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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.
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
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!
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...
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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.
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.
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.