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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.'"
Let's start with the unsensational headline of "Linux Can't Kill Windows", follow through the article to no rational arguments as to why this is, and ending with a "Stay tuned; I'll tell you all about it."
Seems like a well-thought out article that certainly wasn't created for the purpose of increasing impressions or generating clicks to advertisers on the site.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I didn't read the article.
But history has shown that the short term impact of most new things tend to be over-estimated, whereas the long term impact tends to be under-estimated.
Who knows where Linux will be in 20 years? I sure as hell don't, but I have a rather optimistic view.
.: Max Romantschuk
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.
This is just sensationalism. If you look at for example the server market, or the governments sector, linux is already beating up windows.
My long term projection would be, that Linux will push Windows into a third of the market, something like 1/3 linux, 1/3 windows and 1/3 else.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Will the /. editors stop posting flamebait articles?
Simon.
"But you can't turn Linux into a platform even if you brand it, box it, and put a pricey sticker on it."
What does branding it, boxing it and putting on a price tag, have to do with a tool doing a job?
what
Very poor indeed.
Last week I gave a class about Linux to 4 people who haven't used it yet. They were blown away because they didn't realize it had a desktop and all the fancy programs that Windows has. I think what really is hurting Linux is just myth. That myth is that Linux is just a text interface for servers or something like that.
If GNU/Linux was a platform, in the sense that MacOSX or Windows 2003 was a platform then how come you need to recompile software depending on your distro or hardware ?
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
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.
Linux Can't Kill Windows
One fundamental difference guarantees that Windows will continue to dominate
By Tom Yager
April 13, 2005
You can quit proclaiming Linux the Windows killer.
ADVERTISEMENT
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.
Businesses and organizations of all sizes need consistent, predictable, scalable, self-contained platforms for server solutions. Windows wins. Linux doesn't lose, because it can continue the legacy of another nonplatform, namely Unix, that needs to be refreshed and extended.
The practical need to keep Unix around isn't rooted in nostalgia or misguided conviction. There may be times when you're convinced that the solution you need doesn't exist as a whole. The total solutions that exist might be too confining or expensive, or -- as is sometimes the showstopper for me -- simply closed. Open source Unix, in which category I place Linux, BSD, and Darwin (the OS layer of Apple's OS X), is a 500,000-piece bag of Legos that comes with some drawings and a few models you can use, build on, or tap into as references for your own creations. On paper, an OS is an ideal place to start building, because you get to choose everything that sits above it and presumably you know just what belongs in each of those gaps between your hardware and your application. You see, while developers can write to an operating system's default API, they'll spend most of their time encapsulating and abstracting low-level system calls to create what is, in effect, an application platform.
No one is so foolish as to make what can be acquired cheaply or free; it's wiser to pick one from among hundreds of platforms and modules that fill in the holes between open source Unix and your applications.
In contrast, Windows fills in all the blocks between the hardware and your apps. It does it in ways that you can't alter, but which you can use in different ways. You can code with the tools of your choice and in the programming language of your choice, and unless you stray too far from the rule book, everything you create will interoperate with everything others write for Windows. An operating system is a rack into which device drivers and APIs are inserted. A platform is a rack into which applications are inserted.
Linux and Windows don't compete. Sun Microsystems (Profile, Products, Articles) sees this as an opportunity and has struggled mightily to position the combination of Solaris and Java as a platform. It almost makes it. I'd choose J2EE and Solaris over Linux for nonuser-facing server applications in shops that have expert administrators. But, similar to Linux and other flavors of Unix, Solaris is a nonstarter on clients, and that's enough to hurt its capability of competing with Windows. There is only one platform that can stand toe-to-toe with Windows, and that's the combination of OS X and Java.
Stay tuned; I'll tell you all about it.
Linux isn't really about killing Windows off.. whoever thought that the primary idea behind Linux when it was created was to make MS go bankrupt and for no one in the world to ever use Windows is a bit dilusional. Linux is an alternative. It's a choice. The same thing could be said in reverse: Windows Can't Kill Linux.
There's too many people who are interested with tinkering.. with having something being totally customizable if they take their time. With being free and able to run their computer the way they want. Is this the majority of people? Not even close! But it's enough that Linux will sustain itself in spite of any FUD MS and crew would throw at it.
