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Desktop Linux Survey Results Published
An anonymous reader writes "The Open Source Development Labs has published preliminary results from its desktop Linux survey, which had 3,300 responses. The month-long online survey focused on determining the key issues driving Linux on the desktop, as well as the major barriers to Linux desktop adoption. 'What was most surprising to us was probably the top two reasons given for deploying Linux on the desktop,' OSDL's Principal Analyst Dave Rosenberg said. 'It's not TCO (total cost of ownership), or security, or lack of license fees. It was 'employees requesting Linux (user demand)' and because 'my competitors have successfully deployed Linux,' he added."
Not for stability, or security, or pricing, or modifiability, or all the great things that come to us from Unixland.
It's because we're all so cool.
Who could have guessed it?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I have had folks getting an Ubuntu CD after having been told "all applications are there", attempting to install these apps on a SuSE distro!
The other thing is multimedia not working exactly as advertised or not working as expected.
With all these problems, getting Linux on the desktop is still a challenge in my case.
For mass consumption, this is the biggest problem I have seen. The people I know who are not technically inclined will stay away from Linux for the time being for this very reason. When they buy a sparling new ipod and the installation cd doesn't set everything up for them they end up thinking Linux is either a) crap or b) for nerds with too much spare time on their hands.
This is, of course, in large part due to vendors not giving a toss about Linux. With it's ever increasing popularity (especially in the corporate world) I don't think this situation will last very long.
"It's not TCO (total cost of ownership), or security, or lack of license fees," Dave Rosenberg said. "It's about the lack of a talking paper clip."
If this software were availed, it'd significantly boost the status of Linux getting looked at seriously on the desktop. I would not want to spend any money on the so called tax software again.
I don't know why but grandma kept insisting on NetBSD....
Looking at the results, I have to ask, how representative was the sample group? Was it, as it appears, entirely self-selected? And what does that say about the validity of the results?
I mean, 54% of the respondents use, or are considering, Ubantu? With only 19% for Red Hat, with another 26% for Fedora, for a total of 45%? Could that possibly be representative?
And the second most important application is "Digital Camera/Video?"
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Believe it or not, i am using Linux as primary desktop continuosly from 1997 ( with just a short interval where i was forced to work on windows, or face getting fired). I've grown practically toghether with Linux as Desktop. Man, it was a challenge in the beginning. Things that for a server weren't important, they become for a desktop the equivalent of endless hacking nights. But it was worth. I was really pleased with it. Ah, and there were not that many distros, i think i started with Slackware, and since then only Redhat ( and now Fedora). I've tried also SuSE and Mandrake, but RH was the most consistent and the most easy to work with that time. SuSE was a PITA, until maybe the latest versions. Debian was out of range because of the "stable means old software" filosofy, even though i used the backports for various friends of mine, who wanted desktops with Debian.
Now, if i take a look of latest gnome, but especially latest KDE, i can tell you, boy, this a fucking marvellous piece of UI, compared with was before. And all the small bits of integration with hardware are getting close to be a commodity, and not a luxury. I know, i didn't give back to much back to the community, but i am lurking from time to time in frenode's IRC channels, helping some poor beginners. Although, i think while the user friendliness of KDE(or gnome) has skyrocketed, there are still many hacks needed to make the user get the max out of what is offered. The weakest point and also the strongest point of FOSS is this somehow fractured and all over the world decentralised development of software. We should never abandon it, even if that would hurt the potential user ( i am not saying customer, because we talk about distribution and not commercialization).
That being said, I applaud again the efforts of all developers, that keep us with the vision of a Linux Desktop.
Full results are here in PDF format (333 KiB), coral linked : http://www.osdl.org.nyud.net:8090/dtl/DTL_Survey_R eport_Nov2005.pdf
1) Put a pile of Linux CDs in a display in a store that has a "Grand Opening". ... Loss!
2) Invite news media to the opening.
3) Pay group of people to go charging into the store to fight over the Linux CDs.
