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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?'
Has this been confirmed by Netcraft?
Isn't that a bit like supermarkets saying we're going to sell more organic food? Not necessarily going to decrease the sale of regular food, but we're not going to decrease the amount of organic food.
I'm happy there are more linux servers. And once it becomes a viable desktop solution for a normal user, it'll be a boon for its security. As it is now, it's not a flexible, easy to manage, easy to use desktop OS. But keep trying!
Declare victory then get the hell out.
why do i keep on having recurring visions of a flight deck with a "mission accomplished banner" blowing in the background...
*ducks*
"A new IBM-sponsored study on Linux sent m..."
Hahahaha.... thank you IBM for fudding the Microsoft way. Down Microsoft DOWN! I have a boat load of nails for your new coffin.
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. He spent a significant amount of time in the US before the Japanese attacked. He felt that the pre-emptive strike was a mistake, and that it would only buy them about 6 months reprieve before the American war machine was fully geared up and ready. Thus his "I fear I have awakened a sleeping giant" comment.
He was right. Six months later, the U.S. turned the tide at the Battle of Miday. The Japanese Navy was nowhere near as resilient as the U.S. Navy, and their losses hurt them deeply. Combined with the incredible number of carriers the U.S. began to manufacture, the six month turning point was a deadly one for Japan.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
and there, Linux hasn't so much won, as it is simply accepted as a fait accompli. The networks run by government departments are enormous beasts, with tens/hundreds of thousands of desktop PCs running Windows XP and thousands of servers running Irix, Solaris, OpenBSD, Linux and Windows 2003 server. The interesting thing is that all new server installations are either Linux or Windows 2003, other versions of UNIX have pretty much fizzled out and Linux (specifically Red Hat and Novell) is used for critical servers, firewalls and data-diodes, while Windows is mainly used for Active Directory and Exchange, protected behind an army of penguins.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
If it'll stop the OS wars, I'll accept anything. Imagine if other products were debated as often as Operating Systems.
Architect: "Loser. My printer is so much better than yours, because it is a plotter and can print HUGE banners!"
Writer: "Loser. Well my printer was cheaper, and the ink is much cheaper!"
Graphic Designer: "Sellout! My printer can print on photo-quality paper and at a higher resolution!"
Although the jokes the wars create are quite funny.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
"Don't forget to pay your $699 licensing fee you cock-smoking teabaggers."
Man, you had me confused for a minute. I sat here for a minute wondering what the Playstation 3 had to do with this!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Linus has won nothing because there is nothing to win. Linux won't kill Windows in the next decade and vice versa. No one is winning but rather both sides are in a pissing contest they refuse to admit is worthless.
I like muppets.
The war has been won on the server side a long time ago. MS was allways a joke there.
On the desktop, the best Product is MAC OS X, with both Windows and Linux running distant second. For some reason desktop customers do not seem to care about usability too much. But what the hell, OS X is pretty close to Linux anyways, with regard to what software runns.
But if Linux is the server OS of the future, it means it will stay and grow. Desktop OSes can be changed pretty fast. Server OSes cannot. MS allways wanted to dominate the server market. Guess they just never managed to create a good enough product. Or have long enough product lifetimes.
My personal reason for running Linux and not OS X is that I wanted a workstation OS (read Unix-like OS) longe before OS X came along. Windows? Well, most games only run on Windows. Any other reason to use it? I don't see any. It is not even cheaper or easier to use if you know what you are doing...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"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)
Meh, real men run UNIX anyway.
Seriously, I think some of the Linux distributions are putting themselves in jeopardy by aligning themselves with corporate interests and for accepting and distributing binary blobs from vendors. Corporations are simply using the Linux community as a way of off-loading their development costs.
#1. The server segment. Linux looks to have this market locked up.
I'm not sure what the hell people are looking at when they say things like this. Take a look at Microsoft quarterly results. Their revenue and profits in their server OS and SQL products has been skyrocketing every quarter.
Linux may win a war versus Microsoft on the server, but that is not where Microsoft is most powerful. Microsoft is still the 800 pound king gorilla of the desktop, and Linux still has a way to go before it unseats Microsoft. Heck, OS X has been out for over five years. Many users who have used both OS X and Windows claim that OS X is superior, and many have switched. However, OS X has barely pinched Microsoft, and Microsoft still enjoys 93% or so marketshare on the desktop (5% goes to Mac, and the rest of that is Linux, BSD, and other OSes).
