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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
> What does branding it, boxing it and putting on a price tag, have to do with a tool doing a job?
Who? The editor?
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...
Linux Can't Kill Windows
I see someone didn't try to dual boot Fedora Core 2
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
It will be replaced by mentats.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
All I had displayed was the fluxbox window manager with firefox, gvim, and a matplotlib window from a python session.
I had to switch vterms to convince him, as I was running Linux, as he also assumed Linux was all CLI.
He should've known better too: He wasn't some PHB, but someone who used X11 and fink under OS X! If those who are as technically literate as this don't get Linux, how will the "average consumer" ever get it?
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, '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.
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.