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The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won
xtaski writes "Dana Blankenhorn bluntly states a reality that many have known: 'The war is over and Linux won'. With Oracle and Microsoft putting Linux in the spotlight and positioning themselves to grow with Linux. 'A new report shows that 83% of companies expect to support new workloads on Linux against 23% for Windows. ... Over two-thirds of the respondents said they will increase their use of Linux in the next year, and almost no one said the opposite.'"
The battle is over and Linux has won it. The desktop is the major war.
At best, Linux has won an opening skirmish. For most people, the internet is what runs on their desktop ( or laptop ). They have no more concern about the particulars of the server that their router connects to than they do about the particulars of the powerplant that their power cord connects to. They neither know nor care about server software
At worst, it is like the Japanese general ( admiral? ) who is alleged to have said after Pearl Harbor: "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant." MS is obviously taking Linux seriously now, but most people still don't know what it is. Expect MS to engage in serious Linux FUD.
Anyway, congratulations to all the Linux coders.
At least, judging from the general response here to the Novell-MS deal, so people are more at war then ever before.
But than again, it's becoming an old song: 'Haven't they heard we've won the war, what do they keep on fighting for?'
Don't take a page from the George W. Bush's play book and declare victory before the war even really begins. The OS war is just getting started and Linux still has a long way to go before it can be declared the outright winner.
First off, "war" is a stupid metaphor for OS marketshare.
Secondly, there are multiple market segments.
#1. The server segment. Linux looks to have this market locked up.
#2. The corporate/government desktop market. Pay attention to how Munich progresses. This is the next big market for Linux.
#3. The home (non-gamer) market. This isn't going to happen until you can buy Linux pre-loaded from the major OEM's. And that's not going to happen until Linux has the marketshare with the corporations/governments.
#4. Finally, the gamer market. This depends almost entirely upon the support of the hardware OEM's and game ISV's. If the newest video card doesn't come with Linux drivers, the gamers will buy the video card and run the OS that does have drivers. Look for this market to be the very, very last one that Linux will gain marketshare in.
Don't worry about whether Linux is taking over the gamer machines yet. Focus on getting Linux into corporation/government desktops. That will get the OEM's to start pre-loading it which will set the stage for the home user migration.
"First they ignore you..."
1991-96
"...then they laugh at you..."
1997-2000
"...then they attack you..."
2001-06
"...then you win."
2007?
(all years are approximate)
I'll take it one step further. Linux needs to meet certain 'benchmarks' in order to succeed in the markets you mentioned. Specifically:
#1 Server segment - Linux needs to interoperate with Microsoft before it can fully tackle the enterprise administration server market. Active Directory and Outlook are the 2 major players for Microsoft here, Linux needs to be compatible or companies will not fully make the switch. As you said, the desktop comes after the server market, so in order for the server market to succeed, all of those corporate desktops need to work with linux servers.
#2 Corporate/government desktop market - It will be a huge help if Munich succeeds. Applications are the key here, specifically office applications. Open Office is great, but it still has a long way to go in some areas before I would feel comfortable doing away with MSOffice entirely. A working Powerpoint replacement is a must, as is a fully featured Excel replacement. Writer is relatively solid for most uses. Open formats will be a key contributer to advances in office applications.
#3 The home (non-gamer) market - The only reason this will not happen before the corporate/government market is because the OEMs have much to gain by ignoring linux and a lot to lose by embracing it as long as MS has enough market dominance to throw their weight around. A solid web-browser, a decent office application, and a usable movie/music player are all that is truly needed by this market - and they all already exist. The only thing stopping is the OEMs not pre-loading linux in favor of MS.
#4 the gamer market - You hit the nail on the head on this one. Drivers Drivers Drivers. If #3 succeeds, game makers will naturally focus more on their linux customers, but only if they have compatible hardware.
Unfortunately most of us slashdotters want to jump straight to #3-4. That simply isn't going to happen until microsoft's influence is already weakened from some other area such as corporate or government use of linux.
This is due to the collapse of unix and novell on the server marketplace. It's a well documented phenomenon. As the market for unix and netware collapse people either move to linux or windows. Studies show that the vast majority of migrations move to linux but a certain percentage moves to windows. This is why linux on the server is growing faster then windows on the server and both are growing. Once all that migration is done they will have to fight over new customers.
Linux is winning this war, and will continue to win it.
evil is as evil does
The best GPU money can buy this week, the NVidia GeForce 8800 had Linux drivers the very same day it was launched.
However I see no game companies going to develop Linux game after Linux game. After all games are a market where money makes the decisions, and Linux users are used to have software but not pay for it.
