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Is Apple Killing Linux on the Desktop?
Domains May Disappear writes "Chris Howard has an interesting commentary at Apple Matters on recent trends in OS market share that says that while OS X has seen continual growth, from 4.21% in Jan 2006 to 7.31% in December 2007 at the same time, Linux's percentage has risen from only 0.29% to 0.63%. The reasons? 'Apple has Microsoft Office, Linux doesn't; Apple has Adobe Creative Suite, Linux doesn't; Apple has easily accessed and easy to use service and support, Linux doesn't; Apple is driven by someone who has some understanding of end-user needs, Linux is not,' says Howard. 'Early in the decade it seemed that if you wanted a Windows alternative, Linux was it. Nowadays, an Apple Mac is undoubtedly the alternative and, with its resurgence and its Intel base, a very viable one.'"
Obviously Apple Matters is going to have a bias towards OS X and that should be taken into account. However, that said we've been reducing both our Windows and Linux systems in favor of OS X for some time now for many of the reasons outlined in the referenced article.
I'd like to add in another reason why Linux is not growing as fast as OS X use: fragmented distros. Supporting multiple flavors of Linux is simply a pain in the ass and the typical end user of Linux is likely to have their own preference (Red Hat, Yellow Dog, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc...etc...etc... In fact, last time I looked there were over 1000 different flavors of Linux and BSD and with the exception of OS X (a descendent of BSD) every single flavor that I've tried out of that 1000 all required significant effort just to get the OS up and running with wireless networks, not to mention all the various voodoo required for the printer support.
No, for me it is all about getting work done and I don't want the OS getting in my way or becoming an impediment to accomplishing things and I don't want to have to spend time with all of our students on various flavors of Linux. In retrospect, the last project that we worked on with a contractor got developed for Red Hat and in terms of system support, backup, management and more I really wish we had developed it for OS X now. That is not to say that we will not develop our algorithms cross platform, as that is our goal to release them totally open source, but for anything that is going to be developed for intensive use or for further development it is going on OS X and taking advantage of all the platform specific pleasantries such as Cocoa, Core Image, Core Animation, Quartz and more.
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OS X sales can be counted, Linux downloads more or less can't.
Also, those must be US-only figures, surely? OSX 7%!?
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
From 4.21% to 7.31% is an increase of ~73% of market share for the mac.
From 0.29% to 0.63% is an increase of ~117% of market share for linux.
Isn't that a bigger victory for linux?
The relative market share increase of linux being about 1.5 times that of the mac...
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
When the trend is UPWARDS, I.E. when Linux is being used MORE than before, then why does it make sense to use the word 'killing'? Surely if the trend was downwards this would be sensible, but not the other way around?
And also.. it's very easy to blame others for your problems. What problems are those? Well, they are the plusses of Apple's and Microsoft's solutions. They are those software or productivity suites that those respective companies have which Linux does not have. It is not Apple or Microsoft's fault they have those things as much as it is Linux's fault for NOT having them, or for what they do have simply not being as good. You can only blame yourself for what you lack in comparison to what is the widely accepted and used norm.
It's all a geek dream anyway, that people doing work for free is going to somehow outperform people who do their jobs to get paid and rely on that payment to sustain the quality of living they are used to. Not to mention that during this time that the people are writing free software they have to be working for a living; working on other projects and with other distractions. It just doesn't add up that Linux could be better than Apple, or even Microsoft, despite how completely fucked Vista seems to be so far.
Now, I know there are many ways you can tear up the logic in this post, and I freely encourage you to do so. But ultimately what you need to do is explain why, if my logic is flawed, the situation is as it remains today.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Fink is a package manger based on debian aptget. there's thousands of free packages there. and because the mac environment is so homogeneous they build seamlessly without surprises, many downloadable in binary form. works great from the command line or from the gui. Easy to keep up-to-date
then there's darwin ports and a gnu-darwin if you want other package managers.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The one thing I hate about my OSX laptop is trying to get a lot of CPAN and perl related libs installed on it. If you just want to dump a pre-set LAMP (er.. OSXAMP? Whatever) on it, that's fine. But I was trying to replicate my development environment for a personal project onto my powerbook so I could carry it all with me and no longer have to telnet to my system to work on such things.
I found a lot of seemingly trivial things to be absolutely tedious and borderline impossible on OSX. Something I could have just installed with cpan or apt-get on debian required that I install this lib. Then that lib. Then FINK. Then tweak a bunch of stuff. Then, finally, if I'd sacrificed enough chickens, I could install the actual think I had wanted to in the first place.
I know that OSX is a huge platform among web developers, but I also know most of them are into dreamweaver crap and php, ruby, etc. But I know that it's big enough among them that it can't always be that difficult. For me, however, I simply wasn't willing to invest the absurd amount of energy and time to get my development environment going on it that would have taken me an hour from start to finish on any given linux system. And without that, there is absolutely no reason for me to own a mac (the unix underpinning being the reason I enjoy it so I can do my solaris/linux-ish stuff with it). The only exception being that I do love my powerbook, for ease of networkability in multiple environments and the rather rugged, durable, always-works consistency of it.