Who cares if Linux never overtakes Windows? I know before I discovered it in '98, I thought I was doomed to the endless update/virus/adware world that everyone else was in (except those crazy mac people.. which now due to the mac mini I am one as well.. side tracking....)
Anyway, the point being.. Linux is strong due to it's following, and has great potential to do quite a few things Windows has troubles with. The choice is there for anyone to pick up that option if they so choose. What's the big deal?
From the article:
Businesses and organizations of all sizes need consistent, predictable, scalable, self-contained platforms for server solutions.
I thought Windows was winning on the desktop? Isn't that what we're always hearing?
Linux and Windows don't compete.
Ok, so the whole "Get The Facts" campaign was done just for grins?
Open source Unix, in which category I place Linux, BSD, and Darwin (the OS layer of Apple's OS X), is a 500,000-piece bag of Legos that comes with some drawings and a few models you can use, build on, or tap into as references for your own creations.
Also wrong. There are distros that are like that, but there are distros that aren't. Linux offers choice, and not just the "bag of Legos" kind.
And, just in case the article author reads this...ever hear of Wine? As soon as Wine gets DCOM working correctly and Installshield working right, it won't matter to Joe User if the OS is Linux or Windows, just so long as he can install TurboTax and Doom3. Check back in a few years, and we'll see if you're singing a different tune.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Linux cannot make a dent??? I'd say it already has, else why is M$ running "Get the facts"?
That said, there is an important point here: Linux probably won't "kill" windows, it will be RedHat, or Mandrake, or Debian, or even Linspire :/
Linux at it's heart is nothing more than a Kernel, it's a GNU/Linux distro that people ultimatly install (mostly anyway).
Linux as a brand cannot compete with Windows, because Linux is not a brand, not a product. There is not even a single definition of what "Linux" is, except a bunch of software running on top of a specific kernel.
Even the concept of "competition" is a straw man.
Linux represents a total, brutal, and unstoppable commoditization of technology that follows the same rules which drive "Moore's Law". When you remove the costs of improving a technology, its marginal cost will fall to zero as people compete to be the key suppliers.
Software is basically becoming free, and this is what will kill Windows, whether or not it's something called "Linux" that takes over.
Most likely, "Linux" will never become more than a niche OS, excellent for servers but rare for desktops. But what it represents - unlimited and perfect software at no cost - will, inevitably, rule the desktop as it will rule every single computing platform, for the simple reason that no amount of lock-in or marketing is going to get people to keep paying more than the going rate for a commodity.
Apple's strategy - where the OS and a bunch of software is basically thrown in for free - is the trend of the future.
I hate to say it, because I truly love using Microsoft's well-engineered products, but between the commoditization of their core markets and the parasites eating their way in from the internets, they are dead, Linux or no Linux.
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His first sentence is right on the money - "Linux is established and has a niche". So the question is - what is holding it back? And here, he misses the bleeding obvious - every single one of his points (from TFA - the reasons to keep unix or windows around, the cost analysis, etc) is flatly wrong or misses the mark. The answer is, I think, obvious --- Linux is the OS designed by geeks, for geeks. It's the classic example of overengineering the wheel. The problem is, I have yet to see an interface for *nix that does as good as job as windows does of 'packing everything under the hood' and making an operating system that (as a friend of mine, the chief sysadmin for Connectiv would say) "protects users from their own stupidity". When someone can come up with an interface that is as intuitive and user-friendly as windows, then (and only then) can linux hope to compete in the desktop market.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
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.
Flash forward to now: I have worked my way through the following distros, by doing a full wipe-and-reinstall each time:
Mandrake 10 (as mentioned);
Mandrake 10.1;
Gentoo(lol)
Each time, as soon as the nVidia binary driver was installed, UT04 would start and run without a single tweak being made to the UT04 install.
The lesson to learn is this: although the majority of open-source Linux software is not self-contained (and this is by conscious design) and has dependencies that need to be tracked-down and installed first, there is no reason at all why a company can't just package up everything it needs in one big self-contained lump, eliminating the need for dependencies or the need to run on a specific distro entirely. As for the comment that you need to recompile for different hardware: I have no idea what you're talking about. Clearly, if you have a x86 app, it will need to be re-compiled to run at full speed on a PPC system - a difficulty not encountered in the Windows world for the sole reason that Windows is only capable of running on x86, and similary for MacOSX.