(Having said that ugly generalization, I believe I'm just going to install Heavy Gear 2 for Linux as I really like that game and the Windows version doesn't work in my XP)
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
The truth is that Microsofts business model has failed and they know it.
Yeah, I'd call any business with a market cap of 287 billion dollars a failure. Wish I could fail that way.
~X~
Most people don't care if it's free or proprietary; they just want it to work regardless of their knowledge of software. The masses don't care about the philosophical ramifications of open vs. proprietary software and frankly I think the FOSS community puts too much emphasis on it, even above usability in some cases.
And as far as who prefers which operating system I think you're also mistaken. I'm stuck hacking away at a bash prompt for a very large chunk of my day five days a week trying to deploy servers while maintaining other servers. I do not prefer Linux for home use as it doesn't offer me anything more than Windows or Mac OSX (except maybe security in the case of Windows). I personally have a Windows machine for gaming and a Powerbook laptop for just general dicking around.
In either case I think you've grossly over generalized a lot of people.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but ease of install is a major non-issue.
First of all, most Linux distros are already easier to install than Windows, and after a recent eXPerience with a laptop with a SATA drive, which Win XP SP1 can't even see, and the laptop, of course, doesn't have a floppy drive - which is, as we all know, the only way one can load external drivers during a Windows install - well, even Gentoo is easier to install than Windows. At least it sees the disk.
Furthermore, common users do not install their OS anyway. It comes pre-installed or they get one of us geeks to do it for them.
Although, it may be so that Microsoft Quality(TM) accustomed users to a regular OS reinstall... can't say, really...
Superior features are also a non-issue; people just want to use the same programs in the same manner, for they do not want to learn new stuff.
This wasn't meant as a critique; it is not their area of interest, and they mostly just want to use the computer, not program it or learn anything beyond the few basic functions they need and which they have already mastered to the level they need.
Think speed-reading vs. normal reading and how many people bother learning that.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Last year Windows 2003 outpaced new sales of unix for the first time ever, while new linux market share was single digits. Windows 2003 is on pace to do it again this year too.
MS is now just starting to dabble in Linux's foothold, affordable HPC computing. Lets be honest here, the lack of MS support is what gave linux the biggest door into the server market in the first place. Do you guys honestly think that Longhorn server is going to loose MS market share? Since Windows NT 3.51 MS has consistently put out server software that was significantly superior to the previous version, and MANY people are pretty happy with 2003.
Or do any of you think they are going to start losing server share to Apple? I mean I won't even talk about how apple xserve share is hardly measureable in the server world...
All that aside, here is my real question; Why is this an acceptable post? Regardless of your side, nobody really believes the "war" is over and "linux has won". Isn't this the definition of "trolling"? Why is ok to troll when its anti-ms? Its bad enough people troll in the a thread, but to start a new thread by trolling? What the he**?
#1. The server segment. Linux looks to have this market locked up.
Oh, how I wish this were true.... But it's not.
Every day, dozens of servers are deployed running Microsoft Exchange. These servers spread through data centers like a plague, leaving behind Active Directories and MS SQL Server databases. Users start using the non-interoperable features of the windows server and it causes DHCP, DNS, and eventually FTP and Web servers to go to windows 'because it's easier'. Somewhere in there a CIO, who only knows about software with a multi-million dollar marketing budget, figures out that it is cheaper to buy a bulk license than to buy individual Microsoft licenses. His trade magazine said he would get audited if he didn't anyway. Then the administrators are forced to use the products for every task to maximize ROI, while the CIO walks around the office spouting inaccuracies about Linux, like it's "famous inability to handle timezones" and other such trash, in order to seem smart. Before you know, while there may be a couple of Linux boxes in the company, for the first time ever Windows Server is dominating every rack in these companies datacenters where there user to be commercial UNIX. Linux's main role? Providing a stable kernel for the virtual machines that allow Microsoft multiple license fees for a single piece of hardware.
You just can't compete with that marketing budget. Not when people with no technical knowledge make the purchasing decisions. Not only is Microsoft encouraging you to buy their own products, but the thousands of other tech companies that bring in billions of dollars of revenue each year by selling products that make Microsoft's broken bloated trash usable are encouraging you to buy Microsoft so that you'll need their software to fix them. In 5 years, Microsoft will have the same stranglehold on the server market that they have on the desktop today. Ironically, they may blow the desktop market with Vista.