The reason why Windows still hasn't been unseated is that too many people have software that is Windows-only. Businesses still rely on in-house Windows programs that were created by some programmer many years ago who is long gone, and cannot afford porting it to another operating system. Sometimes you'll see a business run an old Windows 3.1 or even DOS application since there is no replacement, and since it is good enough for them to not worry about porting it or creating a clone of it. Engineers aren't dropping AutoCAD anytime soon, and AutoCAD is Windows only. Engineers, being well known for their pragmatism, stick to Windows. Graphics artists on both the PC and the Macintosh who rely on Photoshop, Quark Express, and Dreamweaver are not going to move to Ubuntu and use the GIMP, Scribus, and nvu (yes, those open source products are good, but their commercial competitors are very good and are worth the $$$ that you pay for them; they end up saving you $$$ with their features and ease of use). And developers who want some food on their table better know something about Win32, .NET, and other Windows technologies. In most non-CS fields, you cannot avoid Windows in the professional world, and Windows has became a fact of life in many careers.
So, what is the open source community going to do about this? A great operating system with all of the bells and whistles isn't enough for most people. Once again, OS X is considered the best operating system by many people, but some applications haven't been ported yet (or won't be ported), which doesn't leave OS X as an option for those people. The open source community needs to start polishing up their offerings and get started on some new stuff (an AutoCAD replacement will get engineers off of Windows, for example). GIMP can use some improvement. OpenOffice should be more modular and faster. Dia needs to start looking like OmniGraffle or Visio. There needs to be some sort of OSS equivalent to Visual Basic (what I mean by that is ease of developing GUI applications). I recommend the same with other Linux applications.
Remember, the key to operating system adoption is applications. Look at MS-DOS, for example (back in its heyday). It was hard to use (compared to the Apple Macintosh at the time), very rudimentary (compared to other OSes in the 80s like Unix, NeXTSTEP, and VMS), and can only run one application at a time. But it ran Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect, and it ran all of the other applications that business users wanted. Home users wanted the computers that business users had, so they got that too. Ditto for Windows 3.1. NeXTSTEP knocks the socks off of Windows 3.1. But who had the applications?
Your OS can be the easiest to use OS in the world. It can have microkernels with the best scheduling and load-balancing algorithms that exist. It can utilize all of the systems research published in the ACM and IEEE journals within the past two years. It can be so secure that it would be the envy of Homeland Security and would make Symantec and McAffe angry (they can't sell protection for it). It can even have a mass advertising campaign with beautiful angelic models praising the product. But if it cannot run the applications that they want, then it is just a waste of hard drive space and time as far as they are concerned.
#2. The corporate/government desktop market. Pay attention to how Munich progresses. This is the next big market for Linux.
You would think that government would be the first to jump on open source. Very few things seem as ridiculous to me as closed-source voting machines.
But then again, since money elects politicians, politicians cozy up to big business.
Gotta watch those screenwriters:
m oto's_sleeping_giant_quote
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Isoroku_Yama
rj
So when is the liquidation sale in Redmond?
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.
Linux: The wars over: we won. Turns out your the big hero. I get to drive the float. And Red Hat is in charge of confetti!
Microsoft: I'm no stranger to sarcasm sir.
The desktop is dead. The new battleground is on the phones and other embedded devices.
evil is as evil does
You missed one. The embedded market...which I'm sorry, but Linux/*nix has had that for a few years now, and no one has noticed.
I'm not talkin cell phones and PDAs. I'm talkin things you use that you NEVER think about. What do you think runs all the slot machines in vegas? Keno machines at truck stops? Station pumps at EVERY BP gas station in the USA? Etc etc. That's a huge marketshare that's pretty much hidden from the public eye.
Linux has already gotten what it's gonna get. Don't expect it to gain any double-digit percentage of market-share in the next decade...it just won't...unless Microsoft takes Novell and incorporates it into their own stuff natively. Maybe we see Windows 2010 with a *nix kernel in it and it runs pretty much all apps.
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
I think that #3 will happen as a natural progression from MS's anti-piracy efforts and OEM deals. It used to be that when an new MS OS came out, you went out and bought a copy, and installed it on all the computers in your home. Maybe you even went in halfsies with a pal. Now, not only are you not able (without some real effort) install on multiple machines, but you don't even go out and buy a copy of the OS. You buy a computer with the OS already on it. Now what happens to your old machine. Yes, some people will toss them out. Many will keep running their old software. But, there will also be a significantly large group of people that will just install Linux. They won't care if it runs everything, as it is the second computer that they use for writing emails, or surfing the web with someone else in the family is on the gamer system. They may not do much on those systems, but their existence in their homes will show them that there are other choices. Some may even decide that they like Linux better, or that it suits their needs all by itself. That is how I see #3 coming about.
Did you really just compare Gandhi's fight for freedom from British rule in India to the OS "wars"?
You can compare anything to anything. That's the beauty of C style type casting, really!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
well, points 2 and 3 are (sometimes) easily fixed by using a newer distro. Ubuntu Edgy made some progress in wifi (i believe) and sudo is setup for the main user by default.
i nuxplugin
As for Earth From Space, check out: http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b1_installer_l
Just visited the site, works great for me in linux.
