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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.'"
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.
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".
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