I suspect I've just been feeding a troll, but oh well - who cares? :)
I regularly use three platforms; Windows, Linux (Fedora) and OSX. Conclusion? I cringe at having to use Windows. I find that once you learn UNIX it is faster to get anything done. Albeit you have to learn UNIX.
Now having said that, what I see more off are peacock articles. All fluff and very little facts because the three operating systems are TOO similar. Compare it to cars. These days all of the cars are good enough! They will last four years without too many problems. So then how do you distinguish yourself? Write articles like a peacock struts its feathers, all emotional.
The easiest way to illustrate this peacock argument is to take a bushman from the jungle and get them to figure out what a computer does. Without helping them. My guess is that the bushman will have a hard time figuring out what the mouse is for. Most likely they will use the mouse as a slingshot and head back into the jungle. I am not saying that bushmen are dumb. I am saying that computers require some upfront learning time regardless of the OS used.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
He believes Linux isn't a "whole platform", and I can see where he gets that idea-- Linux isn't very unified (Do have KDE or Gnome? [0]) and anyone who hasn't dealt with a modern package manglement system has dealt with Dependency Hell.
So let's imagine some company, we'll call them Red Hat, to pull a bogus name out of thin air, and let's say they were to take this Linux thing, and make a nice standardized platform out of it. People ship you an application, you take your server, we'll call it a "Red Hat Enterprise Server" or something like that, and you can simply load the app on it and run it. They wouldn't say their app runs on Linux. They'd say their app runs on Red Hat.
To him, _that_ would be a platform, and that would have a chance at taking on Windows. It would be Linux behind the scenes, but it's more that just Linux.
Too bad nobody's ever going to do something like that.
-JDF
[0] Thankfully, even if you generally only see one of these, you can still have the other behind the scenes and run stuff intended for either...
To most end users, a consistent look and feel, that works right out of the box, is really important. So it's a very good thing that Linux distributions are improving in this area (which the article conveniently forgets to mention).
For the same reason, I also think it's good to see Open Source applications adopting user interfaces that are more similar to their Windows counterparts. It may annoy some old-time Unix or Linux users to find "Options" under "Tools" rather than under "Edit" in the Firefox browser.
But for Windows users that are looking for a safer alternative to their present browser, the chance that they'll make the switch increases with every item that works as expected when they first try it out.
And it's only by convincing today's Windows users to switch, that Linux can avoid the fate that the article spells out.
Christian Engström, Former Member of the European Parliament 2009-2014 for The Pirate Party, Sweden
Linux Can't Kill Windows
I see someone didn't try to dual boot Fedora Core 2
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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
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.
To take the points in order:
countless widget sets
A few major widget sets. If you're going to include every kit, you might as well include the buttons here in Opera, which are completely non-standard as far as Windows is concerned.
multiple clipboards
Yes, annoying and stupid.
different directory structures, an infinite number of combinations and permutations of shared libraries
Uusually well managed by your distribution. A cross-distro way to create a standalone installer would be nice though, LSB doesn't quite cut it.
just as many sources of outdated, incorrect, misleading or utterly superb documentation
Most projects have a homepage. That is the source of the most up-to-date information. Though most of the time, the docs in the package is enough.
crap vendors like Redhat which drop version support in a third the time of Microsoft
And Debian gets scolded each time they're mentioned for actually supporting something for a while.
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.
Linux does that. But you should really mention a long-supported ABI. Linux does definately not have that.
In short, I see all of this as signs that Linux is moving too fast for people to consolidate and work out standards. Being more bazaar than cathedral, that is natural. But that is like a brake on a streamroller already in motion.
We're in a transition period where people are held back by old systems, but seek cross-platform compatibility on new systems. It's like watching pressure build for a switchover. Just because there's been no mass exodus you still see them untangle themselves from Windows strangleholds.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A set of APIs and an ABI for writing graphical programs which is still supported now in spite of being over 10 years old and can be guaranteed to be available on 100% of Windows systems?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yeah, 'cause there's so many of them :-)
:-(
Debian would be a platform, or Novell/SUSE, or RedHat - if they finally committed themselves to being one.