Just to relieve the hyperbola, a War is a condition that results in mass destruction of life, culture and property for some arbritrary greater good. Brains and meat sprayed over the road, orphans, legless combatants. That is War. It is important to recognize the difference. Linux vs Microsoft is not War. Pick another word. Try not to be such a twit.
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.
Why is there such a competition anyway? Why do retards have to complain when other people use some other operating system? What does it matter if Linux isn't on every computer in the world? Some (read: most normal) people prefer Windows because you can use it without some inordinate amount of knowledge. Yeah, Linux is great if you know more about computers than most people (and if you don't have any particularly special programs you need to run), but what does it really matter? One reason I personally don't use Linux is because a lot of people who do are very condescending about it.
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~
Which is now MS apparently...
I'm going to go get a me a clippy t-shirt!
Screw you Linu$!
Most people don't care if it's free or proprietary; they just want it to work regardless of their knowledge of software. The masses don't care about the philosophical ramifications of open vs. proprietary software and frankly I think the FOSS community puts too much emphasis on it, even above usability in some cases.
And as far as who prefers which operating system I think you're also mistaken. I'm stuck hacking away at a bash prompt for a very large chunk of my day five days a week trying to deploy servers while maintaining other servers. I do not prefer Linux for home use as it doesn't offer me anything more than Windows or Mac OSX (except maybe security in the case of Windows). I personally have a Windows machine for gaming and a Powerbook laptop for just general dicking around.
In either case I think you've grossly over generalized a lot of people.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
Linux won't kill Windows in the next decade and vice versa. No one is winning but rather both sides are in a pissing contest they refuse to admit is worthless.
That sounds even handed but it's whack. The pissing is vastly one sided. No one in the Free Software world has done anything to "fight" other than state the obvious shortcomings of non free software. Microsoft, on the other hand, has spent billions calling free software a "communist" "cancer", and extended all of the tools they used to destroy their non free competitors: non-standard "extensible standards", secret file formats, and threats for vendors who would carry anything else. The real problem M$ has is competing. They had a difficult enough time matching non free competitor's offerings. It's impossible for them to match free software. Just look at the monster that Vista is - it's the end of the line for the non free way. Only M$ really cares about market share. Free software vendors know there's more than enough work in the world for everyone to be a winner. Projecting M$ like attitudes onto free software developers and users is deeply offensive.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I would like Linux to win the war. The reason is NOT so that Microsoft can go bankrupt (although that would be nice), or so that people can diss Windows (although that would be nice). It's not so that we can have a bigger market share than Redmond (although that would be nice).
To my mind, the war will be won when computer equipment manufacturers make their hardware available for Linux as much as they do for the market leader. I want to be able to buy the latest and greatest LCD projector mouse with built-in Wifi webcam, and not have to worry about whether some poor hacker in some corner of the world has worked all the bugs out of his loadable module. I want the manufacturer to provide the driver, and list requirements like: "Windows Vista, OS X v23.6, or Linux kernel 2.6.72" and have a CD that lets me use the thing.
All those people on either side of the debate, who say, "Why should we dumb down our geek OS for the average Joe?" or "Let's crush Microsoft under our heel!" --well, this is my goal for Linux winning. I don't care if Linux has 0.1% marketshare --if I can use it, and anyone else who wants to can use it, that's all I need.
As Linus says, we're not out to crush Microsoft. That's just a side effect.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I really don't think so.
Aunt Tilly is an interesting statistic, nothing more. Look at what she does -- she browses the web, uses wireless. Apparently she needs to edit sudoers for some bullshit reason -- but I think it's bullshit for you to even bring it up; an ordinary Linux user does NOT have to do anything with sudoers, and in fact, I've touched the file maybe once, and I do far more with my box than Aunt Tilly ever will.
But regardless, look at what she doesn't do.
She doesn't spend between $50 and $500 a month on new games.
She doesn't make decisions about what new software a multi-million-dollar company is buying and deploying on hundreds of desktops.
She doesn't develop software... period, not to mention software that is so intricately bound to some quirk in the Windows API that she causes headaches for Microsoft itself when they try to fix their OS.
She, as so many people have made so perfectly clear, doesn't care what OS she runs, so long as it works. Thus, if Linux were taking over in a big way, she might buy an Ubuntu machine and not even know it. She certainly wouldn't be having these "Aunt Tilly" issues you so colourfully describe if Linux came preloaded on her computer and already set for her wireless card.
If "Earth from Space" doesn't work on her computer, and Linux has sufficient marketshare, she'll complain to the Smithsonian, not to her OS. The Smithsonian would be forced to use actual web standards, not made-up proprietary ones.
She doesn't impact, in any real way, the success or failure of Linux, other than perhaps word-of-mouth, and whether she tolerates websites going down or her credit card information being stolen.
The people who would need to use Linux are: gamers, business executives, IT people, and software developers, not necessarily in that order. These people are the only people who will actually make a conscious decision one way or the other, and they're certainly in a way to make other key people sweat.