4) Profi... oh wait. They're free. And you have to pay those people. Soooo
Pagemaker? Who actually listed Pagemaker as an application they'd like to see on Linux? Quark or InDesign would make more sense. The shrinking pool of leftover Pagemaker users don't have the clout to have Adobe port it to Linux. Hell, all of the users begging Adobe to port Photoshop don't have the clout. :|
Hmmm...
Perhaps "Employees requesting Linux" and "My competitors have successfully deployed Linux" were rated as top reasons because these were the things that got companies looking at Linux, rather than them being a final deciding factor?
Or perhaps competitors successfully deploying Linux is seen as including decreased TCO etc. And employees' requests could certainly be based on these things (especially if they are generally IT workers, which I suspect is likely).
In order to resolve these issues, the questionnaire should have also asked "what were your employees' and competitors top reasons for choosing Linux?". :-)
What about games? THe only reason I'm staying with WinXP is to play the latest games due to DirectX/Open GL support and the always updated driver base. Seriously, why is the entertainment aspect always left out? For fucks sake, gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. I would THINK it would be a huge factor for home PC users.
Life is not for the lazy.
I've ranted about this before, but why are people so obsessed with email?
No encryption (unless you have a degree in IT), no authentication (because people are tight, and nobody out side of IT knows what PGP is), poor support for attachments (MIME is a hack) and no enforcable equivalent to recorded delivery.
That's before we start to think about the mess that is HTML encoded mails.
I could live without security, but I'm really suprised that corporations can.
We've been using email for over 10 years now, and it hasn't progressed at all and I don't believe for a moment that this is a 'if its not broke...' situation.
If the FOSS community could establish a new email protocol that transparnetly added real support for attachments, security and formatting and it was adopted quickly by Thunderbird, Evolution and Mail.app (I'm a Mac zealot so I want it too) the next version of Exchange would support it too. In the mean time, Redhat, Suse and Ubuntu could be peddling Linux as the next big thing in email - something that might get the attention of CEOs who's only realy contact with a computer is email.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Nice Job, Whore.
I have been running my business on a Linux desktop and F/OSS for a number of years. (My servers are all OpenBSD, however) I have done a number of consulting gigs where a Linux deployment is discussed, and in some cases, choosen as the exclusive desktop solution. If there are no applications that the client has that absolutely requires Windows to run, i.e. beyond what they can do with e-mail, firefox, openoffice.org, GIMP, etc. --it isn't a difficult to sell them on the idea. Especially when pointing out the many advantages of an MS free office. I once recommended a Linux solution and told the client to keep a reserve of cash on hand to purchase Windows (OS and Office suite) software if they should find themselves feeling like they couldn't get by running a Linux desktop. That reserve has long since been spent, they are still running Linux, and there isn't a Windows desktop to be found anywhere. In other cases running a handful of Windows boxes for the people that really need it mixed with a mostly Linux deployment is the answer.
Many clients have said that it is not that much of a change for them and that they wonder what all the fuss was about?
I personally have actually found myself lost trying to do even trivial tasks on a friend's borrowed Windows machine that I wouldn't have to think twice about using my own laptop running Linux... I have started carrying LiveCD's just so this doesn't become more of an issue. The tools that come standard on many Linux distro's are far superior to those available to other OS's. It's a no brainer for me...
---
Simulated Sig
So it doesn't count if the application is deployed via the web?
TurboTax Online comes out in January. Firefox support remains to be seen, obviously, but I'm not overly concerned, given FF's now-relatively-high market share.
I've been using H&R Block Online under Linux for the last four years. Works flawlessly in firefox. They even keep a hot copy your records for three years - a feature I've used a few times now, and I don't need to worry about backing them up, losing the CD, etc. Tinfoil hat wearers need not apply.
This site lists a few more I've never heard of, and, of course, Googling for it doesn't hurt either. Just make sure to pick software for the right country.
No, I doubt there are any Gtk/Mono/Java/Qt/WhizBang clients out there, but who needs them? Installed clients for such things are (or should be) a thing of the past. The web offers a relatively cross-platform, painless deployment mechanism for every OS and distro.
The other obvious advantage of the online approach is, of course, that you don't need to pay for an upgrade every year. You just pay the filing cost for whatever taxes you want to file, plus the vendor costs. I usually end up paying H&R Block to e-file my stuff and to have a human look over them beforehand, just to make sure I didn't miss anything.
