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lttlrck

What an awful rant.

Who said Linux has won the desktop?

So now it's got a bit harder to remove the Windows 8 license you just voluntarily paid for. Oh dear.

If you are going to whine about Secure Boot please write an article based on its technical merits.

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For me it had won. Linux had reached the point where I could go up to any computer I wished, fire up Linux, and have it not even occur to me that something wouldn't work. Not "have it work most of the time", but have it work "enough of the time that I no longer pondered the possibility that it wouldn't." My last two laptop purchases in the last 3 years were done with no research into Linux compatibility; neither time did I regret the purchase.

Now I have a concern again, and that doesn't feel nice.

> For me it had won.

You are not the desktop market, just a single user.

Not everything has to be technical. There are huge powers in politics and this author explains nicely how MS is playing the game. If anything more people should know about this.

Also more people should know about this - http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.de...

Going by the article's TLDR, this is a bundle of pretty flimsy arguments. The first argument "no stability" is pretty funny to those of us who use Linux as a desktop OS every day.

the TLDR is worthy of a self-facepalm..

>> I guess, under 10,000 hours of testing

I would of thought that the regression of Microsoft is inferior to the diversity of people using Linux daily. Another benefit to a rolling release cycle I suppose

Despite Linux not being ready for "The Desktop", it is certainly ready for my desktop. That is the one that matters to users of Linux. Their desktop, not a hypothetical grandmother desktop which has been branded "The".

Nobody thinks that Linux has won the desktop, but we did think that it had won the right to exist. For a while it looked like Microsoft had put its anticompetitive practices aside.

> a bit harder to remove the Windows 8 license you just voluntarily paid for

It's not voluntary as long as the option of not buying doesn't exist. It's coercion.

It somehow feels as if for some folks like the author, bringing down Microsoft is more of a priority than adding to user freedom via Linux or BSD or whatever.

See Ubuntu Bug #1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 - Microsoft has a majority market share

So if you believe the graph that someone else posted today, Microsoft has already lost and that means Ubuntu/Linux has won... or something.

http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meeker-2012-internet-tre...

From the article:

>Every purchase of a Windows license is an attack on Linux. Linux has not won, and Microsoft is as dangerous as ever

What if people buy an iPad instead of a Windows PC? Is that an "attack" on Linux? How about total lack of developer freedom in iOS or even charging for in app purchases or banning linking to a website for buying things?

Or even if the user buys a Mac instead, do you think Apple would be better at enhancing user freedom that MS was? How about the Apple tax on all hardware that you need to buy to get Mac compatibility if it gets a monopoly?

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