For instance, let's say a large company suddenly decides to go pure-Linux, but they've been buying from Dell. They switch to someone else. As one company after another does this, Dell will either be forced to start selling computers without an OS (and at an actual, legitimate discount from the Windows ones), or even start preloading Linux, or they'll lose business and someone else will fill the gap. With enough companies doing this, it becomes viable for an OEM to decide it's cheaper to support their few home users by preloading Linux and supporting that than to deal with Microsoft. Home users will be faced with a choice -- actually spend $250+ on an OS, or switch. My feeling is, Aunt Tilly, given the choice, won't want to spend $250 on something she doesn't care about anyway. Many of them may even notice how nicely their work computers run, and will take Linux home with them.
Another scenario: Gamers, who have long built their own systems or ordered ludicrously expensive ones from the likes of Alienware, discover Linux -- cheaper for the custom-built, and available in a shiny case from a game-specific OEM, already pre-configured and tuned (so none of your "ndiswrapper" complaints). They start running so many games under Cedega that game developers decide it's cheaper to support Linux directly, with cross-platform games, than to keep dealing with the nightmare that is Cedega and actual Windows support. Eventually, games no longer run under Windows, and gamers either dual-boot or switch completely. Anyone who cares about that demographic starts developing Linux versions at least, if not exclusively, for all their major apps, so eventually, non-gamers start to switch, going to their gamer friends for technical help.
Finally: Software developers discover Linux. Be it some killer language or some killer tool, or simply the fact that Linux provides none of the hassle of Windows, and really isn't lacking anything -- even today -- that a software developer would want for his job, they start to switch. They start
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
Really? Mind if I ask what you typed that on?
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**?
VxWorks runs a lot of it, QNX is also popular. There's tons more as well, heck some devices even use DOS (really). Linux is certainly growing but if you think Linux is the embedded OS that runs the world, think again. As some high profile examples of the two I listed the Mars rovers run on VxWorks and Cisco's new IOS-XR is built on top of QNX.
While you could claim *NIX has a lot of the embedded market since QNX is POSIX complaint and VxWorks is at least in some ways it's not Linux by a long shot.
The embedded market is rather varied and you see all sorts of OSes in there you don't normally see. You even see Windows. In addition to Windows CE/Mobile there's a special embedded version of Windows XP (called XP embedded). Windows is getting fairly popular in new ATMs these days, though the OS/2 (yes really) ATMs are still a sizable force.
#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.
Do you think Linux games would be pirated more than Windows games?
Or, more precisely,do you think a Linux counterpart of a game would be more pirated than the Windows version?
I'm afraid that you're very much mistaken if you think that, and this is why I find this statement of yours misleading.
Yes, Linux users like the fact that their OS is free. But to many (not the most; I don't have such illusions) even more important is the fact that it's open.
Linux users - at least in my experience - aren't cheapskates; if they find a product worth their money, they'll buy it, hardware or software, no matter.
No-one at least bordering on normal won't refuse to buy a game although they'd really want to play it just because they believe in free software.
But whatever... I only know one thing about Linux and games:
Even some of my friends who don't like Linux and don't believe in it ever succeeding in anything but the tiny share it appears to have right now have Linux installed on their machines.
Old games work much better under Linux than under Windows XP. DOS games, Win9x games... you name it. There are many games which won't even run under WinXP, even in compatibility mode, but will run just fine under Wine or Cedega.
I know that not many people play ancient[1] games all that often, but it is a factor which could get people running Linux as their secondary OS - if only they knew about it.
[1] In game terms, anything older than "previous version" is ancient.
Ignore this signature. By order.
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?
Linux has not won. No one has. That's the beauty of the checks and balances known as competition. However, it has definitely improved.
Microsoft can see the writing on the wall but evidently no one else can. Virtulalization, i.e. running more than one operating system at once has made war obsolete. Microsoft doesn't need to compete with linux. The day and age of running only one operating system is near over. You buy a windows licence and microsoft will give you virtualzation software and setup and install linux for you. The only time anyone needs to worry about patent litigation I think is when they get between MS and it's tax. Linux compatability is now a windows feature. Getting linux to work well with windows is desirable. Think about it, if they give you linux they can tell the EU regulators to go stick it. Let me repeat myself, so long as MS gets our money they are happy. MS is currently taking the advice of keeping it's enimies closer to heart. If you don't believe me your going to cry when you see the ads of MS including linux for free.
Make sure it has a raid array and no floppy drive for even more fun.
Yep. They were all off on maneuvers, about a day out of port. IIRC, the Japanese knew this, but they were mostly concerned with the battleships. The idea that a carrier could be a major force to be reckoned with was only realized because the U.S. was forced to fight the beginning of the war with only carriers. The results were so spectacular, that the carrier force became the backbone of the WWII fleets. Of course, the CVE idea might have been a bit ambitious.
