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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!"
... 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.
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
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!