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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
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
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.
According to this there 1.26 billion Internet users. According to Wikipedia there were 1.4 million iPhones sold by October 2007. Assuming every iPhone connects to the Net at some point, that means ~0.11% of the connected devices should be iPhones, which is remarkably close to the number the article quotes.
That having been said, I don't really trust the stats provided in the article. They claim 0.6% Linux usage, but most other estimates based on web traffic put Linux usage at 0.8% to 3% (and as we all know such techniques are inherently error-prone; e.g. Linux users may spoof their agent string).
As usual, estimating Linux market share is nearly impossible. It can be interesting to look at the numbers, but I wouldn't make any sweeping arguments based on such uncertain data.
Could you point me to where I can find evidence to support this over/under-estimation?
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.