) Autopackage 0.4 will be out in the next week, promise!
Because there are no "Clueless" or "Shat up, dumbass" moderations.
Yet.
IMHO Linux should have at least 10% of the desktop market before a revoloution is declared.
BTW
What percentage of the server market does linux have and is it growing ( as compared to M$)?
I took it for granted that this number was high, but it was not as high as I thought.
Steve
I use Linux as a desktop, but I run it on an iBook. Does this confuse the poll?
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
DVD player: mplayer, xine, videolan, just name a few.
.eml files scattered all over you directory tree. CLI does it easy.
CD writer: xcdroast, gtoaster, k3b, not counting commandline apps.
They either come with your distro, or are really easy to get. Apt-get, rpmfind.net, emerge, you name it.
Third-party people package these, but Red Hat has the biggest market share out there, and their latest release, Fedora Core 1, does not provide mplayer, xine, or videolan in the default repository. True, other people package these for FC1, but they aren't in your yum.conf by default. MPlayer in particular was, in the past, a real bear to build ahead of time and distribute as a binary, because there were a ton of arch-specific build-time optimizations. There are also legal concerns associated with a number of formats -- what *exactly* is the legal status of DiVX, given that it might use IP from the MPEG folks? How about MP3 (another high-profile omission from RH9's xmms due to legal reasons, when the Fraunhoffer people were blustering about lawsuits, though it's back in FC1)? What about Sorenson support, or the Windows binaries needed to work with a number of proprietary codecs? In the past, a lot of gray area has been ignored by little projects poking around on the Internet, but you can't have a distro maintainer ignore things -- they have pocketbooks that one can sue for.
Also, CD burning used to be a pain in the ass (not sure what the status is in FC1) in Red Hat, because RH used the ide-cd driver by default...and for a long time, you couldn't burn CDs without using ide-scsi emulation.
Note that other vendors have had flaws as well -- I've been using Red Hat's releases for *years*, and can dredge a fair number of irritations folks have had up pretty easily.
This one is a no no, for two reasons: (a) If a windows software is useful, we better have a native version, for the sake of reliability/performance/freedom. Write a clone or have the vender port it, just don't count on running an emulator as a long term solution. (b) If you have to use Wine to get something done, what would a new/non-export/prospect user--which seems to be your major concern--think? "Look, linux must suck, because it doesn't even have that!"
Right. WINE performance is actually not bad (assumine one has it set up properly). Freedom is an issue. WINE reliability is a decided issue -- you can't just have half of all Windows software work, and the other part fail in random ways or during certain tasks. That's unacceptable for an end user. It's nice for a techie who can't get away with using Linux without a particular Windows app, and has been valuable for the past few years, but users can start expecting native releases. WINE changes not infrequently break previously working software -- it's a tough job to reverse engineer and implement a huge chunk of buggy software like the collection of Windows libraries.
Not sure what you refer to. Maybe you should have named some Gnome/KDE default setting that's wacky? On a side note, "usability" is overrated. Gnome's default wm, metacity, is a prime "usability" example, made by "usability" export Havoc Pennington after consulting "usability" surveys, and it ends up being one of the most unusable piece of software in the Gnome packages. If this happens to be what you meant "improvements and surveys will help", future looks quite dark to me.
I agree. Having an easy-to-use environment out-of-box has not been a problem for years on Red Hat. I can see folks complaining when you got an ancient AfterStep desktop that required a significant amount of config file editing and WM restarting to make even basic changes. This is long behind us.
This totally depends on what you do with you desktop. Try come up with a GUI that can do things such as putting ".virus" suffix on all
People with no administrative responsibilities do not, IMHO, have to use the CLI. People with any administrative tasks d
May we never see th
Panther runs well on an original bondi blue imac as long as you update the firmware and max out the ram. A B&W g3 should run it even better. There has been better performance with every update to OS X. Hopefully that is something that continues.
C'mon people, lets look to it!
We should be looking at around 1200 posts telling us why mac's are good/bad and why linux is/is'nt.
Of course you'll have the good grace to intersperse alternate posts with pro/anti monopolist rhetoric now won't you?
I am the owner of a 5 person Architectural firm in the Raleigh Durham area. With a significant amount of work, I have kept our office microsoft free for about fifteen years. Truly the most difficult task has been CAD programs.
We use a combination of Linux and OS/2. Linux for servers and administrative desktops. OS/2 for drafting workstations running DOS based cad programs. Some of the older DOS based CAD programs are really very good, and run like greased lightning on newer hardware.
I am quite sure that some of the win32 CAD programs will become quite usable on linux through use of wine. I have copies of a number of these programs(All legal!) which I test against various releases of WINE. My current favorite is VISUAL CADD which is almost usable.
Quite frankly I think there are a lot of technically savy design firms who would like to dump Microsoft (and Autodesk for that matter!) who would leap at a resonably functional WIN32 cad program running on Linux/Wine.
I know I would. Bye OS/2, sadly, I knew ye well.
I disagree. 2003 was the first year in which consoles overtook growth of PC games, and is a trend that has been pretty evident for awhile. While PC games are not doomed in any sense I think there is a decline in the making, in favour of the dedicated game machines. This means 'PC gaming' and consequently Linux/Mac gaming will be less of an issue. IMHO.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Sorry, but I want something that looks good to begin with; I can tweak it later if I want. Damn right! So, knowing this, isn't there a marked for a Linux distribution that would meet the demands of us not-so-geeky-GUI-loving-designers?
Never underestimate the slack-jawed stupidity about technical issues with your run-of-the-mill MCSE.
These are the same people that once told me Macs are unable to network. It's not completely thier fault though. I've been to 2-day Windows administration seminars and they FUD like hell at those things.
Well, atleast 2 billion people worldwide have English as their primary or secondary language. Just because my primary language isn't English it doesn't necessarly mean I know any less English than someone with English as their mother tongue.
Funny thing about that 1% linux number... it seems to be stuck at exactly 1% every month for as far back as the Zeitgeist has been archived. Strange for a number in a survey to be so steady. Perhaps there is something else happening with their numbers... for instance, many mozilla users change their browser identity string to look like IE, so we don't get those annoying messages telling us that mozilla isn't supported, when it works perfectly well.
Another possiblity is that most people google for related items, and most of the time this is through either windows desktops, or through a proxy that runs on windows.
I also don't see an "unknown" category, perhaps they are just accidently seeing many linux configurations as unknown, and then sticking the unknowns into a windows category by mistake.
Yes, I did preview this... that should read _work_ related items.
Good luck on Linux overtaking OS X's momentum.
Apple has built themselves a very profitable niche, and is happy with it. Yes, they could get more market share (but much less money, at least in the short run) by porting Mac OS X to x86. They've chosen not to. They want to maintain a market with users who are comfortable paying high prices for a polished black box system. Nothing wrong with that, but Apple is not aiming at the masses, which buy computers based on price, where Apple simply is not competitive (and, again, has chosen not to be).
Aside from the folks that use Linux on PowerPC, Apple's Mac OS doesn't really even compete with Linux all that much. People using Linux on the desktop are generally on x86 -- a new Linux user means a vanished Windows users.
Linux and Mac users can get along pretty well. Apple (setting aside Quicktime) doesn't push proprietary formats, a la Microsoft. Apple doesn't play dirty compatibility games, a la Microsoft ("Gee, did we break Netscape Server with that change? Do we prioritize IE requiests ahead of Navigator requests? Ooops, looks like we introduced a bug!"). An Apple/Linux argument is much like an argument between vi and emacs. It can get very impassioned, as each person defends their own favorite logic. However, in the end, the two interoperate well -- they'e still both churning out text. Bob in the next cubicle can use one, and me the other, and everyone is happy. I don't get my nice GNU tools on a vanilla Mac, but I get a reasonable set of POSIX utils. I can write and run my scripts and work without too much pain. I don't have the Godawful Windows virtual terminal and horrendous shell. I get X11 support. Yeah, some Linux software doesn't work well or at all under OS X (especially for things that have half-done native ports from X11), and software using the Mac's GUI as a front-end doesn't work really well on Linux. However, think of the following:
* Libraries can be designed to be cross-platform. Most Windows uers that I know of seem to use AIM or ICQ, or maybe Trillian, which I believe is a closed-source codebase. The friend that I have that uses OS X uses Adium, which uses libgaim. If I find a bug in libgaim on my Linux box and fix it, he benefits, and visa versa. There are a startling number of Mac OS X people working on POSIX sourceforge projects, much like the Linux world, and very unlike the Windows world.