A platform is a platform only if its stable, and I don't mean "stable" as in "does not crash". I mean "stable" as in "does not change significantly every 6 months". So Debian would be an ideal choice.
However, Debian itself has zero commercial drive. I wonder what drives Debian at all, and other people wonder, too, given the admirable rise of Ubuntu.
But people want pretty software, and Debian stable features GNOME and a stone-aged KDE. And while GNOME on Debian seems to be more advanced than KDE, forgive me, I would not chose it for fancy software. It looks so painfully dull
KDE on the other hand looks nice and lively, but is it a platform? I wonder.
Obviously there has to be a balance between the drive forward, the wish to leave behind all that old cruft (fsck compatibility!) and the conservative approach to not chance anything to not break compatibility.
Still, what drives the PC market is cool software, not cool licensing.
Just to give you an example: mplayer is technically cool. But its complexity scares people away. It's only cool because it's free. You won't be able to sell it to anybody, because as a software _product_ it sucks. badly. Even with gmplayer.
Or take GIMP. It's cool 'cause it's free. But it's just an aggregation of image manipulation tools. It's not a _product_.
There is this small gap between a program and a product that Open Source software seems to be unable to bridge, this final, annoying, painful step of really _finishing_ it so that it _could_ be sold.
My conclusion: Linux needs commercial(-grade) software. Firefox is not enough. Instead of scaring commercial software vendors away with stupid fundamentalism we should be fair with them.
Many of us call that CHOICE .
I can pick the Linux distribution that best fits my needs, be they toolkit-driven, tool-driven, UI driven or otherwise.
With Windows, you get... well, Windows. You have to shim other things onto it to get it to be useful. For example, I don't use icons, toolbars, window frames or titlebars. Show me how I can configure Windows to provide that interface, in an easy way... you can't. Not without 10 different third-party products.
Its all about choice.
You know, I honestly don't care if this is true or not. So what if Linux can't kill Windows? Windows can't kill Linux, that I'm positive of. And that's really all I care about. Sure it'd be nice if enough people abandoned Windows in favor of Linux to "kill" Windows, but whether that happens or not, I can still use Linux to my hearts content. If other people continue to use & support Microsoft, that's up to them, and while it will have some effect on me, I doubt it will be a significant enough effect for me to really care.
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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!
I think what's needed is a good bridge between the two operating systems. You can get people to walk over to the dark side (mouahahaha) without giving them a bridge. The bridge between Windows and Linux is cross-platform apps, like Firefox and OpenOffice. Get everyone using these apps, and then point out to them that "hey, you could actually use the exact same apps on linux, why are you paying for windows?"
.. like... ONE person using OpenOffice. Since everything's working fine they have no need to switch OS, but if their Windows installations ever got totally bunged, I might suggest Linux.. and since they're already using these apps, I think they might be more open to it. Of course, they're using Firefox now so spyware isn't much of a problem for them... so the chances of them needed to switch OS is down about 90%... ah the irony..
You have to take things one step at a time. First the apps, then the operating system. Change everything at once and it won't work.
I've gotten a couple of people using Firefox, and
It's like combat: the force with the superior size and resources is going to be unbeatable until they make a major tactical or technical mistake. Use the Iraqi War if you want an analogy: the US is cleaning shop, and it's because of superior technology, tactics, and sheer size (of the establishment, not the deployment). Training, too: Windows (say, all the futuristic military tech) is damn easy to set up and install, and everyone knows how to use it, so anyone can use it. Linux, on the other hand (say, a trial-and-error mortar system) is difficult to use for someone unfamiliar with it than Windows is, and it's not always as straightforward to get a system up and running.
The Vietnam War would be a good example of how the superior force (size and resources) can still lose. Shitty M-16 rifles, poor coordination, and the disadvantage of not being on home ground (ie, the other side had "home team" advantage) all made things difficult for them. If Linux were to get a wide corporate install base, I think things would slowly start to get away from Microsoft.
