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Should Being Competitive With Windows Matter For Linux?
An anonymous reader writes "Is Linux being held back by distributions bent on competing with Microsoft Windows? This article argues that it's a real possibility. Quoting: '... what was apparent early on during my Linux adoption was my motivation for making the switch in the first place — no longer wanting to use Windows. This is where I think the confusion begins for most new Linux adopters. As we make the switch, we must fight the inherent urge to automatically begin comparing the new desktop experience to our previous experiences with Windows. It's a completely different set of circumstances, folks. ... The fact that one platform can support a specific device while the other platform cannot (and so on) doesn't really solve the problem of getting said device working. You can see where this dysfunction of thought can become a big problem, fast."
Linux has a 90% share in supercomputers, a 50% share in servers (+/- 10%), and a pretty good share of cell phones and other mobiles, if you include Android and other semi-proprietary systems. The only place to expand into it the desktop, where the market share is at most 5%. So, why not?
can be anything we want it to be. It is, after all, open source and can be modified to suit many different purposes. Should Linux compete directly with Windows? That's a stupid question. Linux should do what the user wants and if that happens to put it on a collision course with Windows then so be it.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
It isn't just the distros. It is the desktop environments and all the plumbing underneath trying to shovel in the Fail as fast as they can.
Remove manual configuration. Remove features in general. Allow people who openly hate the UNIX Way to redesign core subsystems, losing important things like network transparency and human readable/understandable settings. Microsoft is ditching the registry because in the end users hated so much they finally had to listen to them while we are still chasing those taillights.
Democrat delenda est
There is hardly a soul on this planet who's life is not touched by linux in some fashion every single day. Windows has another chunk taken out of it every day it is death by a thousand cuts. If things continue on the path they currently are nearly everyone is going to be running around with linux in their pocket and soon. I saw a guy today with a droid in one hand and a kindle in the other, now that brought a smile to my face.
Got Code?
Linux must compete with Windows if there is ever going to be a "year of Linux on the desktop."
That would force manufacturers to release more compatible products, perhaps even contributing drivers to the kernel. It would spur the release of more commercial software, and gather more interest in the open source software that already exists as well as fostering new growth there.
Computers would be cheaper, as there wouldn't be a Windows tax, and additionally there would be more form factors available. How about ARM laptops with 30-40 hour battery life? Oh, sorry, that's not really happening now because manufacturers are afraid their customers will be confused, and they are afraid of losing their partnering bribes - I mean "incentives" with Microsoft.
Linux on the desktop, from the store, for average people, with first-party support, is extremely desirable for the future of computing. One thing that would be nice is to see some Linux games. Oh sure, you can run Wine or one of the commercial variants of Wine, but most people are just going to stick with Windows.
If the objective is to be a desktop OS that everyone can use then yes you are defacto competing with Windows. That doesn't mean doing everything just like Windows does but it does mean competing.
Also if you want to compete EFFECTIVELY it does mean trying to do the things that Windows can do. That doesn't mean looking or acting precisely the same, but it means being able to handle the same kinds of tasks with the same (or better yet less) effort.
Remember that to most people computers are tools. They have various things they want to accomplish with them, and they want the tool to be easy and helpful in doing that. As such, to win them over you need to be able to accomplish their tasks, and to do so with a minimum of fuss.
Expecting people to be willing to troubleshoot and learn more about Linux is complete bullshit. It is effectively being lazy, it is saying "We can't make our shit work right or be easy to use, so we expect you to pick up the slack and learn to deal with it." That is NOT an acceptable solution, because the response from people will be "Fuck you, I'm not using it then." They don't want to become experts in computers, they just want to use them to accomplish whatever it is they are after.
It is no coincidence that as computers have gotten easier to use, more people use them. Back when computers were first invented not only were they expensive, but you practically needed an advanced degree to operate them. You had to program them in raw machine code, every program was something newly created, you had to solve electrical problems, etc, etc. There were just few people that could deal with that. As things got successively easier, more friendly, the world of computing was opened to more people.