Hope this helps.
I hear Automatix is pretty good for settings things up on Ubuntu Just Right (tm): http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=66563
Since I'm running mostly KDE-applications and didn't hear of it before too late, I didn't use this. So I've followed the various HOWTOs for installing proprietary codecs and compiled kmplayer (which is The best player for Linux right now, do yourself a big favour and forget all others), installed Real Player for Linux (found a utility that converted the install-binary into a deb IIRC). My Linux box now plays more formats than my Windows-boxes (mainly because I don't really care about all those formats, it was just so that people would not complain about it).
To compile kmplayer was just an 'apt-get install libkde-dev' (or whatever the KDE-dev package was called) and then 'make && make install'. There are some breezy deb's around, and I made some myself (I like to have everything a deb), but the links didn't work unfortunately.
For the future, the Penguin Liberation Front for Ubuntu is aiming to provide packages not provided in the free / universe / multiverse repositories: http://wiki.ubuntu-fr.org/doc/plf
They didn't have too many packages last time, but enough to put them in sources.list. I will submit my kmplayer deb's to the proper maintainers now that my box is properly set up.
For the simplest installation, I would recommend Automatix though. I've heard alot of good about it, and messing around with all of that yourself takes alot of time and frustration. I mainly see computers as a tool to relieve me of work, but I also like that tool as good as it can be, so I put up with it.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I've come across this argument a lot, and I still fair to see why it's that big of a deal.
Right now I'm running KDE, and of the applications I have open, half were written in GTK+ and the other half in Qt, plus a Java application written with SWT and a Windows application running under Crossover Office.
If I didn't know a thing or two about Linux and about these programs I wouldn't have any idea that some of them are "KDE" applications and others are "GNOME" applications. All of these applications pretty much have the same look and feel. I can copy and paste between them, access all of them from a single menu, put GNOME applications on my desktop or toolbar, etc.
So I don't really see why this is a big dea.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Costs $15, but well worth it. Also, there are more native Linux games than you might think. Check out http://www.icculus.org/ , http://www.linuxgames.com/ http://www.happypenguin.org/ , http://www.linuxgamepublishing.com/ , http://www.tuxgames.com/ , http://games.linux.sk/ , http://games.linux.sk/ , http://www.linux-games.com/ , http://www.linux-gamers.net/ ... Of course for me gaming is just gravy, Linux is my ideal OS for actually getting work done. But I find that games run much more consistently in Linux than in Windows, which makes my gaming flings that much more enjoyable when I do have time for the occasional LAN.
There are much more games for Windows, so if gaming is your number one reason for owning a PC Linux will probably dissapoint you. If you're like me and gaming is secondary, I think you'll get along just fine. ;-)
-AT
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
it's amazing you guys delude yourself into believing you can seriously compete with one of the largest corporations in the world.
Who is "we"? IBM, Novell, Red Hat? It's not david v. goliath anymore. Many very large corporations want to humble Microsoft. Being able to leverage its OS is a serious advantage these corporations would rather it didn't have.
just because you can bang out some obscure computer code, or deal with archaic unix-like systems, doesn't mean you're qualified to make business decisions, nor act like gods.
Well that's where Gates got his start anyway.
do you think people give a fuck about "free" software, when it's five years too old, has 25% functionality, no real commercial support, and impossible to use?
Even if these accusations were true, you have to remember that DOS/Windows took a while to catch up with its contemporaries. But people didn't care. They wanted cheap and functional. Turning to today, if MS has to compete on price with linux they lose.
So, in other words, Linux was installed not for business or technical reasons but because the next guy has it so we should have it too and people are talking about it so we should get one and so on.
Linux is all grown up! Finally it is behaving in the marketplace the way real money behaves -- soon, CIOs everywhere will be propounding their 'Linux strategy' and writing articles in trade rags about 'how a switch to Linux allowed us to give our clients a competitive edge'. Heck, they already are! Then in 10 years, we'll be reading about how 'evaluating Linux alternatives forms a major part of our strategy for cutting the soaring costs of server farms' and so on and the cycle will go on.
