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Dvorak on How Microsoft Can Kill Linux

Posted by Zonk on from the i-miss-silicon-spin dept.

gewg_ writes "John C. Dvorak thinks he knows the way Redmond can kill Linux. Basing his premise on the relative dearth of device drivers available for Linux (compared to what is available for Windows), he sees an opportunity for the Borg to embrace and extinguish." From the article: "The immediate usefulness of Linux running under Windows is obvious. You can use all the Windows drivers for all the peripherals that don't run under Linux. Drivers have always been an issue with Linux as PC users have gotten spoiled with Windows driver support. Today's user wants to grab just about anything and not worry about installing it and making it work."

3 of 842 comments (clear)

  1. What would MS-linux have I can't get from by georgeha · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Cygwin or MS Services for Unix?

    Plus, there are quite a few hardware devices that work in Linux and not all versions of Windows, for instance my Kensington SVGA webcam, fine in Linux, not available in Win2k.

  2. RTFA - nothing to see here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Okay, BFOTO (blinding flash of the obvious):
    If MS developed an "MS Linux" as described, it would be one of many distributions. Even if it became "the dominant" one (the only good use for which would be to use the Windows drivers for devices Linux lacks driver support for), then stops supporting drivers for their own flavor of Linux... ummm... hmmm... what would happen? Oh -
    Dvorak suggests that this somehow magically kills *all* of the different flavors of Linux. (Not *nix, he mentions only Linux).
    He also alludes to some heretofore unknown, undiscovered-but-for-M$-lawyers hole in the GPL that would somehow allow M$ to pry Linux from the hands of the community into its control.
    I RTFA'd twice, but John, you lost me on this. I can only guess you were looking for more hits to your column website from ./. I got suckered... Ad revenue whore, anyone...

  3. A little tale for you by HogynCymraeg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I had a new hard disk a while back and I installed XP and Suse 9.2 on it.
    Windows XP took around 15 mins to install, with a couple of reboots. I then installed my nvidia drivers. Rebooted. I then installed my firewall. Rebooted. I then installed the drivers for the cisco aironet card. Rebooted. I then installed the drivers for my Delta-Audio 1010LT soundcard. Rebooted. I spent over an hour installing all the drivers I needed to make my system *functional*.
    Suse took ~20-25 mins to install with all the software I wanted. When I logged in, everything just worked...

    People say they use windows because it just works. Bull. It's just that people have been conditioned to accept that installing drivers is not part of the installation process.

    There may be more drivers available for windows, but I'll stick with the linux way of doing things and buy cautiously.