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Linux Reaches 1% Usage Share
je ne sais quoi writes "The April data is out for the Net Applications 'market share' survey of operating systems (more accurately referred to as a usage share). For the first time, Linux has reached 1%. This past month the Linux share increased by 0.12% which is well above the average monthly increase of 0.02%. Historically, the Net Applications estimate of market share has been lower than that of other organizations who measure this, but the abnormally large increase reported this month brings it closer to the median estimate of 1.11%. For other operating systems, Windows XP continued its slow decline by 0.64% to 62.21%, whereas Vista use is still increasing to 23.90%, but its rate of adoption is slowing. That is, this month's increase of 0.48% is well below the 12-month average increase of 0.78% and down from the peak rate of increase of 1.00% per month on average in January-February 2008. The total Windows share dropped to 87.90%. Mac OS use decreased slightly to 9.73% from 9.77%, but usage share of the iPhone and iPod Touch combined increased by 0.1%."
My girlfriends mother bought a laptop about two years ago. She struggled with Windows as she had never used a computer much before. I installed gOS and she's doing fantastic with it.
Just because you are used to Windows and find it hard to transition, don't blame the OS, blame yourself.
I consider myself to be a bit more advanced than the typical computer user..maybe not compared to the slashdot crowd.
I had Ubuntu(gusty) on a partition for a long time. For about 3 months for so I used it as my primary partition. I liked the look and feel for the most part.
I even enjoyed learning the command line stuff to get my screen rez correct..it took a long while to set that damn thing to 1366x766! But, once I figured it out, that was that.
In the end, I went back to Windows and that is where I will stay and here's why...
Bluetooth!
At that time, my wife lived overseas and we used skype to talk. None of my Bluetooth dongles would work in the slightest with Linux. I tried and tried and tried, but could not make it work..and hell.. at that time my job was maintaining and creating bluetooth RF test cases!!!!
I was so sick of having to boot to windows every time i needed to "do" something I said forgot it..im sticking with windows.
The really troubling trend, from my point of view as an OSS fanboy, is that netbooks are reverting to Windows. I teach at a community college. A year or two ago, one my students showed me his eeePC running Linux, which was the first eee I'd seen. This year my wife saw a eee with Linux in Target for $270. "Wow," I thought, "Linux in Target!" I bought her a eee with Linux (not the Target one, but a $400-ish model, via Amazon) as a birthday present, but the wifi was misconfigured. Asus tech support told me the wrong card was installed, and there was no way to fix it in software. We returned it and gave up on the netbook idea. If you look at the reviews on Amazon, you'll see tons of customers complaining about problems with their eee/Linux boxes. Now when I walk through the cafeteria at work, I see lots of students using netbooks, but when I sneak a peek over their shoulders, it's always Windows. IMO Asus really dropped the ball by not getting the quality of their Linux configuration right. They were supposed to be the flagship of the new wave of Linux on netbooks, and it just didn't happen. I guess this kind of thing is just expensive to get right.
It will be interesting to see if this predicted new wave of ARM-based netbooks really comes to market, and whether they really have a decent price-to-performance ratio. If so, it would be great, because Windows doesn't run on ARM, and if the price gets down to $100-200, there's really no room for profit for MS even if they did make an ARM version of Windows. But so far, the history of netbooks has all been bait and switch. They keep saying they're going to have them at price x, but they're always really at price 2x. Performance is still a problem, too. I'd hate for people to get the impression that Linux is slow and crappy, simply because netbooks are underpowered to run Firefox/js/flash.
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i sell ubuntu systems to regular users. as part of a purchase, if they're local i offer to install it in their house and give an hour of time to answer questions for free. after a brief orientation (don't buy a new ipod, before buying a printer check here or call me, etc.), i spend the time showing them how to find and install software using synaptic, where update alerts appear and what to do, how to use firefox instead of ie, and a few other tips. i leave with them knowing they can call or email me anytime they have a question and i'll do my best to answer it.
i've been doing this for several years now. i always install the latest LTS version of ubuntu, and i offer to do software upgrades for $60. most customers are happy they no longer have to deal w/ virus, malware and spyware, even though there's a bit of a learning curve. i've had a few who installed xp because they just couldn't "get it," and out of them at least 4 of them come back with, you guessed it, malware and virus infected boxes. i've also had 2 customers who brought the computer back and asked me to set it up for dual-boot w/ xp. i found out later they boot to windows only to use itunes (being unable to get it working correctly in linux) and generally use the ubuntu side for everything else.
for the most part, i've found that spending just that initial hour is enough to put the customer at ease. additionally, knowing i'm just a phone call away helps too.
for customers who aren't local, i prepare a pdf document that basically contains what i go over w/ the locals in that orientation hour.
i've had just a couple of customers who were "new users," who basically had never used a computer before. since they don't know the difference (that there's other o/s's that aren't linux), they take to it a little more quickly.
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
I did setup a gentoo desktop at my parent's house. They use it regularly and they like it a lot. They only need a browser (with flash to browse youtube), a music player, pdf viewer, text editor and java. Java is needed because the government taxes simulation program is written in java (cross-platform).
Since I have my own personal server at home, I have shell access to the desktop computer and I deal myself with the updates.
I must say that is kind of funny when my parents see on the TV news that FOOBAR virus is in the wild and if they shouldn't take care. :P
Is not that easy. I'll try to make it short, my aunt, a prototypical Aunt Tillie user was getting sick of malware and viruses util I installed ubuntu in her laptop. Everything went alright but some problems started to creep.
OpenOffice fonts looked "jagged", only ate the default zoom level but that was enough.
Some websites don't load ok, these resulted to be using very intrusive windows only drm plugins, (unsusrprisingly, they were christian radio stations, those pious bastards)
The old printer, that didn't work because of bad drivers still didn't work.
One excel/VBA game/joke some friend sent her didn't work.
That was the straw that broke the camel's back! She bought a Vista Laptop with MS Office 2007 home edition.
Several hundred $$$ later, the printer still doesn't work, those problematic radio stations still don't work but at least the leaping frog VBA game did work now. A year later it seems to have gotten a virus.
My point is, ye old saying, Linux must be twice as good as windows to get the same level of respect.
But... the future refused to change.