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Linux Can't Kill Windows
nberardi writes "Infoworld is running an article in which the author claims 'Linux is established and has a niche that, as various pendulums swing, will grow and shrink. Show me charts and stats and benchmarks that prove Linux superior to Windows in every measure and I'll not argue with you. But no matter how much money and dedication is poured into Linux, it will never put a dent in Windows' mind share or market share because Linux is an operating system, a way -- and probably the best way -- to make system hardware do what it's told. But you can't turn Linux into a platform even if you brand it, box it, and put a pricey sticker on it.'"
It's the mindset of most people that keep them from using Linux. They've been using DOS and Windows for YEARS, and they're so familar with how things are, that changing that even slightly is very confusing for most people. If Linux had been in Windows place, and had 90% of the market, people would LOVE Linux and HATE Windows. Simple as that.
For example, my dad is a Windows person, and his SO has a Mac with OS X. He can't seem to understand how OS X works, so he dissmisses it and claims that Windows is better (on the fact that he knows how to use Windows).
It's not that Windows is "special", it's just that that's all most people know. And half those people don't know much, if anything, about Windows anyway, so it's no wonder Linux has a difficult time trying to enter the mainstream market.
Will the /. editors stop posting flamebait articles?
Simon.
what
Very poor indeed.
A way to fight network effect is to have platform independent applications.
The web is a first step.
XUL and other technologies like thsi is one step is the right direction.
Open and RF standards are also a key in this process.
Many GNU/Linux users don't compile their own binaries anymore. There are almost always precompiled binaries for GNU/Linux, that mainly depend on which hardware architecture you use (e.g. SPARC, x86, PPC). This would happen with Windows (x86) and Mac OS X (PPC) also if they supported multiple hardware platforms! It's just that GNU/Linux allows you to choose your own architecture if you so wish. It's an advantage.
Yeah, a moving platform. With countless widget sets, multiple clipboards, different directory structures, an infinite number of combinations and permutations of shared libraries, and just as many sources of outdated, incorrect, misleading or utterly superb documentation, and crap vendors like Redhat which drop version support in a third the time of Microsoft.
One place where GNU/Linux is relatively stable is in POSIX and a vague semblence of commonly accepted extensions to the standard. That makes it a nice platform for server software, but does nothing on the desktop.
Windows was never an OS. It contains an OS, they changed OSes in the product lifetime, but the product has always been a desktop environment and a consistent, well documented, and long-supported API.
General purpose programs are different. Look at the standard libraries on OS X or Windows. You have a complete windowing toolkit or two (Win32 / Avalon, Carbon / Cocoa), a media plaing framework (DirectShow, QuickTime), an HTML rendering engine (MSHTML, WebKit) and a whole host of other things which a guaranteed to be there. You can build your app expecting them to be there.
On Linux (or *BSD for that matter), alternatives to most of these things exist. In some cases, several alternatives exist. The problem is that you can't guarantee that they will be there. You can statically link everything, but then you have to update your entire app whenever small updates to dependant libraries are released. Alternatively you can just release the app dynamically linked, and hope that people have all of the required libraries (where you expect to find them), and hope that the distribution will package your app in such a way that it will work. The only way to really make sure it will work it to package it complete with dependencies for every distribution you plan on supporting, which generally limits things to Red Hat and maybe SuSE, even though the code would work with no modifications on a large number of other platforms.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
1991 : Linux? A plaything for college students. It'll never work like *real* Unix.
1996 : Linux? So it makes a simple web server. It'll never scale as an enterprise server.
2001 : Linux? Yeah, it's nice for my enterprise servers, but it'll never give end-users any satisfaction.
2005 : Linux? So hackers have pretty desktop. Didja see the effort they had to go to make it work? It'll never be easy enough for our secretary Jane Typist.
Nope, Linux will never compete. Not even that Novell Linux Desktop that has proliferated our workplace and made every desktop look the same (but secure). It'll never happen.
H0ek
Think you're smart? Prove you've got brains!
> So when Joe Luser gets home with his computer and plugs it in he's ready to:
> Open Excel and do some work?
I have a cheapo e-machine I bought to run Windows games on (at which it has done surprisingly well, I might add). It came with Windows Works, which is not unusual. Joe Luser gets home, plugs it in, and he's got a spreadsheet. Not a terribly good one, but Joe doesn't know the difference.
> Watch some DVD's?
It also came with PowerDVD 5, which is even more common than getting Works. Actually, it plays DVDs better than any of my Linux boxes, and did so right out of the box.
> Browse the internet risk free?
No, but Joe doesn't know this and can't see it. He double clicks on Internet Explorer, and it's teh Intarweb! Works right out of the box!
> No, he can't do any of those things "out of the box".
Actually, yes, as far as Joe can see, he *can* do all those things right out of the box He doesn't see how poorly or brokenly they may be done. All he sees is that he can't buy a Linux box that he can just plug in and have do these things with no requirement that he do things he doesn't understand.
Chris Mattern
Even with a restricted set of architectures you don't really need to compile. MacOS pretty successfully supported 68k and PPC at the same time with fat binaries. I think the difference is that most users neither knew nor cared what that meant, and Apple made it so that for the most part they didn't have to.
English is easier said than done.
Does he not realize that OS X is simply a packaged up pretty version of BSD, which is almost identical besides licensing to Linux.
False analogy.
Let me make it clearer to you by making the following two statements:
1. Linux revolves around the kernel. Every time you muck with the kernel to bring about yet another set of "gee whiz bang" features, dozens of things are broken.
2. Mac OS X and Windows revolve around the interface. On the library level, new interfaces are added, but older ones are still supported for a surprisingly long time (see Carbon / Classic Runtime Environment for Mac OS X, or Win9x Compatibility Mode / Application Compatibility Toolkit for Windows 2000 / XP). Certainly, support is eventually dropped, but the pace is normally quite slow for popular APIs.
On a visual interface level, both Apple and MS try to keep consistency in the interface. Sure, you'll see major changes in interface every 5-10 years (Windows 95, Windows XP, Mac OS X), but that's a pace most people can cope with, and they try not to change EVERYTHING in the process. Linux, on the other hand: for any random distro, you can't be assurred GUI consistency.
Tell me, how many people really know if there were major kernel revisions between all the Mac OX X releases? I imagine not many, because programmers don't have to care. That's the beauty of revolving around interfaces.
Until Linux stops revolving around the kernel, it will never break out of the server niche.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.