Also, I think RedHat (the company) is a big problem for Linux adoption. Their support is pretty bad, and they tend to still have a very "non-corporate" software attitude. Bug in your kernel? "Here, try this beta kernel." It's not a very corporate-friendly attitude, in my opinion. Are there any other good corporate options out there? No, not really, unfortunately.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
10 years ago IT was only beginning to look at Windows and did not seriously thought of Windows for most of their server infrastructure.
Now people say the same thing but about Linux.
Why did Microsoft succeeded ?
1/ network integration with personnal computers
2/ marketing
3/ ease of use
4/ price compared to Unix systems
5/ drivers & software
Points 1 and 2 are Linux weakness.
Point 3 had a lot of improvements.
Point 4 : Linux is at advantage (until you dont buy Red Hat Server that costs more than W2003 SRV).
Point 5 is improving for linux.
Some experiment in our corp. We wanted to use Linux to host antivirus repositories & Windows Update Service & hardware+software inventory tools. None of the tools we selected work with Linux. Therefore we have to pay a W2003 for each box... hardware : 1300 euros, system : 700 euros, software : free or licenced per user. We plan to have tens of such computers.
The lack of software compatible with Linux costs a lot of money. And slows down the propagation of Linux.
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
The big reasons beta lost were shorter play/recording time and the fact that manufacturers had to pay licensing fees to Sony to use it. VHS was the free and open standard that won. Also, as the above poster pointed out, beta came first.
I understand the point you're trying to make, but the analogy was the wrong choice.
to quote "it will never put a dent in Windows' mind share or market share"
Hasnt linux already largly DENTED windows mind and market share, how many governments moved to open source and nix from windows systems, those XX,000 Systems dont count as market share?
Linux wont ever replace windows but, your a fool to think windows will remain uneffected.
Linux is the manifestation of Ayn Rand's 'rebellion of the intellect' projected in Atlas Shrugged. Computer professionals were constantly being knocked back to square one whenever management decided to change the company IT structure. Since the early 1950's it was normal to expect programmers to master a dozen languages and systems, all theoretically similar but with arbitrarily different structures. It was the modern equivalent of the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who was condemned to push a boulder to the top of a hill, only to have it roll down again, forever.
Linux changed that. Computer professionals are telling management that they will work with one standard OS. Their OS. Designing and building it themselves and distributing it freely is a brilliant strategy to counter management's claim that some other OS was cheaper.
All this happened concurrently with the widespread introduction of powerful inexpensive desktop computers into the workspace. Office computing adopted the Windows OS in order to maximize the productivity gains that could only be achieved by having the entire world adopt a single standard. An incredible stroke of luck for the company selling that standard. The price went to the company that was the most relentless and focused on forcing the world to adopt their standard. That company was also flexible and intelligent enough to integrate huge positive feedback loops into the process of getting the world to adopt its product. The astonishing success of the company in selling a product that the world was desperate to buy doesnt mean that they can do it again with another type of product.
The widespread introduction of powerful inexpensive desktop computers was predicated on the condition that the performance/price ratio of the PCs would double every few years.
The current problems that result from the conversion of all other Operating Systems to Linux are temporary. They are being addressed; they will be solved. The widespread introduction of powerful inexpensive desktop computers was predicated on the condition that the performance/price ratio of the PCs would double every few years. The entire next generation of desktop computers may find their doubling of power completely dedicated to transition from Windows to Linux. In other words, it may take a doubling of computer power to make Windows applications run on Linux with the same speed and efficiency that they currently run on Windows OS. This will be denounced as a complete waste by IT professionals. Theyre correct, but it will be a necessary step anyway.
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.
The real killer app for widespread acceptance of desktop Linux would be Microsoft Office (or a 100% work-alike). Openoffice.org and Evolution have come a long way, but they're only (IMHO) about 85% there in terms of replacing MS-Office.
The other thing which would drive acceptance of desktop linux would be the availability of games. If Joe User could walk in to Best Buy and see that all the popular games are available in Windows and Linux versions, he might consider switching. As it is now, even hard-core Linux geeks usually have a Windows partition for gaming.
As an aside, Given the success of live CD distros like Knoppix, I'm suprised that game makers haven't considered releasing their products under a custom bootable Linux distro.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
DLL hell is not unique to either Linux or Windows. It has been a serious problem from the moment the first person updated a shared library on the first system to support them.
