1) Laziness. Quite simply, most people are lazy. They use Windows at work, they've used it at home/school, it just seems easier.
Patheticly, it's true that some people are actually so lazy that they can't save $200.
2) Too many variants. Each Linux distro is different in some or many ways, but it's not always clear how. There's just one "home" version of Windows, one "Pro" and one "Server", and the differences are easily found and most people just go for the "home" version because it's easily labelled. If there were ever a version of Linux called "Linux Home" sold at Best Buy, that would probably outsell all the others.
A) It's open source and people aren't quite satisfied with it. What do you expect?
B) IMO this is a good thing. First, it's always nice to have a choice. Second, competition breeds better things.
3) Commission. Most average home users buy from retail stores. Most retail stores pay on commission. There's not a lot of commission on $0, or even $20, so it's worth their time to hype up the $200 Windows, and most consumers won't look any further to find the free options.
Yeah, that's true:\
4) Games. As a Mac user, this obviously isn't a big selling point for me, but lots of people still play PC games, and Linux supports far fewer big-name titles.
That's true too. As long as Vivendi or whatever the name the parent of Blizzard and Sierra is and other big companies don't port their game to Linux this will happen. The weirdest part is that Vivendi runs Linux on their servers.
5) Ease of support. Every technophobe has a nephew, or cousin, or whatever that can "fix" Windows when it breaks. Fewer people know somebody knowledgeable enough in Linux to do proper troubleshooting, and most consumers are reticent to rely solely on net-based trouble-shotting (forums et al.)
Getting support for Linux has been pretty easy for me. The XP manuals aren't very helpful.
6) Consistency. With the exception of a few skins and themes and whatnot, a Windows XP box performs like any other. But different distros act differently, Gnome is different from KDE, etc. For example, my computer has three labs running Linux, each maintained by different techs. In each lab, accessing a floppy disk that's been inserted must be done in a different way. For Windows, it's always "Click on My Computer, Click on A:".
A) Like I said before, it's nice to have a choice and competition breeds better things.
B)Things like that are really easy to find out and change on Linux. Just take a look at/etc/fstab.
7) Perception. Linux is still seen, accurately or not, as the "hacker OS". Most non-techy people that have even heard of Linux think of it as an inscrutable mess of arcania and technical gibberish. Names like "apt-get" , "vi", "emacs" and "gcc" don't help; "InstallShield", "NotePad"/"Word" and "Visual Studio" are clearer and easier to remember.
A)As long as the fucking media and GNU use the word "hacker" differently this'll be true.
B)Umm... this isn't very hard to get around at all. You could just remember everything or make desktopp shortcuts...
8) Microsoft has $60 Billion or so. They spend millions on advertising. Linux has Slashdot, and word-of-mouth advocacy. The latter may prove more effective eventually, but not quickly.
"Compared to the best known opensores webserver "Red Hat", Microsoft IIS:
* Has 276% better peak performance for static transactions.
* Has 63% better peak performance for dynamic content."
IIRC RHEL and Fedora don't use offical Linux releases. And if you think the whole OS is called "Linux", you're wrong.
"that bedroom coder Thorwaldes who publicly admits that he is in fact A HACKER???"
Apparently, you don't know what a hacker is. What you think is a hacker is really a cracker. Linus is a hacker, or one good at programming/using a computer.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of any work == stress
Does it really take studies to figure that out?
Deer Park Alpha 1 was released like a week and a half ago.
The Mozilla Foundation
l a.asp
The Mozilla Foundation was created in July 2003 when AOL laid off the employees involved in the Mozilla open-source browser team.
-http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_mozil
That article never said anything about that...
1) Laziness. Quite simply, most people are lazy. They use Windows at work, they've used it at home/school, it just seems easier.
:\
/etc/fstab.
Patheticly, it's true that some people are actually so lazy that they can't save $200.
2) Too many variants. Each Linux distro is different in some or many ways, but it's not always clear how. There's just one "home" version of Windows, one "Pro" and one "Server", and the differences are easily found and most people just go for the "home" version because it's easily labelled. If there were ever a version of Linux called "Linux Home" sold at Best Buy, that would probably outsell all the others.
A) It's open source and people aren't quite satisfied with it. What do you expect?
B) IMO this is a good thing. First, it's always nice to have a choice. Second, competition breeds better things.
3) Commission. Most average home users buy from retail stores. Most retail stores pay on commission. There's not a lot of commission on $0, or even $20, so it's worth their time to hype up the $200 Windows, and most consumers won't look any further to find the free options.
Yeah, that's true
4) Games. As a Mac user, this obviously isn't a big selling point for me, but lots of people still play PC games, and Linux supports far fewer big-name titles.
That's true too. As long as Vivendi or whatever the name the parent of Blizzard and Sierra is and other big companies don't port their game to Linux this will happen. The weirdest part is that Vivendi runs Linux on their servers.
5) Ease of support. Every technophobe has a nephew, or cousin, or whatever that can "fix" Windows when it breaks. Fewer people know somebody knowledgeable enough in Linux to do proper troubleshooting, and most consumers are reticent to rely solely on net-based trouble-shotting (forums et al.)
Getting support for Linux has been pretty easy for me. The XP manuals aren't very helpful.
6) Consistency. With the exception of a few skins and themes and whatnot, a Windows XP box performs like any other. But different distros act differently, Gnome is different from KDE, etc. For example, my computer has three labs running Linux, each maintained by different techs. In each lab, accessing a floppy disk that's been inserted must be done in a different way. For Windows, it's always "Click on My Computer, Click on A:".
A) Like I said before, it's nice to have a choice and competition breeds better things.
B)Things like that are really easy to find out and change on Linux. Just take a look at
7) Perception. Linux is still seen, accurately or not, as the "hacker OS". Most non-techy people that have even heard of Linux think of it as an inscrutable mess of arcania and technical gibberish. Names like "apt-get" , "vi", "emacs" and "gcc" don't help; "InstallShield", "NotePad"/"Word" and "Visual Studio" are clearer and easier to remember.
A)As long as the fucking media and GNU use the word "hacker" differently this'll be true.
B)Umm... this isn't very hard to get around at all. You could just remember everything or make desktopp shortcuts...
8) Microsoft has $60 Billion or so. They spend millions on advertising. Linux has Slashdot, and word-of-mouth advocacy. The latter may prove more effective eventually, but not quickly.
Not to mention a monopoly.
...is not free.
"Compared to the best known opensores webserver "Red Hat", Microsoft IIS:
* Has 276% better peak performance for static transactions.
* Has 63% better peak performance for dynamic content."
IIRC RHEL and Fedora don't use offical Linux releases. And if you think the whole OS is called "Linux", you're wrong.
"that bedroom coder Thorwaldes who publicly admits that he is in fact A HACKER???"
Apparently, you don't know what a hacker is. What you think is a hacker is really a cracker. Linus is a hacker, or one good at programming/using a computer.
On everything I've seen that says what distro's the most popular, nothing's really the same.