* Dunno if Mac OS X does perl out of box, but if not, I'm sure that it's installable via fink or something. I don't have to futz with Visual Basic crap coming from some annoying Windows "programmer". Similarly, nice traditional UNIX C daemons work nicely on OS X *or* Linux.
* Objective C. Linux has a nice Objective C compiler available in the GNU Compiler Collection that ships with most distros. The only guy I know that uses Objective C isn't really impressed with it, but still, if you like using the language of choice on the Mac, you can code on Linux comfortably.
* X11 support. I can run X11 apps anywhere, and over the network. It's a whole different world from Windows.
So, while people may happily bash someone else's OS between Mac OS X and Linux, ultimately they can live together pretty comfortably. I mean, I get really annoyed when using Solaris, which I see as missing features, being heavyweight, and being rather expensive. However, I can do useful work on Solaris without constantly getting ticked off at having an environment about a tenth as capable as my Linux box at home -- which is exactly what happens when I use a Windows machine.
May we never see th
Three years ago, I spent $2500 on a fancy new PC. Since then, I've spent over a thousand dollars upgrading and fixing it, dealing with such issues as my power supply exploding after a year of use, Windows XP running like a dog (requiring a memory upgrade), needing a WiFi card, needing a Firewire card, etc. Every time I needed to do something new, I had to modify the computer. Meanwhile my buddy bought an iBook around the same time, and decided to upgrade to a power book after a year of use. I bought the iBook off of him for $1000. Its specs don't match up to my expensive desktop machine, but it seems to run faster, I've had no problems with it, it has features like Firewire that just weren't available on PCs at the time, and I'm generally pretty happy with it, and it works a lot better with the unix servers I need to use for school. I've spent thousands of dollars on a PC desktop that I now use as an iTunes music server (and to play minesweeper) but it useless for anything else, and $1000 on a used iBook that's almost as old and serves all my needs. It's a little slow when doing complex plots, but I can live with that. At least the OS multitasks properly, so my computer doesn't freeze up while they're running.
As far as the "Macintosh" side of things, only the Carbon runtime libaries were ported over for legacy semi-ported Carbon applications. Native Mac OS X apps are Mach-O binaries and use the (NeXTSTEP "NS") Cocoa library for GUI. There is also a "Classic" virtual machine for running Mac OS 9.2.2.
That's not entirely correct. You can compile Carbon apps to the native Mach-O format as well. Carbon apps can be just as native as Cocoa ones.
....*cough* *cough* have a Shuttle computer with Debian or Gentoo. No dual booting (the other OS was erradicated many moons ago), no , sorry, I am lying, dual booting is ther to test other OSS OSes.
Games? For the road GBA, or a PDA.
At home Gamecube or Playstation.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
doesn't matter. the results for Linux would still look pathetic. "twice nothing is still nothing."
apple WOULD sell it as software to make more money and make the investors happy. Now OSX is just an ad trick of the kind "you gotta buy a mac to see this wonderful OS", while in reallity porting OSX to x86 is a matter of minutes.
You are not working at apple by any chance are you?
That could be because Linux users on the whole are smart enough that when they search for something, they a) go to other resources as well (Wikipedia!) and/or b) find what they're looking for the first time, rather than the fifth. :)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
What makes Linux a truly Nice Desktop to common not-so-expert users ?
,Less features , needs configuring additional support]
,can read many formats including .wma]
,Java JRE support etc
1.mp3 playing -XMMS [Works
2.Watching movies - Mplayer [Amazing
3.Watch online Music like Launch [Not much help in Linux]
4.Browser [tabbed browisng,Awesome Firebird / Netscape]
5.MailClient [Great , Thunderbird , Netscape]
6.Realplayer support[not great in linux]
7.Yahoo Messenger advanced functionalities[Doesnt seem like yahoo messenger in linux beats its cousin in windows]
Automatic Flashplayer
I really love linux and think it has the potetial to become no 1 desktop product but i must admit i dont know if there is anyone OS which does all the basic things taht i have mentioned.
Really new users want it simple..
think a virtual Demo could motivate and help new users.
computers are lovely bright and deep
And linux has promises to keep
Miles to go before linux sleeps
Miles to go before i sleep
lol..
Hello , this is my way.
Which way is yours ?
btw there is no right way
Interesting comments. I am following up with some clarification.
I am by no means a new user, but I still haven't found a distro that I got to really "use full time" - I keep installing and *starting* to use it, then something doesn't work right and I am forced to go back to the a different OS as my primary one. I will spend a few minutes trying to fix the problem - which is asking a lot from new users who are more OS neutral. Even I will not spend hours looking for solutions to my problems (but for some reason, I will spend a lot of time with other peoples' problems if they ask - interesting psychological study - but I digress).
What I offered was constructive criticism, as I would like to see GNU/Linux succeed. If the Linux community won't solve the *perceived* problems (these may or may not be REAL problems), someone with a large marketing clout (guess who, and guess what they capitalize on (perceptions)) will use these to slow down the adoption of Linux.
The solutions we know exist are spread around the many distributions - I can't use distro A for solution to some problems, distro B for solutions to some others. A distro should be well rounded (yes, I have used SUSE9, Mandrake10, Gentoo1.4,RedHat FC1, and one-previous-than-current Xandros and Lindows).
Comment on 9: It wasn't meant to preclude developing multiple apps to solve a problem. The comment was that new users would prefer something that works, integrated well and does what they want, as opposed to 5 diferent applications that provide different functionality (and some of which work only partially - some distros had this problem as late as 3Q2003 and may still have it). If the USER wants additional/different application to solve that problem, the user can look to the distro's support site for a different application (with similar functionality), so chioce should still exist.
8. "Tray": It wasn't meant to hold all status (MSwin doesn't show all services either), but selected ones. I haven't found a GNU/Linux tray that will for instance show that my firewall is up and functioning (perhaps there is a way, but I haven't found it in my casual looking).
5. Use of "language" for commands (and other talk). This is a problem in the long term for beginners if they HAVE TO use a CLI. No one is asking to "force" everyone to learn a new set of commands. Just that provide the standardized options (aliases) that Joe can remember and relate to the functions).
7. Dependebility problems are not an issue only for experts. For the new user, if something is broken (even one program), it is a big problem because there isn't one directory where he can go and remove files and clean up (Windows is not good here either, but there are some tools that help).
4. Usability is not overrated, but the so called Human Factors experts can make a mountain out of a molehill. That is one field where 80-90% of them are average and 10% are excellent (defies definition of average, doesn't it!). Acceptable usability should include surveys of large populations and the defaults should be chosen to satisfy a large percentage of the users (in my simplistic view).
That's all for the moment.
-srr
With stuff like : Easy to use installers Office compatibility Easy to use productivity software It is just a matter of time
That's a pretty elitest way of thinking.
Chris
My iBook looked good the first time I turned it on. And every app looks like it belongs in my desktop environment, rather than out of some random other person's.
Having color all over one's interface is not good for a color matching point of view. I remember, back when I cared about Apple products (i.e. pre-Apple blowing away all the clones and consigning themselves to a niche forever) that graphic designers frequently used gray desktop backgrounds, and sometimes went as far as Radius-style professional prepress monitors -- black and with a hood -- to maintain an absolutely neutral environment to do serious color work in. Now there are lots of little pulsing colored shiny things all over the place with colors blasting out of constantly resizing pixmaps, instead of the refined, muted pre-OS X styles.
May we never see th
I use it a lot on windows and I hate it-because its on windows. Don't think for a moment that autodesk doesn't want to put out acad for linux/bsd, it's sales, after all, for Gods sake.
They just don't want to be garroted with piano wire by some soldier from Redmond cutting off their access to the win32 abis. Use your head once in a while.
Our main supplier who sells apple hardware to lots of other architects says that they have had a massive interest in OSX migration since MyDoom was released.
And a big hand to whoever wrote MyDoom. More traffic on the Internet sucks, but this is the kind of long-term benefit that I can live with. If Microsoft loses a quarter-million seats to more stable, secure platforms, I'd consider MyDoom to be well worth the annoyance caused.
May we never see th
I do not believe that Linux is coming near the Mac on desktops. It is just that since Linux is free amny people are trying it out or playing with it but I do not believe that serious desktop work is done with it. You can not trust pools on such an issue until you know how many people are actually USING Linux.
I'm bored I think I'll start a flamewar.
...