The logical symbols mechanism in VMS allowed many problems to be avoided, instead of loading a filename the program would load a logical symbol. It was easy to run a system with different versions of the same shared library in use simultaneously. UNIX and Windows never used symbols in quite the same way.
I think that folk need to look at what they get from a shared library. At one time it made great sense to save memory by having multiple processes share an in memor image of an executable. It makes particular sense if you are running something like Apache where child processes are being spawned off from the parent and share resources with it. I don't think it makes a lot of sense as a general approach when memory cost $50 per gigabyte.
We could probably do much better than shared memory if we went back to static libraries and instead used more intelligent linker technology. When I link to stdio I pull in maybe 500K of code and use at most 40% of the code paths. When I link to more recent libraries the library is much larger and the fraction I use much, much less. A shared library is an all or nothing affair, every part of the library has to be loaded in case another image might need it. Even if the code page is never touched the memory has to be allocated.
As for the question of user interfaces, I think that the way they are designed today is worse than sub-optimal. I would prefer to go back to an architecture similar to the one that the NextStation had. Instead of having the program implement the user interface as code it should send a description of the user interface to the windows manager and have it perform all the necessary animation.
This approach is similar to what we did in the early HTML days but the idea is to take the approach much further. I really dislike the fact that most programs are single threaded and the UI goes to sleep every time it is asked to do anything computationally intensive of requiring the network. The architecture I just described allows the window manager to keep the user interface alive even though the program logic is 'thinking' and the programmer does not have to do any work to achieve this.
The other advantage of this approach is a bit more controvertial, it limits the scope of the UI designer. This is a bad thing if you really, really love to foist a bizaro UI onto the user. On the other hand it means that every application can be skinned so implementing the bizarro UI is simply a matter of telling the program manager how to do it for every program on the machine.
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I think the one thing that's really slowing Linux on the desktop uptake are all the dependency nightmares and package inconsistencies. Yeah, things like yum, apt-get, emerge, et al have made things a lot easier, but they are not perfect. Last night I was trying to apt-get (I hate yum with a passion) proftpd on my FC3 box and no matter what I tried in the config, users could not authenticate - I kept getting "bad password" in the logs. I ended up compiling from source and guess what, it started working. Apparently the binary package had something funky going on with its UNIX auth module.
And then there's this thing that happened yesterday. I'm experimenting with groupware and picked up Conflux. My boss walks in and sees me looking at the demo site they have, and says "that looks cool, install it". It was winding down to the end of the day, and I say "Eh, I'll do it tomorrow", to which he says "You just can't click on the "Install" icon?"
That's when I told him the tale of how I had to get the following operational on the system first: apache2, python, mod_python, postgres, and a smattering of other libraries. Then I had to write the config files to make it all work together. And I've never worked with postgres, so I don't even know how to define users or a database in it yet.
The moral of this story is that installing software on any flavor of Linux is still a royal pain that Joe user won't tolerate. Without a unified base distro and a universal package management system, that will never change.
-R
I think that the idea that GNU/Linux should replace Windows, or anything else for that matter, is faulty from the start. The driving force before GNU and much of open source is people who want to write software for themselves, and share it will all those who are willing to share. The motivation for using GNU/Linux is that it fits your needs, not that it is Not Windows, or something else for that matter. Pressing requests for features, and complaints of lacking technical or customer support are outright ridiculous and should be laughed at. Why? Because no one is forcing anyone to use GNU/Linux. If anything, one should be thankful to those who put forth the effort to get it done on their own time. But the developers should not care anyhow, because they do it for themselves and those who share.
The war between open-source proponents and windows proponents does not fit in with GNU/Linux ideology, it is a totally foreign concept for it in fact. The war was started by Microsoft because they could not buy open-source, and was picked up by people who already disliked Microsoft and by those who thought it was 'cool' to participate (myself included).
But anyhow, to answer your original question of what drives debian development, here is my take on it. Developers want features for themselves, their clients, customers. Developers want neat solutions to show off to potential employers and graduate school admissions too. And something like that. Don't try to find in the list something like "Users Bob and Carloine want a button that whereupon thrice clicked will take her...".