Yay!
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
It was 'employees requesting Linux (user demand)' and because 'my competitors have successfully deployed Linux,' he added.
In other terms: PRODUCTIVITY
(I'm not surprized)
Million Dollar Screenshot
That's not quite the same as license fees and security, though those may be the root causes. The license fee itself isn't so bad, but the associated hassle of budget approval and tracking sure is. Lack of security related to break-ins might be tolerated (yuck), but unknown random DRM crud mysteriously destabilizing the machine is harder to accept.
Sadly, macromedia is sitting on their hands when it comes to supporting Flash on computer that use 64 bit processors.
Basically, if you have an AMD 64 running linux in 64 bit mode, you can't see flash on websites.
This is a real-life case from one of my consulting clients. They are a small construction company with 3 servers (2 file and one email) and about 10 workstations. They chose to convert to Linux based servers and workstations for a variety of reasons. The cost savings on the software purchases were plowed into a one-time expense of employee training and they've been quite happy with the results.
$189 per seat vs. $50 per seat for the Codeweaver's Plugin
Microsoft Office = Same price regardless
($700 + $35 per CAL) x 2 = $1750 vs. $0 and $0 CAL's for Server
($700 + $35 per CAL) x 1 = $1050 vs $0 and $0 for CAL's for mail server
That's well in excess of $4000 in savings. The employer wisely chose to invest this in training and sent a couple of his people off to class. This cost him about $2000 for the both of them at a local community college. He then had those two train the rest of the staff. After some initial pain, he's enjoyed a $2000 savings just in his first year on the software alone.
What's not included in this is that they will be able to use the same hardware for at least one additional year. Had they upgraded their operating systems to the current Microsoft releases, they would have had to upgrade their server hardware as well. Some of their workstations would also have required new hardware. Another expense that's not included in this is not having to purchase antivirus or anitspyware products for the workstations. Since 99%+ of these things are Microsoft-targeted, they simply fail to execute in a Linux environment.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
1) Employees want it
2) Competitors are using it
3) Corporate direction (?)
4) Source code
5) Vendor independence
6) Manageability
7) Total Cost of Ownership
8) Unhappy with existing OS
9) Reduce licensing costs
10) Security
The grid they gave with the results was a little hard to read, so I tried to make a top 10 ranking out of it. I just figured this using a simple average rank, treating N/A as 8, so it's not as accurate/meaningful as it could be. The top 3 make no sense to me, but they may have just consistently scored in the top 5, whereas some issues are either very important or entirely unimportant.
Claim: "No major distribution channels."
Comment: There are many, but you really don't need one if you know what you are doing.
Claim: "No real cost advantage."
Comment: Ha-ha, crack kills dude. There are HUGE cost advantages, give it a try sometimes.
Claim: "Stability is no longer an issue."
Comment: Tell that to the 90% of computer users bringing their broken/infected Windows 2000/XP operating systems into the repair shop for reload at least once every 6 months.
Claim: "Nobody cares. At least, none of the PC desktop consuming masses care. If people have a working Windows PC, why should they switch?"
Comment: Most people's Windows PC DOES NOT work reliably because of continous spyware & virus infections and the need to continously apply bandaids to hide Windows' insecure design.
Claim: "It's too hard to use."
Comment: You're kidding, right?
Claim: "Zealots. I don't think this affects most people, but at least one of my co-workers hates Linux (and open source in general) because of the zealotry he was subjected to in the past."
Comment: I think YOU are that person that hates Linux. Or perhaps a paid Microsoft FUD slinger?
Claim: "Easier development platform."
Comment: So, you are saying that a closed, proprietary, secretive, expensive operating system + development environment is easier to develop with than a totally free, completely open, fully publically documented on the Internet including source code, development + operating system environment? I don't believe that you really think that unless you're nuts.
Claim: "As much as I love Linux (and have used it exclusively, at least at home, for nearly a decade), I feel that overall quality of a Linux-based desktop has suffered somewhat recently."
Comment: I think that you probably have never used Linux in your life and actually work for Microsoft, spreading a little more FUD during the leisure time.