IMHO *ALL* GUI/WIMP Desktops are bloated piles of
resource hogging garbage. The command line is king.
AND
ed is the *only* application you will *ever* need.
siggy played guitar
[glad I read all the way to the bottom ... was going to say this myself]
A number of Mac sites have been pointing this out recently, with a number of articles looking at Mac's lower TOC vs Wintel machines. Most cite the installed base for Macs at 10%.
I dual boot bother my Powerbook and my iMac between Mac OS and Debian.
I wonder which one I count for.
--saint
(And no, I'm not that much of an anomoly.)
All these brains focused on this topic, and no-one seems to get it.
OSS/FS initiatives have already seriously eroded the earning potential of MANY commercial software products. This trend will continue (duh).
Apple has never been a software company... they sell hardware. They give away a boat load of software with any machine they sell. They do charge for some of their software packages (OS upgrades and premium design apps), but the fees they charge are usually a fraction of what a 'software' company would charge for a similar project.
Recently, Apple has made significant moves to more closely incorporate the GNU tools that Linux users expect, or at least design the OS to allow seamless installation of GNU tools. They are hedging their bets. Linux is Apple's friend at the moment, because as Linux makes advances on the desktop, Microsoft users might actually take a moment to ponder their alternatives... some of the people might look at a Mac.
Its not about Linux > OSX or OSX > Linux, As a Mac, Linux, and Windoze user, I cheer the advances of Linux. When my Macs get outdated (after 5 or 6 years) they get a nice Linux distro installed and do odd jobs around the office.
Can't we all just get along?
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
The following posts by StarManta is proof that he is a troll:
3 486 3 306 3 241 2 994
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93042&cid=799
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93042&cid=799
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93042&cid=799
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93042&cid=799
"To be able to ditch windows and natively run applications such as Photoshop or Dreamweaver would be a dream come true!"
I live that dream daily. It's called Adobe Creative Suite Premium and Dreamweaver for MacOS X.
The Mac is more like an Audi - although it may not boast any more features than a Ford, it's better thought out and it's more likely to just work.
Wow... that has certainly NOT been my experience with Audis. Any of the other 2 or 3 unfortunate souls out there who ever owned a 5000S can probably relate... Gad! That car nearly drove me to the insane asylum and poorhouse in the same trip.
That said, I agree with your assessment of the RedHat desktop... I've been using it, continue to use it, and like it
I keep windows around, but strictly for gaming.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
confuse market share for installed base. IDC (subsidiary of IDG) is one of the worst undercounters of Mac marketshare and installed base. A quick look at Google's Zeitgeist shows 3% Mac, 1% Linux. I know these number are not perfect as we all spoof browser IDs, but I think the the ratio of Mac to Linux boxes undercounted due to spoofing is also likely 3:1.
Apple has sold nearly 30 million Macs since 1984. The PowerPC shipped a decade ago in 1994. Any PowerPC will run OS 9, any G3 will run 10.2, and any factory USB machine will run 10.3 (officially, XPostFacto). That is something like 20 million machines still in use mostly as desktops.
I don't hate free software, and I think Mac OS X and Linux complement each other. I just hate these so-called analysts with their biased numbers. My wife used to work for an economics firm that did analysis for the telecom industry. I would liken what they did to selling cosmetics to ugly people to make them look better. They tailored their reports to put the companies that were paying for the reports in the best light no matter what the truth was. IDC is no different. If Apple gave them a crapload of money, they would say Apple's marketshare far outpaces Linux.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...
Usually when I search I find what I am looking for on the first page or 2. Also, I probably do 10x as many searches on Google at work where I am forced to use win2k than home where I am using MDK 9.2.
Besides what is likely to be the OS for the Unknown category? Probably Linux or BSD. How many Linux users change the ID string in thhier browser to Report as something else?
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
" Designers don't want them customizable. Being about to tweak every fucking thing on their computer is infact the OPPOSITE of what they want."
Please speak for yourself. It's ridiculous to generalize about any profession or persons. I'm a designer and guess what? I do want a customizable OS. I enjoy tweaking. If you don't, then don't. If you do, then do. But go ahead and tell us all what we really want. It's not obnoxious or presumptious. Not all...
Yeah, he should have used elitist thinking instead.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
really? you really get what you pay for?
hmm..
air: $0
water: $0
sun: $0 ("the big, warm spot in the sky" sun,
not the "dot in dot com" sun)
life: $0 (unless one is born to a whore. then it
would cost the father a pretty penny.)
love: $0 (unless you are the said father.)
GNU: $0
all of the above things are things that i can undoubtedly say are the most valuable things that i have. and i didn't pay for any of it. maybe we should all Darl-afy ourselves and monitize everything listed above. otherwise it totally goes against the "you get what you pay for" philosophy.
i wouldn't recommend buying diamonds for things to buy that keep their value over time.
Personally, Apple gave me the shaft.
Bought an imac G3 for 700 Dlls with OS9 3 yrs ago.
Soon enough Apple drops OS9. Their brand new OSX runs like
molasses on my G3. OS9 is not prempted OS
and the real downer, does not read long
filenames(256).
Solution?
Yellow Dog linux.
Now my little G3 no only reads long filenames
but supports remotes X Sessions from my wireless
laptop. It's pretty darn fast!
So thank you OSX($120.00Dlls) but Yellow Dog and
Mandrake got me covered.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
have been running old unix systems from the 80's around here - South Florida - since the 80's!
How come everything in this thread is modded either insightful or troll no matter how innocuous?
In order to demonstrate the point for the shallow reading moderator, the point is specifically that the medical people are not what you could call virgin unix users.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
Wow are you out of touch. First off this isn't 1997. Users of rpm based distros like Fedora and Mandrake and Suse use automated tools for installation. Second, Debian/Gentoo? Even among nerds they rank low. In general desktop linux use Debian is probably 4th or 5th in line at best. Gentoo is somewhere at the bottom. And FreeBSD? Well let's just say after the top 50 linux distros its somewhere below that. These aren't statements about software quality these are just the realities of home desktop *nix users. Your wrong in general about who is using Linux at home. I'd say based on the facts of what actual Linux distros are being used we are not all a bunch of nerd and cad engineers. We also certainly aren't flocking to Debian and Gentoo.
I do agree with your question though, where is photoshop etc? One last thing to remember is if Photoshop etc ever do come to Linux its going to work on those rpm distros first, not Debian, Gentoo or FreeBSD.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The most important thing to remember is that UNIX-based OS desktop usage is rising.
I work at a school where, for the first time in it's 30+ year history, it just installed a Macintosh lab and is installing Linux on x86 hardware in a second lab. This is at a small school where there are only 6 computer labs. The great thing about what is happening is that Linux, Macs, and other UNIX-based OS systems play nice together. They use the same network implementations, users can share files between one another without format issues, and much more. The users get to choose which OS and platform they like, without worrying about communicating with others.
In fact, when you look at the broad picture, Windows is the only non-UNIX operating system left among the major operating systems. Instead of Macs screwing things up for system admins in terms of networking, file sharing, etc. like it did in years past, it's now MS Windows that is creating all of the problems in multiplatform environments.
The good news is that among my co-workers and students, the disadvantages for using Windows is beginning to outweigh its advantages. As more people are beginning to realize that Linux is perfectly suitable for day-to-day office operations (without proprietary MS solutions involved in the backend to screw things up), and Macs can pick up on the specialized multimedia tasks and communicate with the Linux boxes without problems, there really isn't a dire need to use MS products anymore. If anything, folks where I work are beginning to realize that MS products are limiting their choices and are beginning to make things more difficult instead of easier.
This is a troll, and a lame attempt to be funny.
Deal with it.
It is also true...
When you don't have too much money you buy the toy you can afford, when you are comfortable you buy the toy you like.
Mac users are probably seen as people with a good education and a good income (see parent post's link), because you need something that brings in enough money to excuse the expense. Its like any luxury toy, they may be a minority in terms of what people buy, but a lot of people want one. Other examples (cars this time): Mercedes, BMW, Cadilac and Ferrari. SGI also makes nice boxes, but the OS just doesn't have the same finish and feel, as OS X.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Duh.
How hard do you think it is for someone to switch from a properly functioning product (Mac/Windows/commercial Unix) to an inferior similar that costs +inf% less than what they used?
I happen to like cashmere and silk, but most of my clothing is cotton or cotton+polyester.
Duh.
I've responded to a post from Adolf Hitler and Bill Gates in the last ten minutes or so. Good old Slashdot.
