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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.'"
linux has apt, apple doesn't;
Badass Resumes
I'm a programmer at a university, and when my boss asked me what type of laptop I wanted, I chose a MacBook Pro because of OS X. I can run all of the normal OS X applications, compile and/or run almost all Unix tools, and virtualize Windows (2000) for when I need to run something in Windows. It's the perfect platform, and you're seeing a lot of more technically adept people move to it for that reason. Is OS X perfect? No, but it really is easy to use, and it means I don't have to fight with my computer when I want to do something unusual. Is there a price premium? Yes, but my employer paid for it, so ha.
It's much easier to measure OS X adoption since most of it is just purchases of Mac computers. It's impossible to do the same with Linux. Who knows how many Linux users there are out there. I've never registered my copy of Linux, for one.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
I took one look at the statistic and thought: Wtf?
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8
0.12% of all devices that access the internet are IPhones? How many did they sell?
0.63% for Linux, which means that only six times as many Linux computers are used to access the internet as IPhones.
About one persent for Linux and about seven for Mac: I would buy that. Sounds reasonable, since many open source guys I know use a Mac for desktop stuff.
But with those numbers for the IPhone the numbers look more like something someone pulled out of their a**. Plus all the computer lab computers at our universities got converted to Linux over the past years. And our university is not Linux friendly in any way. So I imagine that this would happen at many universities and colleges.
These are all the reasons Microsoft gives for using their product, and I expect if their product wasn't riddled with bugs and annoyances, you'd be a closed MS shop.
I think the bottom line is that Linux is, and always will be, a bit of a hobbyist and/or experimentalist bleeding edge platform. It's like the difference between commercial radio and amateur (ham) radio: the former is all about "getting work done," as you say, and so it's streamlined, standardized, and widespread. The latter is about experimenting with new ways of doing stuff, about cooking it up at home by yourself, about trying out your individual creative thoughts and ideas. So it's idiosyncratic, quirky, customizable, and thinly spread.
Each has its place, of course. Without streamlined standardized production platforms, people trying to get stuff done who don't give a hoot about computers and software would be endlessly frustrated. Without weird individual experimentation, advancement stagnates. (I don't doubt that one of the reasons OS X is so much more useful than, say, OS 9 or, God forbid, that bombing monster Mac OS, is because it was goosed by Linux coming up fast from behind.)
Guess what!!! some people don't mind paying for software. Especially if it is good software.
Oh and you can use OS X with completely free as in beer software. I use Abi-word instead of Pages or MS Word.
But unlike Linux I can install Adobe Photoshop.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Another way to look at it is that 3.44% of the market has changed hands, 10% of that to Linux and 90% to OSX
Mac OS X is the success of Unix on the desktop, period.
There are a lot of geeks who are reluctant to admit it, though. Most people pinned their hope on Linux + GNOME/KDE for delivering us from evil. While GNOME and KDE brought Unix miles ahead in terms of GUI usability, neither matched the elegance and power of the NeXTSTEP interface developed years before; the evolution from NeXTSTEP to OS X has further secured this lead.
The defeat of their favorite candidate for Unix GUI Savior left many geeks unwilling to even consider or support the idea of OS X as a real Unix, as an improvement to Windows or existing Unix GUIs, etc. Sour grapes, basically. The whole experiment goes to show that in software, as in government, in the ideal case you want a well-backed tyrant with his head screwed on straight. That's Steve Jobs.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Linux's strength is in it's staying power. It's not going anywhere. You can't kill it the way you can a start-up company... or even a large and powerful company.
It's still largely a hobbyist platform. (Remember, I'm talking about Linux on the desktop, not on the server.) But given a time-span long enough, Linux is bound to be a major player on the desktop (possibly even the dominant player).
The economics of Linux don't place the same value on a perfected user experience. But it does place some value on user experience. That value only goes up over time. What was the most user-friendly Linux distribution in 1996? What was the installation like back then? Now compare that with installing today's Ubuntu or SUSE or Fedora or Mandriva or almost any distribution that you randomly pick off the front page of distrowatch.com. The difference is huge, and the user experience can only continue to improve.
If Steve Jobs is the great master of the user experience, what will happen to Apple if when he quits or dies? I don't know the answer to that.
But I know what will happen to Linux if Linus Torvalds dies... Pretty much nothing. Linux is analogous to the internet. It keeps getting bigger and better, and it has no weak link. The same cannot be said for Apple or Microsoft.
For many people and companies, myself included, WINE's ability to run WoW on Linux as a "platinum" app shows technical expertise, but a lack of vision. There would be much more interest in the project (and possibly a cash infusion) if they publicly declared something like "WINE v0.9.xx will fully support MS-Office 2003 on Linux by this summer..."
Wishful thinking on my part... I doubt that CodeWeavers (a big sponsor of WINE) would allow that.
