Slashdot Mirror
Linux Pre-Installs In the UK Hit 2.8%
schliz alerts us to a story out of the UK PC distribution channel. It seems that the percentage of systems pre-installed with Linux has gone up 28 times since Vista shipped, from 0.1% in January 2007 to 2.8% last June. Still not huge numbers, but Apple did OK for years with similar market share figures. Linux's headway comes in the face of the marketing money that manufacturers pass out to distributors, money that has historically been important to their profits: "In the late 1990s competition was so keen that distributors were said to sell at or below cost and take their profit direct from the marketing funds they received from vendors. Vendors nowadays keep watch to see their marketing funds are actually spent on marketing, but distribution runs on single figure profits and vendor marketing funds are a crucial aid."
On which note, Amazon, get a bloody move on sending me my Linux 901. It was supposed to be out last month, now you say August 11th?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I'm a big Linux user, I have been since the mid-ish / later-ish '90s sometime. I do have to ask, though:
How long do these machines stay running Linux?
If someone wanted a new and cheap PC, get a Linux one and format c:
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
1. Find Marketing research company willing to give arbritrary statistic that surprises and enchants.
2. Write article citing (blaming) the marketing firm several times without really covering credentials.
3. PPPPPPPPPPPPPPP*cough*rofit
I record my sleeptalking
If I have to report a pre-existing condition to the insurance company, I wouldn't have to report anything because all I have is existing conditions, if any.
But, if I do have any pre-existing conditions, that means I had them before they existed, which means I had them before I was born, and therefore...I've gone cross eyed.
Looking at the data, they just picked the lowest and highest points to get the factor. This is not indicative of an overall trend - I could pick March to March and say it had gone from 0.3% to 0.6% a factor of 2, not 28 - indeed from March to June of 07, things went DOWN by a factor of three...
Anyone not trying to fool themselves should really do some kind of best fit line and see that it's going at about 0.1% per month (number guessed). Yes, we're linux is making progress, and it's good, but let's be honest at least with ourselves about how much progress is actually being made.
It's probably more like 18% everywhere else in Europe. England is the most conservative and Windows-fixated backarse of Europe.
FFS, this is the same country that made Bill a Knight. Same goes for Firefox market share
apple makes money at 2.8%. do you really think that all these vendors pay X/each copy distributed?
On the other hand, Linux has been constantly improving on a shoestring budget so anything they make on this is more than that. I'm pretty sure there's money in there, not great money but enough to push Linux forward. If you invest in the stock market thinking Canonical will be the next Microsoft you're almost certainly wrong, but hopefully this means that in a few years Linux is a market share you can not ignore.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
it seems like only yesterday, penetration was only at 2.7%. my, how time flies.
I think it's a cultural thing.
Whenever I have something reasonably complex in mind to do in Windows (let us say... some kind of manipulation of PDF files), and I think 'Somebody must surely have programmed this already - I'll check online!' - I find pages upon pages of applications promising to do just as I wish, but they're all crippleware, non-functional unless I pay somebody money for them. Or they're riddled with advertising, or worse. Because every Windows programmer who has faced this problem has found a solution and immediately had fantasies of making a million selling software on the internet.
Whereas when the same notion strikes in Linux, the results are all free software, and far more functional than the Windows shareware shite, because some hacker in the past has faced the same problem as me, and has published his solution to the community.
Windows programmers hoard their creations and try to make money from them, and no one programmer can really benefit much from the work of any other. Linux hackers release their creations freely, and every hacker can improve and build upon the work of any other. Small wonder then that in order to get any decent software on Windows, one must either pay a licence fee to a corporation and sell one's soul to an EULA, or hope to hell that some software from the Unix world has been ported across.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I of course have a couple of niggles but that is due to hardware and their drivers not 4 Linux kind of situation (my printer)...
Having said that, I wouldn't have enough space here to list my issues with Windows.
I do use Vista (and like it) on my family home PC. Good for games, browsing (no better than Linux) and using my printer...
I use a Windows VPC in my Windows Vista for doing specific test cases for my work (I have still to figure out vmware with Suse 11) but other than that I am Linux all there way...
So, I as a consumer for my business laptop will, from now, be asking for linux pre-installed. It is by far the most convenient O/S to date for my business needs...no doubt in my mind. Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
At that rate we'll see the year of the Linux desktop in well under 200 years
Yeah, so? I don't begrudge paying people for their work. It's kinda' how the world works. (...) Regardless of what other people are doing, you're still whining about having to compensate other people for their work. Cry me a fuckin' river.
And trying to avoid paying is also kinda how the world works. Saying "this is payware" and offering that is a fair deal, the problem is when you're trying to find a gratis solution in the Windows world. Some are very upfront about that there's a gratis version and a payware version and what the differences are. Others are plain old deceptive, probably not to the point of being criminally fraudulent but where it turns out the gratis version is so crippled it's practically useless and only a ruse to make you pay. Or that it comes bundled with ad/spy/malware that they hid way down in the EULA or otherwise downplayed until you try to install/use it.
Open source software has a refreshing air of honesty. It tends to do as advertised, even if it only claims to do half of what the Windows solution claims. Often the shortcomings are in fact pointed out in a TODO or as potential future improvements. Just knowing the license type is generally enough, there's no reason to read to see if it requires your firstborn or anything like that. All of this cuts down on the transaction costs.
It's often been said that open source software is only free if your time is worthless. Well, in my experience trying to chase down a gratis/cheap Windows solution is even more costly than a free Linux solution. Natural selection doesn't happen much in shareware, you find oodles of crap hanging around waiting for some sucker to buy it. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule but they are typically larger, more well established projects and not the kind of half-hobbyist shareware software.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
One totally agnostic guy at my job, was encouraged to use Apple products by the System Engineer because it just works by clicking a button. Surely that was a bunch of oversold hype.
