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Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

What alternate reality are these guys living in? When my mom, an accountant, buys her next computer, it will almost certainly run Windows, because the accounting software she uses targets that OS. The same will be true for many other categories of software for a long time.

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> What alternate reality are these guys living in?

One where accountants aren't the only people buying computers.

Touché :)

Not accountants.

Accountants and financial advisers are cheap bastards who have to deal with crap loads of regulatory compliance rules and complicated software that integrates with lots of other companies and governments, costs a fortune and never works properly.

People who package up all this shit and stick it on the web so the end user maintenance cost isn't there are winning over standalone PC software vendors these days.

And it all works via a web browser (which conveniently doesn't require windows).

Even if you bag Office 365 for comms which is typical at the moment from what I've seen, it works on anything.

I've seen IFA's and accountants wholly running off ChromeBooks and iPads in the UK. The only complaint they have is printing and even that's pretty much solved.

Yet my accountant and I use web-based accounts packages, making the desktop OS irrelevant. The same will be true for many other categories of software.

Which ones, if you don't mind me asking?

I use FreeAgent (as it doesn't feel like I'm using an accounts package).

The place I used to work used Xero, which is a bit more traditional in how it lays things out (for example, Xero uses ledgers, FreeAgent just has you categorise your income and outgoings).

The one where Linux shipped more than any other OS. Mainly thanks to Android, but yeah it happened in this reality figures are out its true.

The article is written in regards to Linux on the Desktop, so I'm not sure how Android is relevant.

I know a former coworker who is maintaining 3-4 different desktop accounting packages on independent VMs, each on a different application and windows versions because different clients are attached to their particular rev of the accounting software. He got to this point because he was sick of working out how to get multiple versions of the software to play nice with one another. On the one hand this locks in Windows pretty tightly - on the other, the OS in the VM is just acting as a fat compatibility layer waiting to be replaced. I think he's moving on to experimenting with Wine next (or maybe this is a use case for Docker).

This isn't some a large enterprise company either, just a small accounting consultancy trying to maintain client compatibility.

Good point when 90% of businesses and professionals use Linux desktops that will be the day that they beat out windows for desktops my bet is desktops will be extinct by the time that happens.

it's the same waffle we've been hearing for years. I am running Ubuntu 13.10, but leaving OSX aside, there's no way in hell Linux is going to make a dent in the desktop market. It wont be linx, it will be some future OS, possible Android that replaces Windows. I know Android is linux underneath, but in much the same way OSX is BSD underneath - to the point that to the user, it doesn't matter much.

"I know Android is linux underneath, but in much the same way OSX is BSD underneath"

Utterly false. Terrible comparison.

OS X merely took parts of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and the Mach kernel. The result is some codebase that is very different from any kernel, and that is not following at all the current developments of the FreeBSD/NetBSD/Mach kernels.

Whereas Android's Linux kernel shares ~95% of its lines of code with the stock Linux kernel source from kernel.org. Every time Linus releases a new kernel, the Android developers merge their branch with Linus' branch, almost on a month-to-month basis. Android is Linux (the kernel). Period.

> Terrible comparison.

Not as bad as you make it seem. While OS X's kernel is indeed something of a mutt, so is its userland. See here for one reference on the topic: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-advocacy/2008-Aug...

Now Android for the most part may have a mostly pure kernel(although I wonder how you come up with ~95%), but it's userland is mostly BSD based(see libc, libm, etc) as is OS X.

> OS X merely took parts of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and the Mach kernel.

Since this is also a large part of how the Linux kernel evolved minus Mach/XNU, I'm not clear where your beef is.

> in much the same way OSX is BSD underneath

The difference is that Linux isn't, and doesn't claim to be a whole system. For example, Android isn't Ubuntu, but Android and Ubuntu are equally Linux.

EDIT: I am not trying to make the "Linux is just a kernel" point here. Android is by no means a "traditional" distribution of Linux, but I just don't see why that makes it "not Linux". Busybox is available for it (Android is designed for embedded systems, after all) so what's the difference?

Yeah, "Linux is a kernel" and all that. Except, for many of us, Linux is also an ecosystem, and the Android ecosystem is definitely not that ecosystem.

Okay then, GNU/Linux.

> I know Android is linux underneath, but in much the same way OSX is BSD underneath - to the point that to the user, it doesn't matter much.

So you define Linux as what? X11? We'll that's going away, so that can't be it. Gnome and KDE? There's also Unity now and Elementary so that's too restrictive... so what exactly is Linux to the user?

When my mom, an accountant, buys her next computer, it will almost certainly run Windows, because the accounting software she uses targets that OS.

Accounting software is being taken over by the web. More generally, the entire financial industry is being taken over by the web. The impact of iPads and smartphones isn't a small contributor to this movement.

There are enormous numbers of office workers who could very easily transition to Linux desktops with barely any notice that they did (Firefox is firefox is firefox, after all).

It took a decade+ longer than most expected, but the operating system really is becoming irrelevant.

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