Now it is fine to feel Linux shouldn't go the desktop route, that it should be a server/embedded OS and desktop use should be primarily incidental. However if you want it to flourish in the desktop market then that means it does have to compete with Windows and it does have to get easy to use. "Recompile your kernel," are words that must utterly vanish from any normal kind of support, source code is something a user can't be aware of needing, the command line should be for experts only, and so on.
To try and think otherwise is not only arrogant, but myopic. You only have to look at the world to realize the vast complexities of things out there, and how much we must all specialize. To decide that computers are the one special thing that everyone should want to become interested and expert in is silly.
Who are these mythical registry-hating end users? Nobody in my family has ever run regedit. If I asked my mom to tell me what the registry is she'd tell me that's where she renews her license.
Normal end users don't hate the registry. Half-wits who think they're power users and screw things up tweaking shit are usually the ones that hate the registry.
Competing with Windows for customers ranges somewhere between silly and stupid. If you want more Linux on the desktop, you need to court developers and software vendors.
Linux works great as an OS. It has penetrated servers well because the server software (both new and inherited from other Unixes) is great. It has penetrated the embedded market largely because new apps were written for it and the new devices. It has penetrated embedded markets because they write everything they need anyway, except the kernel and maybe the C libraries give them a head start.
What you need to break into the desktop market with established applications from established application providers is applications as good or better. If you give gamers the chance to install games from EA, Valve, Blizzard, Bioware, and id on launch day, they will come. If you get Photoshop or some absolutely full-featured replacement for it on Linux, you'll get many of those users from Windows or Mac. If you get a true replacement for Peachtree and Quickbooks, you'll get more small businesses using Linux as their accounting desktops.
People who seem to understand network effects when it comes to social networking sites, instant messengers, P2P, etc. seem to forget all about them when it comes to desktop platforms. The more classes of application in which your platform is the leading installation target for the best apps, the more valuable your platform is. Linux has this for servers, embedded devices, and to some degree mobiles. If you want it to be a major desktop player, it needs this for desktops, too.
Personally, I use Linux on the desktop far more than Windows and I have for years. I still need some Windows or Mac systems around for the applications I just can't run well on Linux. I say "Windows or Mac" because most of the applications I can't run on Linux properly have versions for both of those platforms.
Linux doesn't even need to take developers from Windows to become much bigger on the desktop. It could become a third platform for companies supporting Win and OS X. It could become a second platform for companies doing Win or Mac. It could even replace OS X as the second platform for some software companies that do windows and Mac now. Adobe comes to mind, as they are practically at war with Apple right now anyway.
"The only place to expand into it the desktop, where the market share is at most 5%. So, why not?"
Because it requires linux development to embrace the following:
- Interface design that specifically and completely bars programmers from participating
- Abandonment of 99% of the distros
- Acceptance of proprietary drivers when offered (normal people don't give a damn about open source philosophy)
- Provision of real, available, phone-based technical support
- Real, complete documentation
I have seen someone mocked for buying one package when some pinhead thought another would be more appropriate for the application. It was something like, "Well, what did you expect picking that? It's like you wanted to fail." Most people here have seen PLENTY of derision of new users.
Why not? Because a lot of the community is poison for end users. That's why not.
Consolidate, standardize, and corporatize. Staff and support. Advertise. Court developers. In other words, build a better Microsoft.
Or, remain "pure", disjointed, and niche on the desktop. Rule the world from the server. Personally I think linux should abandon the desktop. By the time they get there, technology will have made the point moot.
Making Linux competitive with Windows? I thought that's what FVWM-95 was for! :^)
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Why do people keep thinking that Linux a a cheap, or free or open or whatever replacement of Windows. It isn't.
And you can't copy Windows. That would mean that you have to wait till Windows does something.
http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm
Linux should go its own way and if that takes down Windows, it is a nice plus. Competing with Windows should not be a direction, bceause that will be a fight that you can only loose.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
While I am more techy than most of the people I worky with (Hence I am sitting here reading this at work) most of the folks around me look at PCs simply as a tool. Can't teach them new tricks? Bollocks. A lot of my time is spent working with business teams who are looking to improve their way of doing business and teaching them about how different programs can be used to get the information they want.