My memory is a bit hazy on this point, but I believe that the problem was their ability to project force over long distances. Their planes didn't have the same range as ours, and they continued to have their code systems broken. There was a major effort to put airstrips out on the occupied islands (that was how Yamamoto got killed), but they simply weren't able to effectively implement that plan.
Also, our carriers left their carriers up in flames after Midway. That significantly reduced their airpower. The Japanese weren't concerned about it at the time, because their Wargames had told them that Battleships were superior. (Actually, one of the Japanese admirals changed the results because he didn't believe that one of his battleships could have been sunken by aircraft.)
Possibly. But Japan was screwed no matter which way you cut it. They'd invested most of their naval resources into the Yamoto class battleships in an attempt to outclass anything that the U.S. could safely fit through the Panama Canal. (Nearly all our warships were built, and are still built, in Newport News/Norfolk.) They were then forced to watch as their Top of the Line Battleships were almost completely ineffective against the U.S. carriers. Once the Essex came online (barely six months later!) it was all over. She had a shakedown while the Enterprise held down the fort, then went on to be the harbinger of an incredible number of Essex class carriers.
The best the Japanese could have hoped for was a protracted land battle on the pacific islands and our west coast. They simply didn't have the resources to actually win a war against the U.S., nor was that their intention. They had hoped to render the U.S. impotent, then make peace after the Axis objectives were completed. Had they never attacked Pearl Harbor, they probably would have done far more damage to the U.S. war effort.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
None of these reports is faultless, and they measure different things from what the parent article measures. But there seems to be no crisis for Microsoft for the time being.
Welcome to 2006, where package managers are graphical. Also welcome to computing's past, present, and future, where the average user can never figure out where they put they files they download.
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.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Oh, please do! We use Linux at the university I attend, but I don't really see any tangible part of Linux that Windows can't preform adequately well.
Most of the limitations that you list here are based on the fact that companies don't see a profitable model out of Linux. If Linux becomes more popular and more and more people start using it, then companies will start investing in software designed for Linux. I'm sure that you already figured this out though. I also think that there is this business stigma against anything to do with 'open source', equating it to 'non profit'. But there are quite a few successful Linux business models out there, so really this bias is a bit misplaced.
Now, I'm probably going to upset a few friends of Linus when I say that this new Microsoft SuSE thing might help the 'image' of Linux a bit with the mainstream public, although it is already hurting it with the hardcore fans out there right now. Really, the major thing that Linux needs is support of the 'BIG' software companies. Heck, the only thing I see that is stopping me from switching is, for the most part, the lack of game support and this looming hardware conundrum. I say that 'cause getting my stuff to work in Windows is bad enough, I'm a bit weak in the knees when I think of getting it to work in Linux (although this is founded on what I heard on the internet, so it's probably not that).
Har?
And on the subject of admirals... "It's a trap!"
Wow. A, what? Two year old installation disk doesn't recognize the latest and greatest drive? And because of that Linux installation problems are a "non-issue"?
Actually, your installation comments are correct in one regard, most people use what's already installed on the computer as it comes from the store. And that, very shortly, is going to be Vista.
And that, my friend, is where the balance lies. Any success Linux will have at the desktop level will have to come at the expense of Windows Vista. Or in other words, MS is going to have to blow it big time to give it an opening. And if Vista suceeds in fixing a good portion of the security issues and other problems currently associated with XP... then Linux simply isn't going to get that opening.
Because the majority of people aren't going to want to give up all of their old software and games and repurchase them just so they can move to a "better" platform. Especially when that "better" platform doesn't even support the majority of those products. Again, you're right, they just want to use the same programs in the same manner.
And if Linux expects to exploit that opening, should it come, then it had better be ready to support all of that hardware: computers and printers and cameras and everything else. And they're better have a common face: 50-plus all slightly different and incompatible distributions and desktops and installers and drivers are not going to cut it.
Take a page from Apple's book. Every Mac desktop and notebook shipped comes with OS X. No "lite" or "media" or "pro" versions. No choice between 50 different-named different-looking different-acting versions. Just OS X.
Personally, I don't think you guys can get past your differences and make it happen.
(BTW, just for the record, I know about OS X Server, but we're talking about the desktop here. Try to stay focused.)
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
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.
:)
I do hope that you have at least worked with Windows since 97 or use it from time to time. Windows from 1997 Win95/Win98 is quite different from the NT based model of XP and Vista.
There are very few things you can do on Linux that you cannot do on a Windows system based on the NT architecture of today. From running in a GUI off mode to even not utilizing the Win32 subsystem and just using the BSD subsystem to write, compile and work with *nix based applications.
Your statement about capabilities is VERY true when comparing a *nix OS to the DOS model Windows of the 90s, but it fails when trying to make the same assertion about the NT and modern based Windows versions.
