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.'"

Comments

Re:

[eno2001]

Your assessment is farily realistic. Being an ex-Windows user who moved to Linux in 97, I have to say the only reasons I moved were the things that I could do in Linux that you can't do in Windows. There are a ton of things like that. But, it's pretty much an even split. For all those things, I'm sure you can find things that Windows can do that Linux can't. The only thing is the reason Linux can't do them is typically artifical restrictions and not really technical limitations of Linux. Which is an important point to clear up and keep at the forefront. Many people who complain about Linux "sucking" tend to do so because if they tried it, they typically ran into a restriction that was imposed artifically by a hardware vendor or some sort of copy protection mechanism. The "problems" in Linux are not due to design issues of technical failures at all. The fact that I can't join Vongo, for example, has nothing to do with Linux distros not being capable of handling streaming video over broadband. It has to do with the fact that Vongo decided to base their service around Windows Media Player with DRM. A completely artifical restrction made in the name of business.

The fact that I can't play games like Max Payne unless I want to shell out for Cedega (which does work quite well for the games it supports officially) has nothing to do with Linux "not being up to par with Windows" where games are concerned. It has to do with the copy protection that the publisher chose which it is a crime to reverse engineer. Once again, an artificial restriction made for business reasons. I had a laptop from work at one point that I had to install Windows drivers in an NDIS Wrapper to get WiFi support for Linux with. Again, not a limitation of Linux at all, and quite a clevelr solution, I might add... The problem was that for business reasons, Broadcom had decided that they didn't want to release any specs for their WiFi chip. Seeing a theme here?

In my case, Linux won enough for me to ditch EVERY Windows box I owned and run only Linux. If I need access to something in Windows (which is typically due to DRM issues), then I use virtualization. It's also been a lot cheaper for me since I can now have EVERY piece of software I want and I don't have to worry about licensing it for each machine I've got. The NLE video suite Cinelerra, is a perfect example. I *could* buy multiple copies of Premiere for the six machines I have here at home to do video editing. Or... I could just install as many copies of Cinelerra as I want on all 18 of my systems and use it's clustering features to have a nice little free renderfarm. But, my needs are a bit more advanced than most Windows users which is why I still think that having Windows around for the normal user is just fine. And, no that's not an elitist statement. I'm just saying that there aren't many people who have 18 systems at home, like to do video work and need/want a render farm.

I won't really go into what Linux offers over Windows unless pressed, because most of us here know the truth about what Linux can do that Windows can't. :)