/etc/yum/repositories or ~/.yum/repositories. Furthermore, apt-get and yum tend to slow down and not parallelize repository checking, so if there's one slow repository added, all tasks done with them are much slower (this is especially true for yum, which by default checks for updates from repositories on every run). There is no standard for autorun on Linux (admittedly, for good security reasons, but it's still a potential issue). You can't just stick in a CD and have an install window come up. There is no standard front-end to use that can deal with RPM/DEB/what-have-you. Folks may use a front-end like Loki's installer (which doesn't work in text-only mode and doesn't enter anything into the RPM/DEB/what-have-you database, breaking the systemwide packaging system by allowing the newly installed software to break if a library it depends on is removed). Many vendors just provide big shell scripts that kind of sort of do the right thing. It's pretty atrocious.
Why do game companies port to Mac, but never Linux?
Good question! There are a number of excellent reasons:
* Financial differences. Many people using Linux (especially on x86) are using it because they like using a free-as-in-beer UNIX system. Mac users were willing to throw down a significant amount of extra money for proprietary hardware and their OS. Conclusian -- many Mac users may be willing to spend more money on software.
* Interest differences. Linux has traditionally had few games. This means that folks that habitually buy games generally either use Windows or have maintained a second Windows boot and are willing to purchase Windows versions of their games.
* CPU Infrastructure. Partly because Linux often replaces Windows on older boxes when Windows no longer runs well on a machine, and partly because there aren't a lot of CPU-cyle-eating gamers on Linux, there are a surprisingly small number of high-powered Linux machines sitting around. I upgraded my PII/266 to a PIII/550 3 months ago only so that I could watch DVDs and do software decoding in real time. I upgraded to a P4 after that only because the motherboard died. Even on Windows, unless one is running games, it's increasingly harder to justify buying new hardware. On Linux, which runs well on old hardware and for which few games (and almost *no* high-system-requirement games exist), there are few high-end systems.
* 3d Graphics Infrastructure. Because there are few games, there is little demand from customers for good, up-to-date 3d drivers. NVidia provides only binary drivers, ATI does not support any hardware 3d above the 9200 (and even the 9200 has still-being-worked-on open-source drivers -- try using texture compression in Neverwinter Nights with a non-CVS DRI). Matrox has provided poor support for their products since the G450/G550 era. Many distros do an incomplete or poor job of setting up 3d out-of-box. With poor 3d support and most new games coming out requiring 3d cards, it's a rough area to sell games in. Most of the games that have sold well for Linux are 2d.
* Software Packaging. This is a huge pain in the ass for most commercial vendors of any Linux software. Ideally, a vendor wants to hand you a CD that you can pop in your drive, click something, and any required software is installed. This is easy to do for Windows -- you pull out InstallShield or Nullsoft's installer and whip something up. On Linux, some people only use tarballs. Some use DEBs. Some use RPMs. There are various downloading-and-dependency-handling front ends for each (apt-get, yup, yum). None of these deal very well with third-party-packages wanting to use them for stuff that isn't in the original distro vendor's distribution -- they usually require the user to manually, as root, modify a repositories list somewhere on his sytem. The installer can't just dump a file in a directory like
*
May we never see th
Why has this been modded down as a troll? it is true afterall, is it not?
Mostly American
I guarantee that Linux awareness is higher among Americans than among Sudanese.
Mostly Home (or non-workplace) Internet Users
I guarantee that Linux awareness is higher among people who use the Internet in their homes than among people who don't.
So far you've managed to demonstrate that the numbers were artificially inflated in favor of Linux. Got anything else?
First, you showed 6% regular or semi-regular mac usage, which is twice what surveys like IDC's show.
IDC's data had nothing to do with use. It had to do with units sold per quarter.
Funny thing about that 1% linux number... it seems to be stuck at exactly 1% every month for as far back as the Zeitgeist has been archived.
Rounding. The actual number may have fluctuated from 0.001% to 0.999%, but it's never strayed above 1%.
for instance, many mozilla users change their browser identity string to look like IE
Many? We're talking about hundreds of millions of people, here. How many is "many," in terms of a fraction? One in a million? One in ten million?
I also don't see an "unknown" category
It's called "other."
To be able to ditch windows and natively run applications such as Photoshop or Dreamweaver on the same hardware I currently own would be a dream come true!
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I think a better "start here" trail for new users would help this, as it's not hard to install the needed RPM (just download and click it, really).
What sucks is that the reason there isn't a better "start here" trail for new users is precisely the same reason it doesn't just work: DMCA and patent concerns. It's clear that you can get in trouble for distributing libdvdcss in the US, and it's clear that you're safe if you don't even mention it to the users, but compromise solutions that fall in between are less than perfectly clear, and cautious people end up having to choose not to do it at all.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
And you've been sucking way too much cock.
:-)
Funny, I don't remember posting anything yet in this discussion, and you didn't reply to me?
I wonder if I would have loosed my memory of posting it, or if slashdot's database could loose my posting?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Is interviewing 1171 people (or businesses) really statistically accurate? If you're really good at what you do you should know that a decent sampling plan is critical to the study. I could interview 2 people and deduce that 100% of the survey indicates that MS has the best OS, according to a survey. Maybe you're right, but the study seems skewed, in my opinion.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
No, BSD is a blessed version of the old school source, Linux is a clean re-implementation. They're both good, but OS X definitely ain't a Linux distro.
For years, the IT industry has had Microsoft to gripe about. A single company that doesn't produce particularly reliable or good products with a stranglehold on the industry. With them gone, will life get massively better, or will folks find something else to gripe about, I wonder?
May we never see th
And according to the post, you are statistically unimportant, so go away.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
Thank you for saying something. The number and severity of spelling errors in posts doesn't say much for the education system.
It IS bad for statistical data because he only interviewed 1171 people (businesses). Do you really believe that's a good sampling plan? How many computer users are out there? That seemed to be the most acurate data the poster submitted and it is insufficient at that.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
We all know this already...Google is equal to God. If Google can find it it must be true.
[SIG] Remember Mattel handheld games?
I've never heard one Ferrari owner complain about how Ford has greater market share.
Apple is a hardware company - they don't compete on cost - they compete on quality. Whereas with Linux, not a hardware company mostly competes on cost. The nice thing is that both platforms have quality software and many of the applications for Linux run on OS X.
Why does an OS have to be all things for all people? Why do Linux lovers wish that Linux was as borg-ish as windows?
Don't get me wrong, we develop on Macs and design on macs and use Linux (sometimes Solaris) to serve. The only PCs we have are basically for 3D. So, I'm an honest platform agnostic driven by what tool is best for the job.
I think the reason that some Linux people get all weird about Mac/OSX is that it messes with the whole Linux vs. Microsoft dialectic. Remember Apple's slogan was not "Think Opposite" - it was "Think Different".
It's a game of GO not chess. There are more than two sides to the board.
-_-
And iPod was number 9. most popular search i January :-)
Wow, I'm a soon-to-be licensed architect in RTP... love to know more, can you mail me off line? (Firm, CAD software, desktop environment, etc.)
I'm right now struggling to decide if I should release a whole set of AutoCAD tools under the GPL. I'd rather help a project like PythonCAD, but it is still a long way from being usable. I hate to assist proprietary CAD makers, but can't figure out a way to migrate off yet. Sounds like you've found a way.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
You are attempting to coopt our sympathies, but you will not have them.
You are twisting the context of "freedom" to "freedom of choice". "Free" as in Free Software does not involve a committment to capitalistic, market competition. It only involves a committment to the possibility of such competition.
And just as tolerance does not involve tolerating the intolerant, neither does freedom involve toleranting those who actively deny and suppress those freedoms they are entitled to.
A world in which GNU/HURD is the only completed and fully functional OS is a world which is more free than one in which Microsoft Windows has 99% of the market share.
Microsoft Windows denies and suppresses the ability of users to realize their rights - to exercise their freedoms. It is not just a matter of Microsoft having its way and GNU having its way. These rights of users are possessed independently of recognition in EULAs and constitutions and statutes.
You are a pig politician or a corporate shill, or you have sold out to both and are attempting to justify your pitiful existence.
Why do you HATE freedom?
I haven't found a GNU/Linux tray that will for instance show that my firewall is up and functioning (perhaps there is a way, but I haven't found it in my casual looking).
This is an interesting sort of concern, and a common one, but not one that's really easy to address. I don't mean that no one could hack out a little systray app to show firewall status; I'm addressing your "meta-concern" which boils down to "I'm used to having/doing this thing in Windows and I feel uncomfortable not having it in Linux, even if it's really not necessary or useful in this environment".
