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Linux vs. Windows
An anonymous reader writes "Technology Review has a great article discussing how pretty, user-friendly Linux desktops, cheap machines sold at stores such as Wal-Mart, and the growth of useful free software like Open Office have made Linux a 'key business risk' for our friends in Redmond. The story notes that Linux's market share for desktop computers has already surpassed Apple's. Says the Open Source Initiative's Eric Raymond, 'The sinister plan for world domination is right on schedule.' All right!"
Yeah, well, this wonderful service they provide (cheap GNU/Linux boxes) may be great for all you Americans - but it ain't gonna take off in the same way throughout the rest of the World without a similar rock-bottom outlet doing the same. ( /me mourns living in rip-off UK)
... the projected 6% desktop share is Linux helping new users reach out to computing, or if it is biting into Microsoft's market share. It will obviously be a little of both, but I wonder what the breakdown is.
Software giant! (a la Crocodile Dundee). As I have pointed out 21.6 times, Wal-Mart will kill any and all competitors because of their immense size, discount ability, and general acceptance by the population. Microsoft may be a big software company, but Wal-Mart is #1 on the Fortune 500 for a reason!
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As much as the 'softies love to downplay the significance of the Linux desktop, and dismiss it publicly as insignificant, irrelevant, and unfeasible ... inside the walls of Redmond, they absolutely take it seriously. They know it is a serious long-term threat to their core sources of revenue, and being the financially wealthy but morally bankrupt bunch of criminals that they are, will stop at nothing to kill it.
And here's why. In 1998, anyone running a Linux desktop was a true geek. But every year brings changes, improvements, leaps in usability and application availability. Ask a marketing weasel what this means and they'll tell you that the value proposition of desktop Linux is slowly but continuously improving. Add in the economics and they'll tell you that eventually that value proposition will become too high to ignore.
Remember: there was a time when the PC itself was considered unfeasible. There was just too much momentum behind IBM's mainframes to ever unseat the venerable 3270 terminal from the business desktops of the world. How many of you are viewing Slashdot from a 3270 right now?
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You don't have a clue, do you? Linspire is a COMPETITOR to Windows. Therefore, they need to offer the same kind of features. Do you really think MS would have made WinXP half as good as it is if not for Linux? If Linux didn't exist, we would still be using WinME and complaining about BSODs.
Once again, rumours of Apple's demise are greatly exaggerated.
This story from Wired basically claims that the PCs that are sold with Linux that are driving up the percentage are immediately being wiped and reinstalled with a pirated version of Windows. According to Google's stats, only about 1% of searches are done from Linux machines, compared with about 3% for Macs.
Rearding this:
... there is a bit of truth in every joke. He is not fully joking here.
Says the Open Source Initiative's Eric Raymond, 'The sinister plan for world domination is right on schedule.' All right!"
Simpy
People keep saying that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, and they use examples of various ages of housebound women as examples of why.
Well, since Red Hat 8, the first distro where I called and encouraged all of the people (including women) in my life to try Linux, the following people have installed and begun to use Linux instead of Windows, and they all did it without my handholding, in all but one case surprising me with a "guess what I just installed!" phone call:
- My three sisters
- My mother
- My father
- My best friend
- His girlfriend
- My cousin
None of them are computer professionals. Most of them weren't even computer "geeks" at all and had just complained enough to me about Windows 95/98/ME/2000 (none of them had XP, it's true, AFAIK) that I thought they might like a change. The first time I had seen Red Hat 8, I pretty much decided it was time for Linux+desktop. A couple of them are still running Red Hat 8, but my mom and sisters have actually run the "upgrades" (i.e. downloading and burning the next version, then running the "upgrade" install on it).
Red Hat 8-9 and Fedora Core 1-2 have very nice, clean, graphical, "click Next a lot" installers/updaters and autodetect pretty much every piece of hardware. Nearly all of the system services can be configured using their desktop tools in the GNOME menu, including things like print queues, wireless cards, modems, and other things that desktop users might want. These aren't IBM or Compaq PCs for the most part either, they're just white box PCs (there is one thinkpad in the group). One of my sisters even uses her Olympus digital camera with gphoto or some such application (I'm not even familiar with gphoto, I just mount a CF card in a card reader, but she found something in the menu that said "Digital Camera" or something like that and away she went...) to sell stuff on eBay.
With the state of the Linux desktop right now, they can listen to and burn CDs without needing to read anything or even launch an application, they can browse the Web, use OpenOffice to write stuff (they all set up their own printers, with one exception). The couple that have installed software from RPMs haven't had any trouble, they just downloaded the software to their home directories and double-clicked on it.
Linux isn't ready for the desktop? Maybe for some values of desktop. But for peope who just want:
- Web/Email
- Word Processing/Spreadsheet/Presentations
- Printing
- Music
- Burning CDs
- Solitaire
it's there and it's been there for a long time already.
Oh, there has been one question, and it is a place where Red Hat's GNOME desktop falls over: every one of these people did end up calling me at some point and asking how to access their floppy. I don't know why Red Hat ships a KDE desktop that has a floppy drive icon, but doesn't do the same with their GNOME desktop?!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Over the last three years, the fraction of home and office PCs powered by Linux has roughly doubled, to almost 3 percent, and it's set to double again before the end of 2005, according to market research firm IDC.
