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OSDL's Review of Desktop Linux In 2006
derrida writes "The OSDL's Desktop Linux Working Group has published its first year-end report on the state of the overall desktop Linux ecosystem. The report provides insight into the year's key accomplishments in functionality, standards, applications, distributions, market penetration, and more. Of great interest is the Market Growth part. Quoting from there: 'Most observers believe that much of the growth will take place outside of the United States. "It will be in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries," said Gerry Riveros, Red Hat, "because of the price and because they aren't locked in yet."'"
I think the interesting thing about this is the projection of the greatest growth in the "BRIC" countries. I don't think it's so much that they aren't locked into Windows, as much as Microsoft has (inadvertently on their part) pushed it along. When MS started its big "anti-piracy" crackdown, it mostly hit in these parts of the world. Add in the high cost of Windows, and the ever-increasing hardware requirements for it, and a free OS that can run on existing hardware looks pretty darn good.
The problem desktop Linux is still facing is getting more penetration in the biggest market - the United States. There are still areas where improvements need to made, and in some areas, applications to be developed. One thing that we have to recognize is that MS is not going to give up its stranglehold on the OEM installed market. The only way Linux going to be able to make any strides is to recognize that the user is going to have to do the install, and to make it easy for them. There's a project going on for Ubuntu which shows some promise, called Winbuntu - it's a Windows installer for Linux. I don't know how it'll work out, but it shows the concept.
it's already been identified that the majority of OSS gets developed outside of the USA, i think you will find america's court system and patent laws are going to result in doing software business inside the USA to become very unpopular through the next decade. you'll end up with only massive corperate entities like MS able to cope with these entry barriers, and if you think you can rely on companies like MS for innovation......
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
While Linux is gaining a little bit of ground on the desktop, I think it will take another 5-10 years before the average joe will be able to switch. I figure in that amount of time most applications will be web-based and subscription based and therefore able to run on any platform. At that point, why NOT run Linux, BSD or OSX? You won't be tied down to some proprietary application on a dying platform.
And then there was E
The press on Vista is so bad right now, it should really be used to push Linux adoption on the desktop in 07.
I myself switched to Ubuntu on my home desktop because of Vista-fear.
You will note that, according to the Executive Overview, there is no KDE, only GNOME. Was the report written by Americans?
Legacy systems, documents, and most importantly user training in said systems and documents. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" rules when computers are the tool rather than the end goal in and of themselves, and it's hard to fault that logic. If you change your systems you're effectively "breaking" your employees in terms of their productivity, and fixing them is quite a job. It's only justified when the end benefits are worth the pain, and to be fair in most cases they probably aren't ...
Funny how Microsoft has gotten away with just that. Every version of Windoze has a few pointless GUI changes and little real improvement, yet the Dells of the world push it out. Vista and Office 2007 mark the largest GUI change in a long time. Legacy software is broken. Where does that leave the user's "faultless" logic?
Free software interfaces are more stable. Window maker, is a Next clone and it's basics have not changed in fifteen years. There are several others, like the fvwm or olvwm, and Enlightenment, that have been just as rock stable. At the same time there have been many other excellent interfaces that have grown up. All of them are extensively customizeable so that you can have as much change in each as you like and they all work together, so you can mix and match. The same performance from Microsoft would have Windows 3.1 GUI be adequate, customizable still available and easily interchangeable with a dozen other excellent window managers. Right.
The same arguments apply to file formats and hardware. Vista is bringing with it .DOCX, the M$ "open" format with a 6,000 page spec. It's also going to obsolete 54% of exiting computers and 94% of them are not really "premium" ready, so their users will soon be disappointed by an upsell that degrades their actual performance. DRM promisses to make it all that much worse.
The real hope is that Vista goes nowhere. XP did not move hardware and it had much better driver and legacy application support at launch. It took four long years for it to be majority. People want new hardware and it's time for it to move. There are major improvements that are good for both performance users and people who want something small and quiet. If Vista's changes are so bad that it actually harms sales, look for Dell, HP and others to follow Lenovo's lead to make up the difference. That would break the M$ monopoly once and for all and then we would not have to worry about this upgrade train nonsense.