I know that I have had to pull myself away from apple.com on more than a few occasions where I was playing with the configurator and so ready to hand out my cash like an idiot, before I came to my senses and said "but you're just doing this so you can have a new shiny toy -- there's nothing you can do on this box that you can't already do on your powerhouse linux box at home... save your $3,000+ and get a hooker, some blow and a couple midgets".
desktop market. Since then the number of folks using Linux on the desktop has certainly increased:
http://www.itfacts.biz/linux-desktop-market-share-to-reach-6-in-2007/723
It was predicted to be 6% in 2007 and I'd wager that is pretty close.
Of course, that doesn't count Linux users like myself who purchase through the retail channel only once out of every 4 downloads, and the much larger number who only download free copies of Linux. This "0.6%" also never takes into account the fact that a single download of a Linux distro is often installed on more than one computer.
So, all this report is comparing is the retail channel sales of Mac, the only way one can get it, with the retail channel sales of Linux, which is usually the choice of last resort among Linux users.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
There's PLENTY of high quality freeware for the Mac.
...
http://www.trailrunnerx.com/ If you're into running and like keeping logs.
http://handbrake.fr/ Does DVD->iPod almost seamless. I'm still pounding my head against debian and ffmpeg (What do you MEAN mp4 is an unrecognized format).
http://www.transmissionbt.com/ Is an excellent torrent client, free.
(The later two have since been ported to Linux)
Some of the 'shareware' is pretty cheap also. Graphic converter (http://www.lemkesoft.com/) is nothing short of amazing. $35 too. I'd copy and paste the number of image formats it supports but it might not make it past the filter.
I haven't run across many Linux programs that come close to being that 'pretty' nor as integrated into the OS. I mean Trailrunner will import your GPS info, map it in google earth with one click. It'll track your running times, etc. Sync with your iPod+Nike, heart rate monitors. And it's FREE.
What is available for Ubuntu that won't run on the Mac? Right now my Mac laptop is running Apache2, PHP and MySQL. I have nmap installed and a ton of other 'unix' programs. I always search sourceforge for programs to see if someone's already written something command line.
If you don't like gcc and compiling stuff your self there's always fink which is built around apt-get. fink install
There's even a GUI for it so that it's no different than Synaptic.
Businesses use support, that's who. Why do you think they actually have to weigh the costs between using Windows or Linux on their servers? To us, it'd be obvious: go Linux, it's free. But support is definitely not free and has to be carefully considered when making decisions that affect small to large businesses.
Microsoft could really care less about the average home user. They don't really care if your experience sucks, they don't really care if you pirate it, and they don't really care if you can't figure something out. They do care about the average business though. They do care if their experience sucks, they do care if they pirate it, and they do care if they can't figure something out. Support is where the real money is.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
The network browsing in 10.5 *is* much better, with it showing my network computers in the finder automatically.
Ubuntu, OTOH, while I can browse to the network shares, I can't open files unless I copy them locally. I try to open a movie I have on the network file server, and it can't figure out the file name.
Leopard, OTOH, opens it up just fine.
I think OS X is not a very 'native UNIX environment'
I think you're wrong. :) OS X is, in fact, an officially certified UNIX[tm]. http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3555.htm It conforms to the Single UNIX Specification Version 3. It's not just "UNIX-like," it is UNIX. Linux is not. :) (Granted, only because (presumably) no one cares enough to cough up the $$ to certify a Linux distribution, and/or put in the effort it would (again, presumably) take to tweak Linux to pass the certification process.)
geek. lawyer.
The potato it is uninformed.
It is "couldn't care less". The point of this expression is "I do not care at all, so I cannot care less, because there is no such thing as negative care"
You essentially said "Microsoft cares about average home user and is threatening to care less." Which, I believe, is not what you tried to say.
Faithfully yours, semantics Nazi
So, what was wrong with emacs and LaTeX? :)
I suggest you take a look at http://www.xdarwin.org/ - Ben Byer (an Apple employee) has been working to migrate Apple's X server to the x.org codeabase, and now has a re-port of the quartz system to that codebase.
Looks as though your doubts are unfounded.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Sound like your installation in b0rked.
Normally both of the 2 bigs desktop environment GNOME and KDE have a system of plugins that gives them support for other way to access data than the standard system :
KIO slaves in KDE and VFS plugins Gnome.
It's those modules that let you type "ftp://" "sftp;//" "smb://" "webdav://" or "nfs://" addresses or that let you freely browse a ZIP file as if it was a simple directory.
These modules are not only used by the file browser, but by all other application from the desktop environment :
For exemple under KDE (openSUSE running here), not only can I browse my files while away from home using SFTP, I can even remotely edit them because KATE (KDE's nice text editor) use them too.
And probably after a couple of versions, this modules will be available for any other software by using project like FUSE : currently FUSE can mount anything that can be accessed by a KIO slave. It's only a matter of time until someone write a nice plug and play automatic wrapper that dynamically mounts network KIO objects as needed to access them in non-KDE and non-GNOME application (for example OpenOffice.org's own webdav module isn't on par with the desktop's one).
But for now if you must copy locally your files before using them with application that are part of your desktop, you should check if those modules are correctly setup to be usable from within those software.
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