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
Could you point me to where I can find evidence to support this over/under-estimation?
You say "choose a Mac over Linux" when what you really mean is "choose Apple hardware over commodity PC hardware," and the answer is simple: OS X. Without a ridiculous amount of finagling, you can't get OS X to run on your commodity hardware, and there are many more programs than textmate that simply don't exist (and are, in fact, lacking viable equivalents for most users) on linux. Off the top of my head: Office, Scrivener, Coda, the Adobe suite, Garage Band, iMovie, and iDVD.
You can dual boot into Windows (or virtualize) to mitigate the average user's requirement for Adobe's products and Office, but on comparable (and yes, comparably equipped PCs and Macs are comparably priced when you don't build it yourself) Mac systems you could boot into Linux, Windows AND OS X. Also, if you think that any linux desktop even approaches the ease of use and learning curve of OS X, you've never used either.
Assuming that the average home user wants to dual boot in the first place. Too many computer geeks assume that their needs are the needs of the majority, and more importantly, that their abilities, resources, and desires are common, when in fact they are not. Most computer users don't want to dig into the insides of their system. Most of them never even loosen the screws on the case over the life of the system. They've never built a computer, they don't want to, and they never will. They don't like installing new software and they HATE upgrading their current software.
They aren't us. Don't assume they want the same things we want.
Shinma
I used to be a pretty hard-core Linux on the Desktop guy. Every PC I ever built or bought (laptops) dual-booted Windows and Linux. At one point in college, I was even writing my essays in HTML to print from within Netscape 4, as there weren't any decent Linux word processing software (that was free ;)) circa late 1996.
I kept Windows around because there was-and-is a lot of stuff that Linux doesn't do well, if at all; Photoshop (GIMP wasn't a contender until GimpShop, too little too late), Office, Final Cut Pro, StarCraft, etc. OpenOffice (NeoOffice) is finally to the point where it's almost an Office replacement (in my line of work, I have to volley a document back and forth a dozen times or more between my office and third parties', with Track Changes and Comments and those aren't in OpenOffice).
I returned to Mac (my last Mac previously was a PowerBook 5300/100 with System 7.5.x and MachTen (http://www.tenon.com/products/machten/) around OS X Jaguar, on an iBook G3/600. That thing was indestructible (fell off the back of my motorcycle at ~40mph and survived outdoors for a week before I recovered it, still works 4 years later), and led to a PowerBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook (engineering school tote-along), iMac, Mac mini HTPC...
What I love? Running Perl / Apache / PHP / MySQL / etc. in a comfortable "native" UNIX environment, while still having all my GUI goodness with Mail.app, Safari.app, Preview.app, Office 2004, StarCraft (yeah, I'm way behind the times in gaming, don't care, don't have time), etc., all a click away as native apps. Plus, now with VMWare and Windows, I can keep around the software I need for school (XILINX, Visual Studio Pro 2005, etc) on one platform. Front Row is a great HTPC interface. AppleScript lets me automate flipping between it and my Elgato EyeTV, with the sleek little Apple remote control. Awesome industrial design (Macs are pretty; most PCs look cobbled together, with the possible exception of the VAIOs).
I haven't run Linux in years, except at the office where we setup a big Linux file / backup server. Even my home server is now an old PowerMac G4 with matched (and software mirrored) internal hard drives and OS X Tiger Server. The UI is better, the third-party application support is there, and most software I want is either a single-click .dmg install or no more difficult to install than it is on Linux (through Darwin Ports and fink), often easier (fink vs. yum, for instance).
Most servers I'd deploy would still be Linux, as Apple's hardware is expensive in that market niche and there's no value add (I'm going to be running the same AMP software stack regardless of OS X or Linux as the underlying platform). But on the desktop, unless you're totally cash-starved, there's no compelling reason for me or most of the techie people I know to run Linux on the desktop, and lots of good reasons to use OS X instead.
This is a trend that's been building for a while (I jumped in 2002, the biggest geeks in my circle jumped shortly thereafter): http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/29/1818256
geek. lawyer.
Macs were the perfect solution. They ran our geeky unix software. They ran powerpoint which most prefer for presentations. Wireless just worked.
After a brief stint with macs, I'm back to linux. I love free software. I love the fact I can customize the GUI easily. But most of my colleagues couldn't care less. They just want their hardware to work. They will not listen to argument about free software and proprietary lock-in.
Here's an aside about OS X that's relevant for people who work with PDFs, which includes scientists but I'm sure a lot of other people too. One area that OS X beats linux in handily is Preview, their PDF viewer. Preview does the following things that are much harder or impossible to do with linux software:
In summary, I love Linux, but I do believe that the article/summary have a point and that Apple's significant resources in (1) spending money on proprietary drivers and (2) developing software that is in some cases superior is cutting into Linux.