In this particular case, there's really never any question as to whether or not your iptables-based firewall is up and working -- if it has been configured, it's doing its job. Most distros wire firewall scripts into the network interface ifup/ifdown scripts, which means that if you have a working network, you have a working firewall and there's really no reason at all to want to check its status. There are reasons to want to see how it's currently configured, and to see what it's rejecting, and there are good tools for doing those things.
The canonical example of the generic concern, of course, is the old FAT defrag programs. The new Linux user wants to know how to defrag his or her disk and is frustrated at not being able to find a tool to do it. FAT filesystems perform horribly when badly fragmented and have a strong tendency to get that way quickly. Better file systems do benefit from defragmentation as well, but not nearly to the same degree. In practice most people never bother, and never care because it's a non-issue unless you're tuning for absolute peak performance. So newbie-type tools don't exist and the recently converted Windows user is frustrated because they can't defrag their disk, an operation that they *know* is essential.
Another common example is reboot times. Linux systems tend not to be optimized for boot or shutdown performance (in general, there are certainly exceptions), and that can really annoy people who are accustomed to the notion that rebooting is some sort of computer hygiene, a meme that is still overwhelmingly prevalent in the Windows world in spite of the fact that Win2K and WinXP are quite stable.
I don't think there really is a good way to address the general problem, other than to recognize it and document the specific instances -- not that new users are likely to read the documentation. I suppose we could build nice, user-friendly GUIs to do all of the unnecessary operations, but who wants to devote their free time to building something that is boring and unnecessary? And users in a business environment typically do get training, so there's really no incentive for the likes of Red Hat to build that stuff either.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Maybe sucking cock destroys braincells?
P.S. - The past tense of loose is lost NOT loosed.
God-damned stupid cock sucker. . . . .
Most Linux distros install at least 6 email clients as part of the default install. If people didn't have anything but pine available, someone must have made a decision not to install anything else. That's no more the fault of Linux that it would be Apple's fault if they rolled out a custom version of Mac OSX that had mail.app removed.
0 1 - just my two bits
1. DVD? Xine. It just works. CD/DVD writing? K3B -- even easier interface than Easy CD Creator for Windows.
2. Support groups? Try Gentoo. 1000's of users at http://forums.gentoo.org; I've yet to find a problem that searching the forums or asking didn't solve within 30 minutes.
3. Wine sucks. I appreciate what the Wine/WineX teams are trying to do, but the existence of those projects has, on many occasions, made companies decide to NOT port software to Linux, because it "mostly works" under Wine, and they don't even have to support it! Linux needs native ports, not an excuse for companies to not port.
4. Seen KDE 3.2 or some of the things in the GNOME 2.5 series? I've had total computer illiterates sit at my GNOME desktop and be able to navigate it easier than a Windows box.
5. Again, take a look at KDE 3.2 or GNOME; I choose to do things at the CLI because it's what I know best, but you really don't have to anymore for the most part.
6. I agree with this point, actually; something kinda like what you get if you hold down Option on a Mac; little icons for each bootable partition or something. I wonder how difficult such a thing would be to code...
7. Portage. End of dependency problems. =)
8. Umm...GNOME and KDE both have system trays with applets similar to what you're talking about...have you looked at a remotely modern Linux DE lately at all?
9. GNOME and KDE both come with a standard set of integrated applications for most everything normal users want....
So, um, yeah...I see one valid point out of those 9 of yours ^_^
And as an added bonus, Linux runs just geat on PPC, so Macs are also a good long-term solution for Linux heads.
Windows is at version XP, not 32.
We use Linux servers and MacOS-X desktops at work. I use WinXP to run my trading software (OptionVue and OmniTrader) and use a Mac for everything else. Each has their rightful place and I use them accordingly.
All this ranting and raving from you Microsoft, Linux and Apple disciples has gotten old.
Time to look for website where the readership isn't so hostile.
maybe what these zealots have been saying about bsd is true.. it's dead, and apple chose a dying horse to ride.
though apple has been a dying horse for a while now.
have to hand it to them for sticking in there for so long and trying to bend to new technologies, one of these days they may get it right before the last nail gets put in the coffin.
Google's numbers are at least coming from hard data, rather than some handwaving article. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Google's Zeitgeist is closer to the truth than the statement that 'Linux is currently overtaking Mac' in desktop installs.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Conratulations. You just spent $370 ($250 for a B&W G3, and $120 for OSX) on a server that could have been built for a third of that using x86 hardware of the same age and Linux/BSD.
The 3% that Apple has is the number of units sold in a quarter taken as an average. Apple's installed desktop base is (according to Forbes) closer to 10%.
Seeing as there are nearly a million new Macs sold every quarter, can Linux compare with that?
It's stupid anyway.
IF, and I do mean IF, Linux does well - fantastic!!!!
I'd love to be a Mac user in a market where there was 75% Microsoft, 20% Linux and 5% Mac. The very fact that a LOT of people had chosen Linux speaks volumes to me. And like it or not, Linux and Mac OS X are closer i terms of the things that really matter (sharing documents, working with Windows-only web pages, email viruses).
That means close to 10% of the desktops out there are running UNIX. Linux/Mac OS X, it's all good. It's UNIX, and That's a Good Thing (TM) :) There is plenty of room of both Linux and OS X. It's all good
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
There is an "Other" category, which accounts for 5%. I'm sure there are things like internet enabled PDA's in there, along with stuff like BSD, Amigas, and whatnot. But if I had to guess a lot of Linux users get counted as "Other".
Quite true..
1 17.82% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) .NET CLR 1 .NET CLR 1 .NET CLR 1.1.4
2 12.73% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;
3 5.68% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
4 3.45% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0;
5 3.14% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)
6 2.60% Mozilla/5.0 (Slurp/cat; slurp@inktomi.com; http://www.inktomi
7 2.38% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko
8 2.21% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko
9 2.01% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
10 1.95% Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4.1) Gecko/20031
11 1.65% Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.1; Linux)
12 1.49% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98;
13 1.37% Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/2003100
14 1.17% Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
15 0.95% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProd
Joke (because yes, I know what's affecting these stats): It's a good thing I use Linux myself and visit my own site regulary, otherwise I'm not sure I'd have any Linux user agents in this list.
I guarantee that Linux awareness is higher among Americans than among Sudanese.
I guarantee that Linux awareness is higher among Germans than among Americans.
I guarantee that Linux awareness is higher among people who use the Internet in their homes than among people who don't
I guarantee the Linux awareness is higher among people who use linux at work than among people who don't.
IDC's data had nothing to do with use. It had to do with units sold per quarter.
IDC data is what the original article was about.
1. Good DVD player & CD-RW that just work...
.conf files and rebooting, trying to see if it worked, doing some more .conf editing, rebooting, etc.
DVD player: mplayer, xine, videolan, just name a few.
CD writer: xcdroast, gtoaster, k3b, not counting commandline apps.
They either come with your distro, or are really easy to get. Apt-get, rpmfind.net, emerge, you name it.
Well, it's basically impossible to find a DVD program for Linux that will play commercial DVD movies legally. No problems with non-encrypted ones.
As for CD burning, I've just spent some time getting my CD burner working in Mandrake 9.2. I originally installed Mandrake with just a DVD drive, but I got my hands on a spare CD burner so I decided to throw it into my Mandrake Box. Then I had to spend quite a bit of time figuring out how to get scsi emulation going, which basically meant editing
Then I booted the computer into Windows, installed the freebie CD burning program that came with the drive, and had it going in Windows in just minutes.
On the other hand, I'm 99% sure that if I had the burner installed in the computer when I installed Mandrake it would of just worked.
Thank you for sharing the thoughts.
...). If sufficient status information is available at a glance, training needs/costs can be reduced significantly. So one-time cost of doing something boring (but somewhat necessary) work should be an advantage over training several users. If I go to a friend's place and want to know how the system is set up, I don't need to go through several commands to figure it out. (And your thought on reconfiguration with tray icons is an important one I failed to mention earlier).
The general lack of "sufficient feedback" is something of a problem on the GNU/Linux systems. The firewall status is just one instance of it. "Training in a business setting" brings up a whole set of intereting thoughts. Training is expensive (perhaps not so much in low wage places, but look at the trade off
From a program management perspective, perhaps the real issues may be the (lack of) strong focus on "user experience" and some strong (not authoritarian) personality to sheppard the project to see it through. This doesn't apply across the spectrum of GNU/Linux projects, but it does, for the stuff that has so far fallen through the cracks.
