Slashdot Mirror
2004: Year of the Penguin?
houseofmore writes "The Toronto star suggests that things are looking good for the Linux desktop this year as more heavy weight commercial vendors get behind it, including HP, Novell, IBM, Sun and... Walmart. It also mentions Red Hat's plan to offer a new corporate desktop edition of their enterprise desktop sometime this year. The article states that more and more companies are considering (and) switching to Linux for their desktop due to expensive Windows licensing fees and high-profile security vulnerabilities."
- one of the big vendors decide to publicly ship a consumer desktop machine with a GNU/Linux install (or even a dual install), will I start to think that the challenge is on.
Don't we hear this every year?
Other small companies can do this and do it now.
Drop a few hints to your local MS vendor that you're thinking about switching to Linux to make them drop their costs on licensing fees.
Trust me, it's so wonderful to take an MS vendor to lunch, sing the praises of Linux the whole time, then take them to a room near your computer room and point out the two shiny new mailservers that are blank and say you're debating about the TCO of Linux versus Exchange.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
If IBM is doing so much for Linux (inc. their ad campagin with the little dude a while back) why can't you buy one of their laptops with Linux preinstalled?
Training guy: Remember that white plane Word had were you typed your text?
........
Luser: Yeah...
Training guy: Your new word processor also has it...
Luser:
Training guy: You know how you used 'open' and 'save' and 'print' in that 'file' menu in the top of the window?
Luser: Yeah....
Training guy: Good, keep doing that.
Luser: Ok....
Training guy: Remember how above the white plane you could select the font and its size? And whit those funny buttons with italic and bold text you could make the text in the white plane turn to italic and bold?
Luser: Uhuh...
Training guy: Great! NEXT!
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
From what I've seen so far, there are only two possible desktops for the average user:
1. SuSE
2. Java Desktop System (SuSE based)
I haven't had a chance to try Xandros, so that may be a competitor as well. The biggest problem is that the Linux developers have to get off their high horse and make binary distribution as easy as source distribution. SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, etc. are all Linux, but all need different RPM files. And then some RPMs may not match the version of libc/glibc you use.
What's the standard solution? "Just recompile it."
That is *not* acceptable for the average end user. Take a look at Mac OS X. They got it right. You download the DMG, it mounts as a folder, you copy the "program" (really a folder that the OS makes look like a file) to your Applications directory. Done.
Linux OTOH, goes like this: Find the RPM you want. Try to install and get a list of dependencies. Go track down every dependency you need (because you should already have libart_gpl and libtheora, right?!) and then install the dependencies. After spending and hour or two just to install one piece of software, log out and log back in so the menus update. Then try to run the software and hope that you didn't accidently install an incompatible binary. ARRRGGGHHH!!!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Personally, having tried Xandros/1.0 and now using Xandros/2.0 it's clear that Windows has real competition.
No doubt this comment will be targetted by the increasing number of moderators who appear to be Windows admirers, but I have enough karma for a whole barbeque, so here goes with a list of the ten reasons why Linux is destined to overtake Windows in 2004 (or 2005, or 2006, etc.)
- Windows is expensive, Linux is free
- Distros like Xandros "just work"
- Linux is secure from worms, trojans, viruses
- Linux runs on modest hardware
- Linux is less complex and thus more stable
- Linux has a "cool" factor missing from Windows
- The IT world's view of Microsoft as "evil" is percolating down to the general public
- Linux now comes with a sufficient set of applications for most common purposes
- Linux applications are more stable and simpler than Windows' ones
And lastly: more and more institutions will choose Linux as they discover the advantages of it, leading to consumer uptake as people "stay compatible" with their work PCs.
From a 3% marketshare this seems unbelievable. And yet this is how markets work: the "tipping" often happens way before the 20% mark, but once it starts, it's unstoppable.
At the very least, 2004 was the year in which people seriously started to wonder "when" and not "whether" Linux would become the de-facto OS standard for all computing, including the desktop.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
GNU/Linux is in it for the long haul. MS Windows flashes on the media's screen with a new release and fades away. GNU/Linux is growing bigger and stronger everyday. As that happens more and more companies will port their wares, more hardware venders will supply GNU/Linux instead of MS Windows, more users will leave MS Windows (most likely because they're tired of the upgrade costs for both hard and software related to the upgrade), and someday MS Windows will be a "niche" OS.
Think about it like Apple. They make an excellent OS which includes some great apps, overall better than average desktop and small server hardware, is clearly better than MS Windows but still isn't "number one". Is this a bad thing: no. Apple will be around for a long time building their stuff reguardless of their marketshare. IMO this is the fate for MS Windows (except for the quality part of course).
Forget about this "Year of the Penguin" stuff because no one year will be it's "year". GNU/Linux is here to stay, grow and get better.
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
There is never going to be one single year of linux, It will have to slowly and steadly erode in to M$ territory.
Funny that you never see articles about this, but it's the truth. I would go so far as to say that growing Linux marketshare is inevitable going down the line. Why? Because Linux is not subject to the same market forces that cause Microsoft to ignore bugs while building ridiculous and ill-advised features that simply look good in a power point. While Microsoft struggles to please shareholders, Linux is plodding along fixing bugs and steadily increasing the value of the platform.
Tech news is dominated by financials, and Linux has oodles of economic potential, but to look at Linux in those terms is so shortsighted. Linux is true progress in the sense that its advances can never be expunged as we have seen happen time and time again with proprietary software. Once Linux reaches a critical point, there will be no financial incentive to develop a separate OS. At most, companies will customize Linux, but in general commercial development will shift to the application layer where it belongs, and we can look forward to renewed competition in the software industry, only this time on a much more solid base.
Of course there's no telling how long all this could take...
But the average person doesn't tinker under the hood of their car much, or at all. (Heck, most people don't even change their own oil these days.) They just want a product that works with little to no detailed knowledge of what's actually going on, and rely on support (mechanics, JiffyLube, whatever) for keeping the thing working properly.
Same for operating systems -- most users aren't going to want to spend the time or energy learning how to maintain their own system. Linux "for the masses" will require a system that can be maintained with a minimum amount of effort from the end user. In a corporate setting, this is less important because those machines would be administered by IT specialists, but in a personal/home setting, self-maintaining systems are a must.
I can just see the rollouts now. Linux on every local desktop, local passwd, group, apps, complexity rising exponentially, security, performance and reliability decreasing in response.
While Windows can be an insecure mess, it's nothing compared to just how messy Unix systems can become.
With Unix, the least efficient use of the hardware is to put a single instance of many different applications on to lots of different machines.
Say a Unix app consumes 20Mb of RAM, 80% -> 90% of that memory is shareable; shared libraries, program text and the like. So *conservatively* 2 people can run the application on a machine and it only takes 24Mb of RAM, not 40Mb of RAM, 3 people it uses 28Mb, not 60Mb and so on. On top of this, the application is already loaded, it doesn't have to be read from disk again each time it's started. The filesystem buffers are already pre-loaded, the CPU caches have a significantly better hit rate than if there are a dozen different apps running.
Unix(and Linux) is *not* Windows, there's an entirely different system architecture which should really be considered before just wiping Windows on each desktop and replacing it with Linux.
Of course there's a great opportunity for people who know.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.