I don't want to pick on your post, but your comments would be like me saying I stopped using Mac at System 8.x and then defining my statements based on the limitations of the System 8 OS. And as most people know, the difference between a Mac running System 8 or 9 and a Mac running OSX is quite different, as OSX has very few architectural limitations. The same is true of modern Windows, there are very few architectural limitations.
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.
In 1997 you could make a very long list of applicaitons and concepts in use on Linux that just were NOT possible on Win95/98, yet today there are almost no applications or concepts in use on Linux that are either available or in use on Windows.
So I will ask, give us even one example of something that Linux is capable of that Windows is not capable of doing.
I will even be kind enough to go first with a very basic example of something Windows can do that Linux cannot do at the core architectural level. Windows is based on the NT architecture, which is a hybrid kernel concept that allows it to host OS subsystems. This is also why the NT architecture has been called a client/server kernel concept. What this gives NT that Linux cannot do is the ability to natively run multiple OS subsystems concurrently that also can communicate with each other at the kernel level.
Win32 is an example of one subsystem in use on Windows and runs independantly of other subsystems like the *nix subsystem, OS/2, Win16, and Win64 subsystems to name a few examples. The subsystem OS architecture concept is not virtualization nor emulation, as each subsystem are true OSes acting independently with their own subsystem level kernels that sit on top of the NT architecture.
It is even rumored that MS has worked on a non BSD based *nix subsystem for Windows that is Linux based and would be able to run anything Linux could run with no virtualization or emulation and it would also have the ability to talk to the other subsystems, like the Win32 subsystem.
Ok, your turn...
All Linux users know why the OS is better than Windows. If you haven't figure that out, hopefully one day you will.
To give you an example, few years back I had a PC dual boot Linux and Windows. I used a dial-up modem to access the internet. On Linux I could get 4K a second, but on Windows, 2K a second or close to zero. That was tested by switching between different OS using the same phone line and ISP. Both OS wasn't running anything other than a web browser.
Bear in mind, most if not all Linux programs are free, their authors take pride in what they do. Unlike Windows, started out as a product to make money. What's the explanation for a paid OS and modem driver is slower than a free OS and modem driver?
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.
There needs to be a godwin-like rule for this.
Every time windows vs. linux is mentioned people quote this thing like it was a rule of battle or something. It isn't. Sometimes they fight you and you lose.
I will even be kind enough to go first with a very basic example of something Windows can do that Linux cannot do at the core architectural level. Windows is based on the NT architecture, which is a hybrid kernel concept that allows it to host OS subsystems. This is also why the NT architecture has been called a client/server kernel concept. What this gives NT that Linux cannot do is the ability to natively run multiple OS subsystems concurrently that also can communicate with each other at the kernel level.
I wasn't the original poster but.... Windows NT 4.0 was 1996 and it included the kernel features you are talking about (I don't believe 1995s 3.51 did because it didn't support alpha but I may be wrong). So I don't know what the 1997 has to do with your point.
Now as far as a capability of Linux that isn't part of Windows: directly manipulate hardware from the GUI/CLI. I all the time have problems with getting windows to actual perform OS functions:
* rescan the SCSI bus,
* pass a packet to the ethernet card exactly as specified (i.e. have the ethernet card emit a specific stream of bytes)
* allow me to pass a message to a piece of hardware the OS isn't seeing
* allow me to access a drive by cylinder
And yes, given how buggy PC hardware is, how buggy PC hardware is these issues have come up and on each of them I was able to diagnose and repair problems in Linux that I was not able to do in Windows. The core purpose of an OS is to be the interface between hardware and programs and Windows does not interface well between cmd.exe and hardware.
In addition the standard complaint about the lack of a powerful command line interface holds. The ability to script apps and stream between them is huge. There is nothing stopping the NT architecture from supporting this ability but the apps don't support it and the OSes (with the exception of Unix services for Windows) don't. And then you can build on this one more level up with termcap. There is no way that I know of to have cmd.exe (or for that matter most other terminal emulator) allow you to handle weirdness on the other side.
But in any case I don't disagree with you that the NT kernel has a better design than the Linux kernel. However the Linux kernel actually has more features. For example the number of filesystems actually supported, the number of network protocols actually supported.... There is no reason people couldn't reverse this, but they haven't.
In short the problem that windows has today is the same problem it had in 1995. Windows apps (with some exceptions like Office) do not offer "power user" features as part of the paradigm.
I have experienced the same thing. My roommate ran Bittorrent on windows XP and frequently got slow(er) download rates (50-100 KBps), yet when I hooked up to the same torrent, on my linux box, going through the same router and connection, I got around 300 KBps. It happened with many torrents, and most of the time I was downloading everything, because it would take 1/4 of the time.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I'm always amazed when I see comments like this. On my home computer, Firefox has been running since mid October and is fine (about 120M resident, 200M virtual).
I use NoScript with only a few sites white-listed. Is that why I don't see memory issues?
I'm running on Linux. Is that why I don't see memory issues?