-srr
What's that? Mac is dead? Again?
Right. Like I've never heard *that* before!
The article is about Linux on the desktop, the headline of the submission was about Linux exceeding Mac on the desktop - and the first six thousand posts are about why Macs are better than Linux and Windows.
Here's the bottom line of the article:
Mac stay at 3% of the market. Linux climbs to at least twice that (and I suspect that is seriously lowballed by IDC given the rate of Linux evolution).
Apple eventually switches to running Linux.
The only reason Macs still exist is because Jobs put a sexy new case on them a few years ago, added a better OS and ramped up marketing. Otherwise Apples would be where Atari is now - gone.
The bottom line hasn't changed. A closed hardware architecture cannot compete with Intel in the marketplace and a proprietary OS (which doesn't have the dominate marketshare at the moment) cannot compete with Linux.
Everything else is trolls, religion, and flamebait.
Have a nice day.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
if only a post could get modded higher than 5...
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
Will this have any impact on Apple? If Linux's market share increases (especially on the desktop), will we see developers shifting to Linux from Apple? Could this be the end of Apple? Of course, I'm not talking about tomorrow--rather, I'm talking long term (say 5 years from now).
People have always speculated that the end of Apple will come from Windows. Right now, the enemy of Apple looks to be Linux.
Personally, I think the desktop (Linux) is still not ready. The desktop needs to be standardized (it looks like this is happening with the shift to Gnome), help system needs to be improved, package management has to be standardized (Red Hat RPM, Mandrake RPM, Debian DEB, old-school TARBALL), etc. However, Linux is getting there. So far, the office suite, internet tools (browser, ftp, irc), general graphics tools, etc are pretty good. But others still need work.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Apple is a HARDWARE company. People buy their hardware because it is so tied together with the OS and every part of it. Thus, if they decided to make the new mac on intel, they'd still have to develop their own hardware platform. They would NOT do the MS thing and let anyone license it for their homegrown boxes. It would kill everything they are about.
Buy a mac because it works better, longer, keeps its value longer, has many fewer problems and is run by the best complete OS out there.
Intel would be a downgrade at this point anyway. The G5s are incredible, and they are only getting better.
(from their website) : Note on methodlogy These results are based on 1,171 interviews of internet-using adults from the U.S. sampled from the SurveyComplete panel. The results were weighted where necessary to align them with the current online population on the following demographics: age, gender, ethnicity, education, and internet connection. With results based on a randomly chosen sample of this size (N=1,171), there is a 95% confidence rate that the results have a statistical precision of plus or minus 2.9% of what they would be if the entire adult online population of US households had been polled. The sample used for this study was not a random sample. While individuals were randomly sampled from SurveyComplete's panel for this survey, they had previously chosen to take part in the panel. Furthermore, all surveys or polls are subject to other sources of error which are probably of greater impact than these theoretical aspects of sampling error. These other significant sources of error include: question phrasing, question order, weighting of demographic data, and refusals to be interviewed (non-response error.) Quantifying the errors that may result from these additional factors would be impossible. It might actually be true - generally - for the US, but I'm certain differant results would be found here in Europe and the rest of the world.
sig under development
O_o
Man, if it's possible to run OS X on non-Apple PPC, totally hook me up with some links. I'm totally all about this from the geek factor- and possibly the economic standpoint as well.
Nice site, but you've got an embarrassing typo on the FP.
So basically "think different" means "you admire how we think so let us think for you"?
Heh. In the Microsoft world, the vendor pushes a monoculture. In the Apple world, the customers pull a monoculture. In Linux there is no monoculture--and that is why it will take over the world.
My Question is how many people out there switched from Linux to Mac? I know I did about 2 years ago and every PERL/PHP developers confrence I attend, more people are attending with iBooks/PowerBooks.
IE only websites have always been bad business. I work as a tech. consultant and I have always explained it this way: Yes 95% of the market uses IE, however 5% doesn't and if they can't view your site, that's 5% of potenital sales/clients you are losing.
What a lot of people don't understand about Macintosh is that Apple is a Niche player. People in Video Production, arts, and many that just want something that is easy to use with support for programs like MS Office, Adobe et al., Mactomedia, scanners and printers, email, and internet, buy macs. I have told more people that just check email, write letters, and don't want to worry about it buy a Mac even though its more expensive up front. Some did, othere said, "yeah but Dell is half is much", however I hear more bitching about viruses and crashes, and devices not worked from those that bought a PC.
Linux still has the problem of not having name branded applications. We use a lot of printing and publishing applications and Linux just isn't an option. We need programs like InDesign and QuarkXpress. Now I have had clients use Linux and OpenOffice for employees that just need office applications. Saves time and money since they don't have time wasters like solitare and an internet browser.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
just look at the Google Zeitgeist for evidence
Where can I buy an Other computer? They have 5% of the market. What OS do they run? Where are they located? I'm really keen on getting one.
I loved the SGI's I wish that someone would port that cool 3D game called BLIX (No not Hans Blix) to OSX or Linux. It had a really unique spherical world and the music it played was kind of creepy.
I miss that one.
This is your friendly neighborhood grammar nazi. I'm here to tell you that if you aren't smart enough to know when to write lose and when to write loose, your reader is not going to put much credence into what you're saying.
Yes, we know this is Slashdot. But that's hardly an excuse--it's not even a homonym; it's just plain bad spelling.
Dude ,
30 % of growth is not enuf..I think it should expand as much a spossible cuz once it remains the same , it means All the compettitors are not doing their best.Lets hope we grow up and thats it
Hello , this is my way.
Which way is yours ?
btw there is no right way
What a dumbfuck...
How do you count stuff that isn't sold? Bullshit baffles brains...
Oh well, what the hell...
Apple must have a fair amount of sales in Poland; they put some effort into their Polish web site. It's pretty nice! http://www.apple.com.pl/start/
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Note that the article doesn't make any claims about average people installing Linux on their computers, and it ony makes a claim that Linux adoption will be 6% in 2007. That's a long way from claiming that 2004 is The Year Of The Linux Desktop (imagine that in with the blink tag). That may not happen, but it's not absurd zealotry to predict that it will.
I do have to wonder where they got the idea that Linux is about to overtake Apple, though. Maybe they're counting servers, or counting every free Linux download.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
It Just Works(tm).
However, given that my two desktop machines are both nForce2 based, I take your point. I added Radeon 9200 video cards, which has helped both reliability and performance considerably, but Apple only makes hardware that dodgy for their portable audio players.
The other point is, the screen on the 1547 is a big letdown. 1024x768 is OK for wordprocessing but for anything seriously graphical it just sucks. Also, they keyboard seems to be wearing out fast and nobody knows anything about the (apparently, I've not dismembered the thing and looked) WinBond card-reader chip in it. TANSTAAFL, I guess.
On the bright side I get well over 3 hours out of a charge and it paid for itself (AUD$1860 inc GST, 2.4GHz 512MB 40GB) in less than two months in work I did on it when otherwise I would have been idle (on transport, waiting for appointments and similar, during a power blackout, etc).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Wow, you are pretty dumb.
Lots of browsers (Opera, Konqueror, Mozilla-and-derivatives) allow you to lie about your browser ID. Many people do, so stuff like internet banking works flawlessly for them where if they confessed to not using Exploder it would tll them to take a hike, unsupported browser, yadda yadda. While many browsers allow you to configure this per-site (Konqueror, for example), many of the people who bother to white-lie about their browser at all just set it globally. Which of course completely buggers up the statistics.
What we need is a RealUserAgent HTTP header, which lists the browser's real name first, then the browsers it emulates (with version number ranges), which would allow people coding for specific versions to fairly easily decide how to accomodate a new one. I'd also like to see the Accept headers expanded to include stuff like Flash and Java, along with some way of indicating that you can't or won't add a particular capability (or any capability) - or in other words, "no, I don't want to be redirected to a Macromedia download once for every Flash object on the page".
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
1) CDRW -- I use K3B www.k3b.org and I like it - pretty much works out of the box on Mandrake.
DVD -- I use Xine Linux Distro Makers don't package the DVD files because of legal concerns with the library needed to decode encrypted DVDs.. This is a two step setup process on my system.
2) http://www.pclinuxonline.com is where I get my info.
3) Amen to that....
4) Possibly - I am not new it this so I can't say. KDE defaults seem mostly ok though.