Want to find your current sales trends in a way that you haven't been able to before? Okay, well, we have the data in this thing called Datawarehouse. Our reporting team will be able to provide you a set of reports, but they take a long time to develop and check. If you want to do some quick nasty analysis to fend off a crisis, there is a program called TOAD that will let you directly query your data. Look difficult? Lets go through how it works and how you write a SQL query.
Result: In the last Two years, I have introduced around 100 users who are NOT tech savvy at all to the wonders of SQL queries. They are now in various stages of competence, but they are using new things.
My (belated) point here is that while something like Toad (or now replace with Linux) isn't something that they can just pick up and run with, if people see a benefit to it, they WILL make the effort to learn how to use it.
In my mind, Linux really needs to advertise the benefits it has to the ordinary person so that they are enticed to make the effort to learn how to use it. Having said that, the easier it makes this learning process, the less advertising it has to do.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
The registry isn't bad because it's stored in binary form, or because it's heirarchical, or because it supports transactions, or because it has ACLs. These are good (or at least acceptable) things.
The registry is bad because it's global and forces a lot of configuration to be global as well. For example, COM components are registered globally, so only one DLL can be associatded with a class ID at a time. That's why you can only have one version of Internet Explorer installed on the same machine. Yes, users have their own registry subtress, but not every key can be configured under the user-specific heirarchy. Even a user-specific key can only have one value at a time for a given user. Unix systems, on the other hand, use environment variables to hold (or point to) configuration information, which results in a lot more flexibility.
Because registry values are global, application developers only consider the case of running one program at a time. If you want, say, two copies of Outlook, each with different settings, you'll need two separate users. A lot of programs don't even support multiple concurrent instances, which is maddening.
Another maddening side effect of the registry being global is that it's not possible to have the equivalent of NFS-mounted home directories under Windows. Say you have a domain user foo\bar on machines A and B. It's natural to want them to have the same %USERPROFILE% (read $HOME) on a fileserver somewhere, and on Unix, that works just fine. But under Windows, when the user logs into machine A, the system will lock ntuser.dat (the file containing the registry), which prevents the user logging in under machine B. Application-specific configuration files that are locked only during actual changes don't have this problem.
The global nature of the registry also makes it difficult to maintain application configuration: if you want to isolate the configuration information used by a program, you're essentially reduced to looking at procmon output and seeing what registry keys it touches. While in principle programs should limit themselves to storing information under HKLU\Software\Blah\..., in practice, they scatter stuff all over the registry, especially when they register COM stuff. You can't keep just, say, Word's configuration under version control.
When people say they hate the registry, what they mean is that they hate that Windows is not very well-modularized. Isolating one application's registry configuration is like removing one egg from an omelet.
A better model would have been to have application-specific registries, searched according to a PATH-like environment variable. In this scheme, when the system needed to, say, look up a COM class ID, it would just search each registry in sequence until it found the right one. Applications would simply store their configuration and registration information in their own registry, making management easy.
But like most Windows brain damage, this scheme wouldn't have worked on a 386SX with 4MB of RAM in 1995, which means it can't possibly be changed in 2010. As we all know, design decisions are irrevecorable and eternal (and I'm only half-joking).
> Competing with Windows for customers ranges somewhere between silly and stupid. If
> you want more Linux on the desktop, you need to court developers and software vendors.
Nope. If you want more users you need preloads. 90% of people would never survive a Windows install if it didn't come preloaded by an OEM who did all the twiddling to have the hardware mostly work out of the box. Anaconda actually does a better job compared to the Windows installer as far as leaving you a working machine when it finishes. Doesn't matter because end users can't use either one and refuse to even consider the possibility.
And that isn't a matter of techinical excellence, software availability or anything competition can address. It all about illegal monopolistic action. Microsoft signs consent decree after consent decree and over a decade after their first one you still can't buy a desktop PC without Windows proloaded except for a couple of bland Dell N series machines that are usually priced higher than the same machine preloaded with Windows.
The netbook revolution almost opened up the market but Microsoft just dumped XP into the hole until they could convince the manufactures to kill em off in favor of small notebooks running Win7. Go ahead, try to find a small flash drive based cheap netbook. All you find is three pounders with hard drives, crappy battery life and screens just a smidge smaller than a small notebook... and all running WIndows.
