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ZDNet: Linux 'Takes The World' While Windows Dominates The Desktop (zdnet.com)
ZDNet editor-in-chief Steve Ranger writes that desktop dominance is less important with today's cloud-based apps running independent of operating system, arguing that the desktop is now "just one computing platform among many." An anonymous reader quotes his report:
Linux on the desktop has about a 2% market share today and is viewed by many as complicated and obscure. Meanwhile, Windows sails on serenely, currently running on 90% of PCs in use... That's probably OK because Linux won the smartphone war and is doing pretty well on the cloud and Internet of Things battlefields too.
There's a four-in-five chance that there's a Linux-powered smartphone in your pocket (Android is based on the Linux kernel) and plenty of IoT devices are Linux-powered too, even if you don't necessarily notice it. Devices like the Raspberry Pi, running a vast array of different flavours of Linux, are creating an enthusiastic community of makers and giving startups a low-cost way to power new types of devices. Much of the public cloud is running on Linux in one form or another, too; even Microsoft has warmed up to open-source software.
There's a four-in-five chance that there's a Linux-powered smartphone in your pocket (Android is based on the Linux kernel) and plenty of IoT devices are Linux-powered too, even if you don't necessarily notice it. Devices like the Raspberry Pi, running a vast array of different flavours of Linux, are creating an enthusiastic community of makers and giving startups a low-cost way to power new types of devices. Much of the public cloud is running on Linux in one form or another, too; even Microsoft has warmed up to open-source software.
People usually say "I took an aspirin" and what they mean 99.9% of the time was that they took acetylsalisilic acid not Asprin . Most reasonable people accept that as valid and accept the usage of the term aspirin to mean acetysalicilic acid. I think people who consider the 99.9% of people who do that as wrong are themselves wrong. I also think it would be harmful of Linux if people nit-picked at them and told them that what they were using wasn't Linux. People have more important things to be concerned with in life. I'm glad when people use Linux or want to share knowlege about it or even just discuss it. I'm not going to belabor the issue with every single one of them and think that doing so would be wrong except in very specific situations such as conversations in this thread about defining an operating system or its components.