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Comment by pierrefar | Hacker News Reader

I'm very happy you've found that Linux serves your desktop needs. For me, I would never host on anything but Linux or FreeBSD, and my phone is a G1 Android.

But your desktop is only one of ~1-2% of desktops that use Linux. The "alternate universe", i.e. the 98%+ of the world, are happy with Windows or OSX, some of them by choice. Your clearly a very happy with Linux, but don't project this happiness on others.

The open source world could learn a lot from the story of Firefox. When the market was frustrated with a slow and insecure IE, Firefox came along being very fast and secure. Us geeks loved it, recommended it to non-techie friends and, these benefits were important to them too. What benefit does desktop Linux give me? The only real new benefit coming in Linux is the fast boot up. That is a real consumer benefit. I can't think of another real benefit in the current crop of distros.

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I'm not projecting anything on others. You essentially called Linux unusable rubbish. I merely posted to state emphatically that it's not.

1) It doesn't cost anything 2) It will run on almost any hardware

I'm sitting at my Arch laptop right now.

The other real tangible benefit is $$$ certainly compared to the top end Windows releases, although the snow leopard price is hardly a deal breaker.

In terms of absolute money number saved, yes absolutely. But how much do you value your time in terms of learning and setting up a different OS?

I live in a third world country so at least my time is pretty cheap compared to a license.

Some hours reading the manual, web searching or asking in forums vs (26 8-hours working days) x ($15[The average income in my region]).*

Most people use Windows but have it unlicensed. I am not rich so yeah Linux look dirt cheap to me and I don't even use Linux I use OpenBSD. I definitely think the government should push open source in all areas we would be better off. Right now kids are learning to use Windows XP, Microsoft Office, Coral Draw, Flash and Visual basic 6. I have to remark that they are learning all this stuff in fairly mediocre way. Also don't forget government and public institutions sites that are non standards compliant and flash heavy.

*In my comparison $1 = 10 Pesos. The price of Windows 7 Ultimate is 4,004.17 Pesos in Mexico.

Snow Leopard price is technically an upgrade from Leopard, though I believe it will actually work from Tiger. This, and it's lack of user visible upgrades by design, help to explain why it wasn't the usual $150 dollar upgrade price. (Of course this is muddied by the fact that you generally buy a Mac with an OS included.)

How about malware? You're practically immune compared to Windows.

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