After my experience of transitioning from Slackware to Ubuntu, I felt that it was ready for my non intuitive friends. I told him to try it and guess what? His wife doesn't have a Mac mini, she has Ubuntu. He also runs Ubuntu on the Powerbook the System Engineer lobbied for him.
Conclusion? Linux is already on the right path, the worse that could be done to Linux, which I see popping up everyday, is to make it feel like a Mac.
No! Wrong. The Apple way encourages ignorance, and obfuscation so that it could lock in the 1 button click and conquer generation. Those like our sys admin who is lost without Apples GUI.
Nothing is wrong with a 1 button click. But a user's biggest frustration is when the 1 button click doesn't work; they're feel helpless and clueless.
Think windows and registry. Apple and its gui, with a non-standard POSIX(?) filesystem layout.
The joke was that "format" isn't a Linux command, and a partition can't be called "c:"... So "format c:" does absolutely nothing in Linux
Then Wine is missing a feature, no?
get a Linux one and format c:
What's a 'c:'?
The Windows file system has up to twenty-six predefined mount points, named A: through Z:. The LSB file system used by GNU/Linux, on the other hand, has mount points named like folders in a single root: /mnt/cdrom. On a PC running GNU/Linux, the Wine subsystem translates between Windows and LSB mount points.
Virgin media is an ethernet based cable connection. I have *never* ran windows (or mac) behind a Virgin media/Telewest connection. All ISPs *need* to support routers, thus not specific os.
Even without a router, this is DHCP-- plug straight into a linux box (or any other box for that matter) and it will obtain an IP and be on the net.
They may well provide a helpful install CD, but it is not by any stretch of the imagination a requirement, its just something to help old people feel comfortable about the process.
Conclusion? Linux is already on the right path, the worse that could be done to Linux, which I see popping up everyday, is to make it feel like a Mac.
I've been running Linux for ages, starting with the very first Slack and bought an iBook G4 (just before the transition to intel, I didn't mind much). I got it because it was a fairly good and inexpensive laptop for the amount of hardware. And I wanted to see what the fuss was about regarding the new Mac OS.
So I used it as my mobile platform for about a year an a half. Then I gladly bought a Samsung, stuck Ubuntu and KDE on it and now have a much more comfortable environment. I honestly couldn't see what all the excitement was about Mac OS. Apart from the gloss it felt just like Windows. The interface is designed to run a single application, in Tiger the network integration was abysmal and there certainly wasn't anything intuitive about it. It just was relatively pretty.
From what I've seen the majority (with a few exceptions) of the Unix users I've met in various get togethers appear to feel that way.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
assholes like apple and google who take other peoples hard work and commercialize it.
And where do you think microsoft's products come from ?
their employees ?
come on ! be serious..
Plus, if FOSS has a license to allow companies to use and commercialize their code, it's just a benefit for the overall software level. While this example is not OS, remember the mouse ? The fact that several companies could use that device to enhance user interface (even if it's by copying and stealing) leads the user interface to what we know right now.
I don't think using other people's code (who permits it.) to enhance one's products is being an asshole (while I disagree with M$ using this strategy to build 80% of their products, or just buy and let patents sleep, and die.). I mean, you know that sharing code is the goal of FOSS, right ?
Linux distros are a huge pissing contest between egoistical morons who instead of contributing to one distribution fork and rob distros of the already scarce resource - the free developer.
I don't see why you criticize that.
OK, they are a much distro's, they are forks, but at the end, how much distro's are powerful enough, user-friendly enough, to get the attention of people ?
gentoo ? no way normal people choose this by default.
slackware, debian, and other geek-obscure-freeky systems that lambda users wouldn't even get to boot ?
In fact, the true is that even with forks, with plenty of distro's and soever users have choice, but no confusion : there is Mandriva (uurk), fedora, and others (like ubuntu, the most known) and if they don't understand the difference between those, they'll choose Ubuntu.
so what is the problem with distro's ? actually there isn't, the only problem is that the potential power of developers is quite not concentrated in few tasks but in much (having no future-)distro's.
Nobody is going to ship proprietary commercial bits using apt or whatever crappy management software is out there
well, if it's commercial, it won't be given free to ubuntu servers, so your statement is pointless. They will ship their softwares in DVDs (or by Steam) with a Linux client (see ID Software, but in a more user-friendly way) and just to let you know, every lambda user I know and saw apt-get working told me several times that it was the greatest way to manage installed softwares they ever saw. IMO it's a Very Good package manager (for a binary distro I mean)
for sure, I use Gentoo for two years now, have used ubuntu for 2-3 years, Mandrake/mandriva for 2 years, Slackware for one year and suffered windows all before that. I think I have basis knowledge of problems with forks, with package managers and with FOSS realities.
The services model sucks. The only OSS projects that do well are those that have commercial backing and those that actually pay developers to write quality code.
sure having full-time paid developers enhances quality and fast development while it's not the only criteria (remember many people doing little stuff being well coordinated can be most efficient than a single well paid developer.). However, if you see a good project and want it to grow, if you REALLY don't want to contribute to the code's development, nor the languages translations, please, don't wait a commercial company to buy and pay the project, just donate money (not much). You see, companies are not the only ones having the possibility to pay developers. People too. And much people giving little money can do the difference.
Segmentation Fault in "Life, Universe and Everything" at line 42. Don't Panic.