I don't think Linux can compete directly with Microsoft. Their mindshare and marketing is too powerful. Where I see the opportunity to win is through the second PC.
Many households are starting to buy more than one computer. If Linux came pre-installed and configured with Samba (to share and store files for the entire house) and streaming software to stream audio and video, then Joe Consumer could start relying on Linux to hold what's most important - their data.
Maybe consumers won't see Linux as a front-line PC for awhile, but the super-reliable machine in the background storing all their save game data, their music collections and their work files will sneak its way into homes just like Linux snuck in to the datacenter. When Jane Doe is pulling her hair out because Windows needs 14 hours of download time to get it OS updates, anti-virus and anti-Spam signatures after being rendered unusable from the latest virus, the realization that reliability is ultimately more important than compatibility will finally dawn. "Hey, this Linux computer is still working. I'll get my report done on that machine"
Of course once that happens, then more people will buy Linux machines. Then there will be a growing demand for native software. Linux compatibility will finally be addressed, because there will now be a market to sell games, applications and other stuff for Linux.
Hopefully Billy Gates and his cohorts have a good supply of Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride. They're going to be losing a lot of sleep in the next few years.
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Not really, most of the "choir" here are repeating the same FUD over and over, or are basing opinions of linux on their experience with redhat 3.1 or Slackware 2.5 back in the early 90's.
Mandrake 10.0 surpasses windows XP massively on the ease of install. I just did a demonstration of this to a group of techs here we are training to roll out our linux support at the help desk.
I showed them a bare install of Mandrake 10.0 and then did a bare install of XP on identical hardware.
Mandrake was ready to use and on the net at first reboot. XP I needed to go and download ATI radeon drivers, sound drivers for the on-board sound chipset, Drivers for the ethernet chipset, and Drivers for the IDE chipset before it was useable.
It completely floored every tech there, (These are tier 3 techs) By the end of the class we were asked by over 60% of the attendees if they could get a copy of Mandrake.
Linux is making insane inroads, is getting easier and better every single day. Windows has had no changes to it for over 2 years now.
It's more of a "wake up and look" kind of article. linux is starting to overtake faster, but very quietly... and because of that a large number of people, even people that are "in the know" are getting caught off-guard.
hell the local College IT classes we held a broadband talk for, the Professor told his class, "ignore the linux part of the talk, as linux is not in seroius use anywhere."
needless to say, I changed our speech to start with, "linux is used in many fortune 500 corperations today, some completely rely on it like Chrysler, AutoZone and IBM......." It really pissed off the un-informed professor.
but this is what is reality today, the "professionals" do not know what is happening... therefore this "circle jerk" as you put it is very important.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
World domination by Microsoft is a terrifying thought. World domination by Linux and Open Source is just self-depreciating humor. A world where Linux dominates is a world where nobody dominates, because everyone who thinks there is a market for something different can just take everything that's been done so far and run with it.
Marketshare is important, even to those who rightfully say that it's not an indicator of quality. It means that hardware manufacturers are more likely to write drivers, that applications are more likely to get Linux ports and interoperate with open file formats. It's all good.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The whole point of this is freedom. If the same freedom isn't available to WalMart, what good is it?
What's amusing about your post, is that you depict the road to open source as being like the road from communism to capitalism. If you really look at the organization of the open source community, you'll see that it follows a more communal approach than a capitalistic one.
Sure, there is the label of "hacker" that people want, that is... ESR's "hacker," and not Time-Life's "hacker," but there's more of a "you have your job, I have mine, we make this work together" feel instead of "I pay you for this, I pay you more for this specialized thing." The "capitalistic" approach is more of the MS way of doing things, where they promote severe competition even amongst their own employees.
I'm not really promoting communism as a governmental type, though. It's an ideal system that will never work in this un-ideal world.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
What's amusing about your post, is that you depict the road to open source as being like the road from communism to capitalism. If you really look at the organization of the open source community, you'll see that it follows a more communal approach than a capitalistic one.
When I look at Soviet Communism, what I see is a monolithic culture where the state, in almost feudal fashion, ran everything. Communism, I think, *has* worked for limited times in limited places for the same reason that other dictatorial state-control based systems have worked, particularly for certain types of unpopular but necessary infrastructure development. However, at a certain point, state control breaks down. I think that this is to a large extent what Marx was talking about in the progression from Feudalism to Capitalism. So Soviet Communism is merely Feudalism backed by Marxist propaganda. Socialism is of course just capitalism with some additional wealth redistribution.
The move to capitalism from either of these state-controled systems involves the decentralization of control. This decentralization allows for greater economic agility, provided that the required infrastructure is available.
So to, when you move from corporate control to ad-hoc social network control (even if at the center is a corporation or foundation, the network as a whole is still the primary influence on the development of the project), we should see the same trend-- the movement from a concrete control structure toward one which is more abstract and agile.
This approach to production more closely resembles (Marxist) psychologist Wilhelm Reich's concept or "Work Democracy" than it does Soviet Communism. But what exists today to make this possible (but did not exist in Reich's day) is the existance of inexpensive, ripid worldwide communication. This is what fundamentally makes this possible.
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