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Comment by martinced | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people have Android devices. And TV decoders running Linux. And routers running Linux. And the trend ain't stopping anytime soon: it's hard to compete with free and open.

That's when you do really want to go back to the late nineties, on Usenet, where all the MS fanbois kept singing: "Nothing to see, move along, Unix is dying and Windows is going to conquer everything, including the server space".

How farsighted these where uh!?

And that's in not even 20 years. I can't imagine how the landscape shall look like in another twenty.

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Replace:

  "90's" with "teens."
  "Usenet" with "HN."
  "MS" and "Windows" with "Linux."
  "Unix" with "Windows."

Same song. Different day.

You really think that Microsoft is going to be able to make a push in consumer electronics? How?

Usenet trolls then are the equivalent of the political blog spam today.

In the nineties, Linux/OSS wasn't as mature/widespread and hardware for small devices sucked in performance and price. People wanted OSes and shit that just "worked". Installing and configuring "alternate" OSes in the '90s was painful even for experienced professionals and hobbyists. And the applications and user experience wasn't that great compared to what we have now.

Now days I can install Linux on a mainstream laptop, restrict Windows to a VM and actually get shit done without any or that much pain.

But the average computer user cannot, painlessly.

Though Linux has gotten easier to install, the average computer user is relatively less proficient than they were a dozen years ago.

Linux is not tailored for most people because of its fragmentation and the depth to which FOSS ideology drives its development. Supporting Linux is bothersome to the point that Red Hat run a lucrative business doing so.

> Supporting Linux is bothersome to the point that Red Hat run a lucrative business doing so.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say with this.

Supporting Windows is bothersome, to the point that thousands of companies run lucrative businesses doing so.

My personal experience is that supporting Linux in a business setting can be done with far fewer people than supporting Windows, and that seems to be a common experience.

Red Hat is a $10 billion company and listed on NYSE. Despite the massive disparity between the installed bases, there is no business that's even close to that size built upon supporting Windows...unless one considers Microsoft itself...and Red Hat is just one flavor of Linux among many.

>But the average computer user cannot, painlessly.

Have you tried installing Linux lately? The Ubuntu installation is simpler and faster than a Windows install and on par with OS X. At best, it's hard to get users to download an ISO and know how to burn it (even though that functionality is built into Windows/OSX/Linux), but even then Wubi is dead-simple to use.

I've recently installed Ubuntu, Kbuntu, and Windows 8. Windows 8 as a clean install was the most seamless in terms of hardware compatibility. Installing additional software on Windows 8 is vastly easier.

What hardware did you have issue with?

>Installing additional software on Windows 8 is vastly easier.

huh? Besides the fact that I can install every application I need in a single command in a few minutes, or despite USC's one-click install of all software... Windows requires either independent one-off nuanced installers or require using the Store that has hardly any apps and requires you have and link a Microsoft Account.

I can believe the first part. When I last installed Ubuntu some years ago it was indeed clunkier than a Windows installation.

But installing software being easy at Windows? The main reason I switched to using Linux as my main system is due to the vastly improved process of installing software. Windows has not improved in this area much in recent years (though many other aspects of it has).

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