6) Don't know Lilo on my machine seems pretty simple. Could be right
7) also a little smarter - by default not show libraries - development packages etc... allow users to select optional dependencies for extra functionality.
8)I sure there is something out there that does this.
9) I am sure this will happen when there apps which are mature enough to stand on there own.
I can only speak about the designers I know (been in the business since 69 so I know quite a few). A relatively small percentage would screw around with tweaking/customizing. In fact almost 100% run with a standard, gray desktop. They don't want anything to compete with what they are working on.
Designers are heavy computer users, they make their living cranking stuff out. Tinkering with OS settings/options is generally not high on their list.
Relatively few designers I know are also geeks. Geeks tweak.
Missing the point my friend, but then so did the poster. Nothing is said about Apple loosing ground.
If anything, Apple will gain ground along with Linux, because Linux shows that alternatives are OK, and that heterogenous shops work just fine. Also, Apple is at heart not that much different from Linux anymore, being a flavor of FreeBSD.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Loki just came too soon, before linux on the desktop took off. Now Linux is on the desktop, we need to sell games. Yes people will pay for an open source MMORPG, 10 bucks a month.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
Things are worth as much as people will pay for them. Consumers are the ones that deem a monetary value on something.
I can name instances in which all those items cost something.
I love that you use the word forced to talk about pre-installed Windows, but then put quotes around it when talking about pre-installed Linux.
I thought the point of Linux was choice. "Forcing" someone to use Linux will just frustrate them when they go over and see what their buddy is doing in Windows XP/OS X.
People know who Apple is. They know what a Mac is. It's like how everyone knows Netscape even though few use them anymore.
Apple maintains an up-to-date running x86 port of Darwin. The day their marketshare dips too low for them to stay alive, they'll release OS X for x86. It's their last card, and you know they'll always keep it in their deck. So, I'm not worried about Apple, and Apple isn't worried--they know they always have that last trick up their sleeve that would automatically throw them into the game big-time.
OS X would blow the doors off of Windows if it came out for x86.
states at least.
I know plenty of folks in Europe that run MCAD on various UNIX platforms.
In the last three years, I have not gained a single new UNIX customer. Every last one of them has been win32.
Over here the PDM move really is being pushed hard. Companies want to get hold of the product design process and manage all of it. Intergration is seen as a way to pack more tasks into an engineers day, along with the increased ability to leverage that data throughout the enterprise.
Actually, I agree with these things in principle, but win32 is the platform being pushed hard by the MCAD companies. In the last 5 years, the market has gone from features to price.
Exising UNIX customers are all planning win32 migrations, though some of their timelines are a few years off yet.
Here in America, every new product demonstration you see is on a win32 platform. Many pre-sales folks have forgotten UNIX even is an option. Nobody will mention it, unless the customer requests it.
Blogging because I can...
I place the blame squarely on spell check and autocomplete, both of which are missing on /.
Oh well, on a forum like this, content is king.
BTW, the GW thing is low indeed. I want *no* association with that guy at all.
Blogging because I can...
It is all one 32 bit mess; thus, win32.
If the various versions could actually be differentiated in some realistic way, I might actually consider using a more precise nomenclature.
Truth is, it all sucks and I would rather not give more brand recognition than strictly needed for conversation.
So, win32 it is.
Get a life, an account, and maybe I might consider the issue a bit further.
As far as I am concerned, you are a pimply faced, trailer trash, cocksucker, geek wannabe with no life. Anonymous no fucking backbone limpdick coward, grow the fuck up and get a life.
Blogging because I can...
new CAD.
Doing this for older 2D systems seems almost doable. We might actually get somewhere with surface modelers and some solids as well.
Problem is in all the kernel tweaking and geometry case handling the existing programs have developed.
It is not easy to program for all the different geometry cases people expect programs to handle these days. One could get a pretty good kernel, but it would have to be licensed. Once that is done, building constraint engines for parametrics is damn tough.
The number of man years invested in current CAD programs is not an easy thing to match. I would *love* to see a realistic MCAD program that is GPL or licensed reasonably, but that is not likely to happen anytime soon.
Ports would be a better idea for development reasons, plus people have lots of legacy data to deal with. If they must maintain their old system, it will likely be done on win32.
As long as that is the case, moving to Linux is going to be a tough sell.
The good news is that most of the better backend PDM packages, will run on Linux, or at least on a UNIX. Getting EDS, Dassaut (sp?) to port would be a big start. Getting one of the popular midrange systems ported would be even better.
If we can get that, the back-end integration (hope I got that one right!) is an easier task.
Blogging because I can...
I run I-deas on SGI IRIX, most of the time. That particular MCAD package really runs well in that configuration.
For MCAD, the primary things necessary for good performance these days is simply CPU and RAM. Most inexpensive graphics sub-systems will do what people need.
Too many people know this. Once you realize what MCAD really needs, the price difference between a PC and Sun workstations is significant when a number of users is a part of the equation.
This next bit is specific to I-deas, but could work for other packages as well.
I-deas has its own data manager built into the system. All users check-in, check-out data from a central data repository that is isolated from the users via UNIX suid function. (On win32, this is broken and users can directly see the files.)
Hosting a package like this on a multi-CPU machine can yield costs approaching PC prices, with some added advantages:
- centralized administration. Everything is on one box, data + code.
- high thoughtput between CAD and the Data Manager because everyting is on local disks. No network issues to deal with.
I setup a couple of these using SGI systems for the CAD, and X window software on the local PC machines. Used Samba to share home directories, so users can easily get output into their Microsoft stuff.
The whole thing works pretty well actually. Funny calling the support line though. The company has actually gotten so win32-centric they often get confused when I explain the setup. The assumption is one, user, one machine, one display. Anything else gets painful.
Anyway, the setup has one other nice attribute for those wanting to provide controlled access to data without actually letting the user have full interaction with said data.
UNIX can do this with the X window system and SUID. User runs the application, from whatever system they want, including Linux. The application then accesses data they do not have direct permission to access themselves. User can do only what the application lets them do. Pretty sweet actually, once you consider the mess the current Office 2003 DRM scheme is turning out to be.
One other advantage of this setup is that it does provide for a Linux desktop without having to port the application. To date, many people have been interested, Microsoft Office gets in the way of that... Maybe in time.
It is sad to see a user with a powerful machine waiting on a CAD application hogging a single user OS and display. Many users, who started using CAD on UNIX, know what they are missing. These days, in the States anyway, they have no idea. Waiting on the computer, or having to futz with it often is seen as the norm.
Morons.
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CD-RW burner software now comes with nearly all distributions. From the command line there's cdrecord and mkiso, for the GUI there's xcdroast and k3b. DVD playing of most DVDs, due to the encoding being illegal to distribute without royalties and NDAs, is difficult to get for Linux without knowing what to look for - but that's an effect of the American legal system rather than Linux's fault.
Make friends at your local LUG (Linux User's group), and of course there's plenty of mailing lists, news groups, and IRC channels to go to.
"ls" isn't much less cryptic than "dir", and is much more powerful. Togeather the Unix toolset is one of the most useful and powerful set of tools available, in spite of it's slightly greater crypticness than the DOS shell. Windows users are used to a shell environment that has very few features, so they tend to think that if Unix stresses the CLI it's stressing a less useful environment than the typical GUI. I reccomend you get a book, such as O'Reilly's "UNIX Power Tools", and learn the power of the force. ;-)
Red Hat has an easy to use GUI for configuring GRUB now. grub is really not hard to configure though, it's menu file is pretty clear and easier and less fragile than lilo. Check out the grub tutorial on IBM Developerworks
Kiddies with their emerge, their apt-get, and their urpmi... installpkg 0wnz j00.
(Sorry, I'm a Slackware user - and I find talk of dependency problems amusing; our solution to that problem is not to have brain-dead dependency checking in the first place. It actually works smoothly most of the time.)
KDE has a network connection icon I think, kinternet, though I think it only works for dialup. For the firewall all you need is the command line and "iptables -L". For overall status you might want to check out gkrellm, it's a pretty-looking graphical display of CPU usage, memory, disk activity, network activity, and more if you get additional plugins for it. Maybe that would interest you...
I find a full Slackware install to be a happy medium between bloat and bare-bones install. Of course, you probably wouldn't like Slackware because it has no additional GUI tools. Probably SuSE, Mandrake, or Red Hat/Fedora would be more your speed; or maybe Xandros or Lycoris if those are too hard. (I don't reccomend Lindows to anyone.)