I do use Flash and Java, often heavily, so that can't be it.
*sigh* back to work...
Wow. A, what? Two year old installation disk doesn't recognize the latest and greatest drive?
First off, SATA is about 2 years old so it's about as late and great as the OS he's talking about. Second, it's not just that, it's also the difficulty providing it with the driver. A FLOPPY drive only? Come on!
I haven't used my floppy drive in YEARS, I don't even know if it still works. Virtually everything is on CD, DVD or USB mass storage device. Requiring a floppy is a lazy carryover.
And that, my friend, is where the balance lies. Any success Linux will have blah, blah, blah
Linux is ALREADY growing in users. It's been a steady, slow process but it shows no signs of stopping. You believe something that's already happening isn't going to happen because Microsoft is going to do something they have a long track record of not being able to do?
Because the majority of people aren't going to want to give up all of their old software and games and repurchase them just so they can move to a "better" platform.
You're generalizing yourself as everyone. MOST people never upgrade the OS on their PC. When it comes time to upgrade, they buy a new one, preloaded. Besides, using this silly logic every new video game console would have failed.
And if Linux expects to exploit that opening, should it come, then it had better be ready to support all of that hardware: computers and printers and cameras and everything else.
Linux already has better hardware support than windows. Neither OS supports everything the other does, of course, but this is a non-issue.
And they're better have a common face: 50-plus all slightly different and incompatible distributions and desktops and installers and drivers are not going to cut it.
Personally, I don't think you guys can get past your differences and make it happen.
It will never happen... and that's a good thing. Not all users are alike. It doesn't have to happen for linux to succeed. The goal is not to replace an old monopoly with a new one. The goal is to restore a free market.
Life is too short to proofread.
Win32 is an example of one subsystem in use on Windows and runs independantly of other subsystems like the *nix subsystem, OS/2, Win16, and Win64 subsystems to name a few examples. The subsystem OS architecture concept is not virtualization nor emulation, as each subsystem are true OSes acting independently with their own subsystem level kernels that sit on top of the NT architecture.
...
... Also, as a nice side effect, easy to back up and restore critical system data since it is all on disk and usually text files -- no registry to screw things up.
.
Are you sure about that? Assuming Windows XP still runs on i386/i486, those "subsystems" must be essentially the same as emulation. Not emulation of a chip, but emulation of an API ala Wine -- which as you know runs both Win16 and Win32 successfully under the same Linux kernel that runs both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux binaries.
So I will ask, give us even one example of something that Linux is capable of that Windows is not capable of doing.
It isn't very easy to pick a capability that Linux can do that Windows can't because frankly an OS is just an OS and so long as both support Turing-complete languages in theory both can do exactly the same things. However, Linux DOES make it much easier to do all of the following "out of the box" on any modern distro. With Windows, many of these capabilities are possible but certainly not out of the box and in many cases require expensive third-party closed-source
software:
0. In a GUI, NOT get interrupted by some random popup dialog box while typing and have my next space/enter key cause who-knows-what to happen. This by itself is almost enough for me not to consider Windows ready for the desktop. Yes, there are registry settings that ALMOST fix the problem, but they still don't work 100% of the time.
1. Write programs in languages at all levels of abstraction that will run on any other Unix-like operating systems. Also, automate all routine aspects of the system via init scripts and cron.
2. Easily handle ALL of the standard network protocols as both client and server: SSH, SCP, FTP, SMTP, HTTP(S), IRC, IM, NFS, NTP,
3. Easily show the user the status of the system in a transparent manner. CPU usage, processes list, mounted disks, available memory, logged in users, login history, disk quota,
4. Easily handle multiple users in multiple security contexts. Need a root window? K -> System -> Root console. Need root access for specific tasks only? su or sudo
5. Allows full debugging of rare corner cases so the system can still run. Example 1: Linux can run safely on a system with a bad RAM chip with a kernel boot parameter telling it to avoid using the affected memory area. Example 2: A bad library that kills X11 on startup CAN be identified and worked around. Example 3: A kernel module that borks the system can be easily fixed not to load at startup. These are pretty serious conditions that usually have no solution when encountered in the Windows world.
6. Allows MUCH easier mixing-and-matching of major components than Windows. Example: Most software runs the same in 2.4.x kernels and 2.6.x kernels on the SAME system; in Windows, this would be equivalent to being able to dual-boot Win2k and WinXP and have them use the same registry and have the exact same programs in the start menu.
I prioritized this list in the order that matters to me as a Linux desktop user. I need the computer to obey my commands, not interrupt a command halfway through. I need programming languages that work well and can also work on the supercomputing clusters I do research on. I need things to be automated easily, so that for instance my home computer can automatically update an external web page after its IP address changes so that I can always find home no matter where I am. I need full network connectivity including SSH and SCP to reach those supercomputers and also transfer files to friends anywh
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.