I have to agree with you on those two points. But there is another issue for a small sub-section of the general populous, people like me. I have spent countless hours tuning and playing with my system just to get it the way I like. I know windows 'cause that's what I learned on, and so switching to Linux would just be a waste of time. The things I could do on Linux I can now do on windows, with little or no problems at all. Anything that Linux is offering windows can already do, with Linux's added benefit of being free. Now with Vista looming over the horizon, the people like me are stuck in a bind. Linux is great and all, but is it really necessary to learn from the beginning? Unfortunately, that issue combined with the zero ability to play games (and wine in no-way counts) makes the decision easy for me. The only computer I own that has the slightest possibility of becoming a Linux box is my media server, which doesn't need windows. My laptop is a tablet and support/features for tablets running Linux isn't what I would want it to be right now. Oh well, I guess the media server is a start...
Har?
Rather than wasting time and energy preaching, intelligent people devote their time to learning and trying out new tools to increase what they have in their toolkit.
Juat accept that Windows is better for some things and Linux is better for others - then use the strengths of both to your advantage.
There is no war.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I suppose you mean at a desktop computer, because otherwise one could go endlessly about all the embedded uses of Linux. Considering applications, I would say both systems are pretty much equivalent these days, I can't think of any application in either Linux or Windows that doesn't have an equivalent in the other system. Wait, I mean other than viruses, of course, that seems to be a category of "applications" where Linux is still very much behind...
The biggest advantage of Linux over Windows for me is ease of use, and that seems to be an intrinsic advantage, because Windows, as its name implies, is predominantly GUI oriented. A graphic interface is better for some jobs, a text interface is better for others, just like a spoon is better for eating soup and a fork is better for steak.
Try to automate any task in Windows, it's a real PITA. Programmers often end doing things through kludges like Excel macros for the lack of a good text-based interface. For instance, let's say you were sent a project that has dozens of directories with thousands of files in it. Let's say you want to rename all *.jpeg files to *.jpg. How would you do that in Windows? In VMS that would be a piece of cake, in a Unix system it's more complicated, for i in *.jpeg; do mv $i `echo $i | sed s/jpeg$/jpg/ - ` ; done or something like that would do it, but the easiest way to do it in Windows that I can think of would be a VB program.
Ironically, ease of installation, which is often cited by XP users as an advantage of Windows over Linux, seems to be one of the areas where Linux shines. I have created a standard system configuration script with twenty or so functions, one for each type of application. There are functions for DVD playing, scientific applications, office applications, graphics, development, electronic circuits design, etc. When I install a Linux system, I install the basic system and run my script, after uncommenting the function calls for the types of applications I want in that computer. Then it's just a matter of waiting until apt-get does its job. No need to insert CDs, no need to click anywhere, no need to run setup.exe, no need to mix and match all the *.DLL files each application expects.
I think both Linux and Windows have made progress in the last ten years, and one should always consider that. It's stupid to compare Kubuntu with Windows95, or XP with Yggdrasil Linux. But IMHO Linux has evolved much more, both because Windows was more mature ten years ago and because Linux has some intrinsic advantages. I think being an open and free system is an advantage in that people make it evolve towards what the users prefer, rather than what marketing decides. Another advantage is that Unix has an excellent basic conception. Windows evolved over DOS, a system whose basic conception was to make it run in the available hardware of 1981. The emphasis on GUI solutions, the lack of a good scripting system language, and the need to maintain compatibility with the DOS roots are limitations that make Windows inferior to Linux.
The main thing Windows can't do is have nice integration with open source software (the most common kind).
To get ANY work done on Windows I have to first, spend $1000 or more upgrading the box (Visual Studio, MS Office, Antivirus, etc). Now, since most everything on the planet is written for a autoconf toolchain, I need cygwin... but at that point I'm being about as silly as installing a linux box just to run MS Office under wine... I should have installed Linux in the first place, so let's forgo that step.
OK, so what do we not have... SSH. Sucks to be me. Sure, I can TS... assuming of course I bought the upgraded licensed version of windows that can actually do that. I can run a webserver... assuming I bought the upgrades. I can run a SQL server... assuming I bought the upgraded OS capable of doing such. I can run apache/mysql, true... but the integration of those apps on the windows platform is abysmal... they were written for Linux and if I'm going to go to the trouble of installing and using them, well, same argument as cygwin.
Sure. on both platforms I can install out of the box and check email. I can do that on a palm pilot.. that's not an honest comparison. Windows *can* do anything Linux can do... by emulating Linux and doing a piss poor job of it. The reverse is rarely the case except with video games or the occasional specialty application which dwarfs the cost of the OS anyway and you are best off running a dedicated workstation running windows for said app.