Democrat delenda est
Desktops are stuck in a "desktop" paradigm, and so are going to be whatever they are now until they totally disappear sometime decades from now: Windows for most everyone, Macs for some specialties particularly in audiovisual production, and Linux for the very few in either the narrowest range of specialties or the narrowest band of all: those who use the best tool for the job at hand, regardless of what everyone else is using.
But the desktop is disappearing. "Mobile" computing is computing you don't have to notice computing. Especially as input leaves behind keyboards, as all displays are networked and shareable, the GUI will detach from the hardware, to be put anywhere the users want it to be, including merged together. More and more people will do what they do helped by "computers", but they won't be Windows. They'll be Android, or some other Linux variant. Because Windows is like a desktop, and most work is better done without a desktop.
It won't be Linux, either. Linux will have a place in the majority of servers, and there'll be a lot of them. But the "Internet of Things" needs something smaller than Windows, smaller than Linux. It's why even the Mac ditched the old MacOS and is now closely related to Linux, in that it's mostly a (mostly) open Unix variant.
Android is closing in on a majority of smartphones. Around the time it's the majority, all phones that do more than just talk will be smartphones. It's the software and uses of smartphones, and their closely related tablets, that will be what most humans use "computers" for most of the time. Everyone in a developed economy will have their mobile device that's their key to accessing all the people, things and info in their world. Windows will be stuck on desktops, where the first small segment of humans started using them. The rest of the world, most of it, will be using the descendants of Android in ways that Windows can never approximate.
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make install -not war
> A Mac and PC user could switch computers and withing a few minutes either person
> could get done what they were intending to get done. Not so with Linux.
Yes so with Linux. I admin a lab in a public library. We give em Linux with NFS mounted home directories and none of the locked down bullcrap Windows every other library in the State offers. They figure it out pretty quick. Hint: people who depend on the lab PCs in a public library aren't UNIX geeks. Hell, it wasn't too many years ago a fair chunk of them couldn't even hold the mouse right. But not long after they get comfortable logging in/out and using the rat they manage to figure out Mozilla/Firefox, OO.o and the usual application suite. Yea we have had our share of USB pen drive issues from time to time.... of course the other libraries in the State running the Gates Foundation's library model keep the USB ports disabled entirely. Same with CD burning, it works stable these days, didn't used to be the case especially if we bought too far down the CD burner food chain. Again, the other sites disconnect the optical drives unless they need to load new software. After all, gotta 'prevent' the spread of malware. Windows IS malware.
Democrat delenda est
> Do the Linux guys WANT to step up and compete with OSX and
> Windows or not?
I have been seeing this word used all evening. I do not think it means what you think it means. I think the word you are looking for is copy.
We DO compete. At this point the Linux desktop, warts GConf and all, works at least as well as Windows and if you don't happen to agree 100% with Steve's Vision of the Way it works better than Apple's offerings.
> The world has spoken, and editing configs and CLI is a giant DO NOT WANT.
If the price for marketshare is to design a system for idiots then I don't want those users. I'm NOT an idiot and a system designed for idiots would slow me down. Seriously. Do me a favor. Get a VM up and running and install something that by virtue of what it IS must be complicated. Say Squid for example.
Now I want you to use your favorite text editor (hint, a CLI is not required if you are on the local machine) on /etc/squid.conf. See how it is almost complete in and of itself, practically making external documentation excessive. Detailed documentation right there beside the configuration items which need to be adjusted. And it is a plain text file so you can put it into a content management system to track changes, especially handy if multiple people will be making changes. And as a text file it is about as simple to edit it from ten thousand miles away as from the system console.
So tell me, how would you improve upon that method of managing Squid? Would this be the best way to manage Firefox? No. And Firefox on Linux is configured in almost exactly the same way as it us on Win/Mac because for Firefox that is the easiest way.
> They want hand holding, in short thinking should NEVER be required..
And this is the great divide. What are computers? Interractive televisions for the mindless or levers for the minds of humans? One paradigm probably can't be extended to perfectly cover both use cases.
Democrat delenda est