You can get it today. It is called "Wildfire". Honestly, PTC has one of the best approaches to their software development out there. They are cross-platform in a way that most other systems are not. Good for Linux.
The bad news? PTC has been hit hard these days. They spent the better part of the early 90s selling expensive software through an aggressive sales channel that has managed to piss off just about everyone who might ever be interested in their software.
Their need for high yearly costs, and constant pressure to upsell software features has made a negative impression overall regarding business with PTC.
Worse, they are in the middle of updating their (old, but fast and functional) user interface to look more like the win32 packages many people use today.
The ease of use arguement is more powerful than it should be in MCAD circles. (Again in the States at least.) Somehow, people seem to expect to do complex things easily. Putting a nice braindead GUI on top of powerful software seems to make people think they are getting something more for their money.
It is scary how much this wasted effort looks like the same command line vs GUI discussions seen here all the time.
The best approach has always been a nice mix of both. You want to make easy things easy, but continue to make impossible things possible.
This latest effort by PTC to blend in with the win32 way of doing things, has slowed down an otherwise fast and capable program. Most users have tried the upgrade and went back to a prior release.
Take a hard look at PTCs quartely numbers. Traditionally, they depend on upgrade and yearly contract revenue for a large percentage of their business. (Almost all the bigger MCAD companies do this.) Creative accounting changes upgrades into new license revenue, but if you look closely, you will find they are getting very few new customers.
They spend much of their time upselling the ones they have. Over the years, these things have come to a head. Today, they have sold most folks as much of their software as they want. The new version does not appeal to a large percentage of their customer base. Their reputation for doing hardnosed business keeps that same version from growing marketshare for them.
PTC is likely fucked.
I did run the Linux version. It worked the same as both win32 and commercial UNIX versions did. You won't ever see them demo it though. Every last one of their sales people runs their software on a win32 laptop. Customers have to ask for the Linux version. PTC has enough sales problems without having to also address OS issues in addition to their own.
What we need is ports from other vendors. As much as I dislike SolidWorks, they would be a great choice. However, they are literally married to Microsoft. Won't happen anytime soon. Perhaps other packages might.
It is really a chicken an egg thing, as my first post indicated. Nobody sees Linux and MCAD demonstrated, marketed, or pushed as a value solution, even though price is a clear consideration these days. Worse, the companies I have spoken to (and I have personally talked with product managers for quite a few) see support as a major barrier along with the cost of porting.
They claim they do not see customer demand because all they see is lots of win32 sales numbers and sharply reduced UNIX sales numbers. They don't really grok OSS at all.
They see it as a cheap UNIX that runs on a PC. They see the number of versions and wonder what to write to. They see the lack of control over what the user can and cannot do as a support liability.
All of these things are really a non issue, if they would just port to RH, for example, those of us wanting to do our own thing would be free to do so. (They don't understand that.)
As much as I want this to happen, there are major issues to be worked out at the product manager and marketing levels, of these MCAD vendors, before anything realistic is going to ha
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I am going to start tinkering with that. I have access to a number of packages as well.
Architectural work is significantly different from MCAD however. I realize you can use MCAD packages, often to great advantage, for this line of work, but the reverse is not true at all.
MCAD is often complex at the part level. The parametric trend, made popular by PTC, involves a high degree of automation for part, drawing and assembly creation. The level of detail required for project output is significantly different.
In my area of the company, MCAD people are a very picky bunch. Just small changes in the formatting of something causes a lot of grief. Many of them have built libraries of parametric parts they leverage to create derivative designs more quickly.
I have not seen anything running on the Mac that can approach the level of parametric design possible on PC or UNIX programs. Sad too, because the Mac is a damn good machine for this these days.
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for something else.
It does not run on any UNIX. They leverage the MFC heavy throughout the program. Early on, their business model was all about packaging technology, not rolling their own. Solidworks makes use of the parasolid kernel, D-cubed constraint engine, and many of the win32 application development features; such as, OLE, visual basic for applications. Their API is exposed the typical Microsoft way.
The package actually requires Microsoft Office to achieve full functionality in many areas. Excel is used for family part tables and such. BTW, this sucks because you end up with a bunch of data linked via OLE. Shaky long-term proposition given the rapid changes that have happened over the last 5 years or so.
Bringing old models up on newer version of both SW and Office often fails...
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I suspect that's mostly mobile phones, Palms, Pocket PCs, etc. Mobile phones running Symbian are getting pretty popular, and PDAs are reasonably popular among some population segments. Then, of course, there's a small number of systems running OSes like BSD, UNIX, VMS, etc., but I doubt they're very significant next to mobiles and PDAs.
If you add up a lot of sub-1% figures, it's actually pretty easy to get up to 5%.
Today I will be replacing my dad's aged Apple Performa 6215CD Macintosh with a shiny 'new' Pentium II running Debian Woody, KDE 3.2 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.
I spent a little time cleaning up KDE's "K" menu, and installing some fun apps for him (but not TOO much clutter; esp. since the thing's only got a ~2GB hard disk). I'm fairly confident he'll find it quite a nice upgrade, and at least as usable and useful as his old Mac!
My dad's in his mid-late 60s, BTW...
I speak of Apple, just like the parent poster did.
The general lack of "sufficient feedback" is something of a problem on the GNU/Linux systems. The firewall status is just one instance of it.
Interesting take. My point was that feedback about firewall status is not insufficient, and the perceived need for it only arises because users have been previously trained to expect it in a Windows environment.
Thus, the issue is one of *perceived* lack of sufficient feedback which really boils down to "this isn't the same as Windows" rather than "Windows does it right and this does not".
IMO, Windows is much worse in terms of telling me what I need to know about my system status than Linux is. For example, CPU load, memory usage and network traffic are far more important bits of information to see in the system tray, but a stock Windows install (I speak of Win2K, having never used XP) gives me only CPU load, and the process I have to go through to get that display is non-obvious.
Of course, I can run the system monitor on Windows to get all of the information I want, but that only runs in a window, so it's always in the way. And there are third-party add-ons that I can find and download to give me the information I want in the systray.
So, to repeat my point, in many cases the problem is not that the Linux environment is inadequate, it's just that it's *different*. And, IMO, better (referring to KDE).
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Yes I do. I am a very outspoken advocate for OSS. I use it all the time. It makes good sense for all the reasons we know.
The picture I just painted is the very truth heard from inside engineering software firms over the last 3 years.
I am not sure the picture is that bleak for all markets, but it sure is for engineering software.
Good call on the ease of use thing. Analysis is one area where people seem to understand the value proposition presented by powerful software.
Too bad more MCAD users don't understand those very same things.
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I do not think companies switching to Linux do it for the elegance of the solution. But instead for economic reasons.
It is an evolutionary step coming from Windows to move to Linux. It's cheaper just keeping the same hardware.
To switch to Mac OS X is revolutionary.
These companies do not need G5 power. They will not dump their hardware investments immediately so they evolve. But for the next hardware buying cycle Apple should be prepared to gain market share by offering a $400 computer just for business use.
Then companies making the switch from Windows can maximize the value out of their investment.
Don't sell the games, sell the support. How? MMORPGs, 10 bucks a month for the game server and community.
People don't exist to serve systems, systems exist to serve people.
I am more into the SGI side of things, but I understand what you are saying.
Workstation class graphics cards are *accurate* in the little details. I feel the same way about my O2 and Indigo2.
With regard to vendor supported configurations, you would be surprised at the number of people that do the cheap card anyway because its cheaper.
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Linux + Naivete + Misinformed Management Decisions = Hidden Costs
The Linux culture, like other UNIX culture of the past, is a fractured culture.
An employee base that isn't systematically trained and inevitably turns-over will perpetually be on hand to misconfigure Linux systems.
The same misinformed corporate management class are now exchanging the Microsoft monoculture with the Linux monoculture.
You can see what a mistake it is eliminating diversity every day you receive a myDoom payload in your e-mail.
You can also see that Apple's strategy saves money for the manager who choses wisely in these recent articles...
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/top_news_item.cfm?http://www.mi2g.net/cgi/mi2g/press/190204_2.php
The MacWorld article is worth quoting:
Company executive chairman DK Matai said: "The swift adoption of Linux last year within the online government and non-government server community, coupled with inadequate training and knowledge on how to keep that environment secure when running vulnerable third party applications, has contributed to a consistently higher proportion of compromised Linux servers. Migration to Open Source can be fool's gold without adequate training and understanding of the impact that third party applications have on overall safety and security."