Vista - the Ow is Now.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Jesus we used to make some good stuff.
Amen. What's ironic, is that as I drove around certain parts of Western Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, is that it's not as if we don't have the capability to make "stuff" anymore -- the machinery, the productive capacity, is mostly all still there, albeit rusted, and the workforce is there, albeit unemployed and twenty years out-of-date -- it's just that the desire to do it disappeared and moved elsewhere, by virtue of some pieces of paper that swapped hands and certain handshakes between heads of state.
We have a government run by the "paper traders," as you put it, for their own kin; they have sold off the economy, piecemeal, to the benefit foreign interests and themselves, despite the obvious outcome: you cannot maintain a first-world economy and standard of living, when you are competing in a labor market with a billion-plus Chinese and Indian peasants. It just isn't going to happen, it's unsustainable: either the first-world country's costs and standards of living are going to sink, or the third-world's are going to rise, and the former is a whole lot easier and a lot more likely than the latter. (Think of it in terms of economic "mass," and of two bodies orbiting around each other; it's a lot easier to move 300 million people down towards the level of a billion poor ones than it is to move the billion up to meet the 300M.)
When the shell game is done, the U.S. is going to become a nation of aristocrats: the same paper-traders who have run the place into the ground, and thus knew from the beginning where it would end, and have moved their wealth into hard currencies; and everyone else, who will be stuck with their savings in a currency suddenly not worth the paper it's printed on (it's already not worth the metal its minted with), and forced to buy everything from abroad (since the country has long since ceased to produce anything of value), who will be stuck with the bill.
Take a look around: you're witnessing the decline of one of the world's great empires, which, like many before it, was brought down not by invaders from afar, but from mismanagement and greed from within.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I think that desktop linux is not ready because it still plagued by a problem of text configuration files. I'm perfectly OK configuring my debian box from various files in /etc directory, however most of the users e.g. normal people aren't, and as long as proper GUI configuration tools, like Control Panel in windows, are absent from KDE/GNOME desktop environments I don't think that majority of people would like to use it. And these tools would not be there for some time, because a few distros currently support common location of configuration files, and LSB itself is a joke: "LSB compliant system is the system that supports RPM package management". So until these things are going to get sorted out Linux will get mainstream, which is, I hope, just a couple of years from now.
And, yes I'm aware of Red Hat system-config-* stuff, the problem is, these utils aren't that great, an they not that well organized.
Your comment is correct. I spent two years in Haiti, the poorest in the western hemisphere. Did anyone run Linux, no. They used old hardware everywhere. Old hardware that would not run linux. I tried replacing the pirated copies with linux and failed! Bandwith is very expensice there at least when compared to Income levels. So downloading linux "for free" is actually much more expesive than the 50 cent Devils own copy of windows. You'd have to find an older version of linux that would run on the hardware ( unlikly in most cases) and then compare it the the windows equivalent. I'm sorry I love linux, but redhat 5 doesn't compare to win 2k on the desktop for new users. No, DSL linux didn't work doesn't matter beacause the oss applications running on top neccisary for real work ( openoffice or abiword) perform terribly on older hardware.
Technology flows from the first world to the third. They will be the last to get linux on the desktop, not the first.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
In terms of being cryptic and user hostile, I agree that editing the registry and browsing to some random port on localhost are about the same.
However, there IS one important difference--it's quite easy to screw over a machine by mucking around in the registry, either by accident or because the instructions you found were incorrect. I can't compare that to simply browsing around localhost. What's the worst you could possibly do? Hit the wrong port and get a screen full of crap from chargen?
You must be one of those people who descend on Amazon and "tag" every single Microsoft product with "defectivebydesign".
No, but that sounds like a good idea and I'm glad that someone is doing it.
I wish you would all stay here and here only.
Hmmmm, you don't like me and I don't like you. Let's make a deal. You go away, your friends leave computer vendors, ISPs and everyone else alone and our paths will never cross. How about that? You get to pay Bill Gates for permission to use your computer, I get to use my computer and both of us are happy. Best of all, you can avoid advocating M$ shit to a free software web forum.
Now that would be super, but you've got a job to do don't you? Suck it up and get back to work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.