Another thing windows can do that linux can't:
Arbitrarily decide that it *might* not be licenced properly and shut itself off asking you to call a 1-800 number to get it back on again. I migrated an entire production server farm over to Linux after my high availability system went down this way. Any OS that will voluntarily sabotage itself when it is not running into technical problems has no business being in a production environment.
No, the needs aren't typical, they are dev needs. The typical user's needs are email+web browser+picture viewing+cd recording... things that can be done on windows or linux with the same ease (or, save for the cd recording, a palm pilot or alot of cell phones). The only people who care about what OS they are using either have a pet app they can't do without (photoshop or maya, or autocad for instance) and it doesn't matter if that app is BeOS only.. they'd use it. The other group is computer professionals, and the situation there is tilted highly in Linux favor.
;) I agree with a sentiment in another thread... Windows: It can do anything Linux can do, except it's expensive! I would throw in slow, difficult to repair when something goes wrong, hardware hungry (ram and CPU requirements are rediculous).
$1000 is not an exaggeration... in fact it's probably low. While I can get Open Source or 3rd party dev tools, I'm still going to need visual studio for compiling/debugging if I am doing any serious MS-centric coding. I need the header files, I need the linked libraries, all that stuff. I could conceivably set it up with msys.. but that's a big hack. The VS lite version, like most "lite" versions of anything, is not going to cut it for productivity. I believe the going price for a decent VS package is close to a grand by itself, but I haven't personally purchased one recently. The next thing is office, although open office is pretty compelling here and integrates just fine. The big issue with open office, is although it can read most anything MS office spits out, the reverse is not true, so other users who shelled out hundred of dollars cannot read my stuff unless I cross save to MS formats, and then I lose formatting and such as the support for that is pretty fuzzy. So add in a couple other apps I might want and $1000 bucks or so is pretty conservative for a computer professional's standard workstation. A system admin's workstation can probably do it for half that, as they don't do the dev-tools thing.
So then.. having shelled out the dough, we step back and look what we have. SSH is the primary deficiency I see. The reason you don't know what it is is windows has no equivelent, but trust me, for administration purposes, it is *the* killer app and probably the most commonly used application used by a unix professional outside of the command line. What it is: "Secure Shell". It's simply an app that is #1 strongly encrypted and #2 gives you a command prompt on a foreign machine. Most any unix box will have it turned on, and most headless routers, switches, etc also have a port. The MS equivelent is Terminal Services, which gives you a full view of the desktop on the remote system. It's handy for some things, but most of the time I don't WANT the desktop of the other sytem... I just want a command line. I want to reboot the machine or look at a file or set a reg key and loading that full desktop is WAY overkill not to mention slow... prohibitively on low bandwidth lines. It's also ram hungry and takes alot of proc power. Many times I have not been able to reboot a misbehaving windows server through TS because transferring that whole desktop over TCP is just too big of a job for a machine caught in a tight loop or OOM... but a machine has to be *REALLY* hosed for SSH not to get through.
But that's enough about SSH
Now, don't get me wrong... I'm not anti-ms. I have in the past and will likely again worked FOR microsoft. I have been developing software for the MS platform for going on 15 years. There are niches that Windows fills well. To spout off that Linux has no advantages over Windows though is blatently false. Windows really falls short in the areas of price, speed, development resources, and most server uses. Linux falls short in laptop usage and *WAY* short on ease of configuration and set up.
My IBM/Lenovo T50 laptop came with Ubuntoo installed, I have re-installed it because of a failed HD and it was one of the easiest installs I have ever done.
As long as you have a network connection to the net it really is a piece of piss.
In the end, It's all bovine dung you know
Please Please Please, Actually read the GPL.....
You do not have to release changes to the kernel unless you are distributing them in some fashion. And assuming that you are in fact distributing binary code... only the code that goes into the kernel must be distributed. (See NVidia's Linux Drivers for an example of this). You are using somebody elses product and the only stipulation is that you must past on the rights that they have afforded you. This gives you protection in that anybody else who uses your sourcecode must abide by the same rules. This keeps the system fair for everbody. Ultimately if your changes are useful this means that getting those changes upstream will mean less work for you.
The second assertion makes me think you should fire your legal team (they have already cost you a lot of time and effort)... The GPL only covers use of the code in a product not use of the product itself. You certainly can use gcc to produce proprietory code. You can also use any of the libraries licensed with a BSD license or the LGPL license. Even if this assertion were true, there are a number of proprietory compilers which can be used with linux - Intels compilers immediately spring to mind.
The GPL is not draconian. It is there to protect the creator of a product from loosing access to that product while allowing others to use and extend that product. If you are the original creator of a product you can choose to license it under the GPL and other licenses. If you don't wish to abide by the GPL then regular copyright law applies.
It is as simple as that.
You may as well deny the moon landing. You'll have people who agree with you there as well. You've just a raving nut.
Life is too short to proofread.