Linux Five Years Away From Mainstream

wellington wrote to mention a ZDNet blurb about a Gartner group study. Gartner indicates that 'mainstream' use of open source in IT environments may be 5 years away. From the article: "Gartner's latest Linux 'hype cycle' report shows that open source is halfway to maturity but warns the biggest test will be whether it can demonstrate the necessary performance and security to function as a data centre server for mission-critical applications. Leading-edge businesses are generally still in the early stages of Linux deployments but Gartner expects increased commercialisation and improved storage and systems management for the operating system by the end of 2005, with Linux being used primarily for WebSphere and infrastructure applications on mainframes and web services on blades and racks."

Comments

Ok, seriously... e-fucking-nough

[DroopyStonx]

Year after year after year... "Linux will be mainstream in 5 years!"

We've been hearing that for over 10 years now.

So just stop. Really. It's boring. It's old.

Unless you're posting these articles to humor us... no one wants to read the same useless "studies" that don't amount to jack shit.

Re:Nuclear Fusion

[ultranova]

99.9999% of home users don't ever need or want a c compiler,

They do, however, need an easy-to-use frontend to a huge online statistics database so they don't need to make up percents.

My very unscientific test found 822 different email addresses from the changelogs of the latest Linux kernel; presumably they all needed a C compiler. Making a wild guess, if even 100 of them were home users, that would mean that the total number of home users would have to be at least 100 000 000 people, assuming that no one else ever programmed in C language. But of course there's much more programmers.

Based on the above, I think your statistics are bullshit.

In any case, a Linux-user will propably want to install software that's not part of his distribution at some point. Such software is usually distributed in (C) source format, and can be installed with the standard "./configure ; make ; su ; make install ; exit" command. He doesn't need to know what a C compiler is, or how to use it, but he will need to have it installed.

or 4 different word processors, or 13 ways to do the same thing, they want the most efficient simple way.

The most efficient simple way to do what ? Write a book ? Write a letter ? Write a reclamation ? Write a business letter template that gets sent to ten thousand people, with the personal details of each taken from database and inserted to the appropriate place in the letter ?

Computers aren't simple, because they can do so many different things. Remove the complexity of choice and you'll also be removing their greatest strength. That, or do it the Microsoft way, and have a single word processor (Word) that has the features of four, and is consequently just as complex as those four combined, with the added effect of being bloated, slow and prone to crashes and weird behaviour.

The list goes on, but people suffer from too much choice, its like going into a foreign sweetshop and not knowing the names of the products.

Both Red Hat and Debian (haven't used others, so I don't know about them) ask, as a part of the install process, what this computer will be used for, and install appropriate programs for the task profile. That's a good starting point.

Which, I might add, is considerably better than Windows, in which you get Solitaire, Minesweeper and Freecell with Windows and need to buy everything else yourself - after figuring out what programs you need. Sure, you could buy Office, but then you have the fun task of figuring out Word - which, as I stated above, has the complexity of four programs, since it tries to do everything in a single one.

If I could just tell somebody to go and get the "Home" version of Linux - from whichever vendor was currently hot then it would be easier to get people to switch.

Just tell them to get LFS. They won't bother you again - either because they've learned better than to ask you, or because they've learned to use Linux ;).

After they have gotten used to their version and know their way around, then they can start customising it and adding all the perfect bits, but until that point, its just overpowering.

Well, if Fedora included the NVidia drivers out of the box, I'd say get it, but they don't. Of course, the 2D drivers are perfectly good for browsing porn on the Internetwork...

Anyway, the solution to this problem is to have good defaults for everything.

Re:Only 5 more?

[fritz1968]

> Hasn't Linux for the desktop been 5 years away for the last 10 years?

It was only 3 years away 10 years ago.


Why is this thread beginning to sound like Windows Explorer reporting on how long it will take when copying a large amount of files?