2013: A Linux Christmas
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
The author isn't fooling anyone. We all know that the goal was for Linux to take the desktop. It was to be a win for freedom against the tyranny of Microsoft. That didn't happen. Instead, Apple stepped in and ate everyone's lunch, and now it seems the Linux warriors want to move the goal posts. Sure, Linux has spread far and wide, but most consumers still have no idea what Linux is, and nor would they care. Linux isn't something people want, it's something they use without being aware of it. Is that a victory or a tragedy?
I agree with everything else you said.
Check out YouTube, Windows isn't something people want anymore, not like the 90's. Give it up, more and more people want a solid, stable, secure, reliable, fast computer. When they ask their techie friends how to get that, almost invariably the answer comes back - install Linux or buy a computer that comes with it pre-installed.
Part of that can be blamed on crappy proprietary graphics drivers, but only part. Most of it is just a decade or more of mediocre design.
The only problems that I have (sometimes) actually with Linux are graphics drivers.
The intention behind the developers of the Linux kernel have always been: build it, use it, let others use it if they want to. There has never been a 'commercialized Linux effort' that didn't involve some vendor capable of making its own hardware - and this is what happened with the mobile take-up.
>We all know that the goal was for Linux to take the desktop.
Linux has been a very viable desktop for over a decade. And besides that - Chromebooks are not a desktop to you?
>Linux isn't something people want, it's something they use without being aware of it. Is that a victory or a tragedy?
Its a victory of course. Linus didn't start a fashion company - he started a kernel project. That kernel powers more devices than any other kernel out there at the moment, across a more diverse range of product types.
And I rate that total success, personally .. but then I've only been using Linux since the day it was available on funet.fi ..
I've been using Linux regularly for the past half decade and daily for the past year as a PC (as opposed to as a development and deployment target for 12 years). No, it's not viable. Not when the competition is Windows and OS X. I'd explain why, but it'd devolve into a huge rant about poor UX, drivers, audio services, file system snafus, grub upgrades gone wrong, bad advice on forums compounding problems, all of which get brought up ad nauseum in any Linux thread. Linux is very good as a server, but that in no way translates into being a good PC.
And no, Chromebooks are not a desktop, they're "browser appliances".
That's not even really a complement to the Linux desktop, it's more a statement about what a billion dollars can do.
The quality of the desktops of the members of this oligopoly has a negligible influence on the uptake IMO. The iPod/iTunes pair was one of the functionally worst (but one of the prettiest) products of its category. Android and iPhone have taken nearly a decade to reinvent basic functionality taken for granted on most computers. Doesn't matter.
Not in my experience, at least...I use Windows, Linux, OS X regularly these days, in increasing order of usage, with Linux and OS X being almost equal. On average, Linux has given me more trouble than the other two combined.
And there is a billion dollar marketing budget for Linux, and it does sell. Except it's only the kernel that's Linux, and the OS is called Android, and it sells because it has a completely different UX, one that was created with another billion dollars of investment from Google. This unfortunately has no bearing on the quality of the Linux UX on PCs.
Granted, the last Windows version I used was Windows XP (pre SP 1), but I also got a SantaRosa MacBook several years ago and found OS X's WM to be fairly outdated at the time.
That being said, I am seriously considering buying a new MacBook Pro since I need a new laptop with lots of RAM.
Earth it all on a Web page somewhere and post a link back here. I'd be interested, with the exception of the bad advice on forums bit.
I have absolutely no problems with UX, drivers, audio, file system, or grub in any of this. You must have some bad mojo.
>And no, Chromebooks are not a desktop, they're "browser appliances".
Chromebooks are eating the desktop metaphor for lunch. Cloud, as well. Complaining about the Desktop was a good pitch in the 90's, but if you think it matters - at all - now, then you're really not being rational.
Agreed, but as long as anecdotes like mine abound (see also: other comments in this thread, or on any Linux thread anywhere in general), I think Linux on the PC will go nowhere. As others have mentioned, this is often the fault of vendors and drivers that Linux can do little about, but that's not going to excuse it for most users.
> Chromebooks are eating the desktop metaphor for lunch.
I think it's too early to call that right now, especially based on some really questionable statistics. There is some potential for Chromebooks, but in the long run tablets will probably prevail in that space.
But, it didn't fester, because the fact is: Linux works great on the Desktop. Really, really great. And it offers far more powerful features than the competition. So that is why its thriving.
The days of 'drivers being better on Windows' are over, by the way.
This has been one of Linux's merits for a very long time, something they embrace.
> Sure, Linux has spread far and wide, but most consumers still have no idea what Linux is, and nor would they care. Linux isn't something people want, it's something they use without being aware of it. Is that a victory or a tragedy?
This benefits Linux desktop users as well, for example better hardware support.
Without Linux there would be no Android and Apple would by now own 95% of the smartphone market(1). Server infrastructure across the industry, including Web hosting, would cost an arm and a leg due to proprietary Unix license costs. Services like Rackspace and AWS would likely be barely viable, if at all. A generation of geeks would have grown up probably on Windows without Linux to cut their technical teeth on.
Linux success is a bit like that of SQLite. There are probably over 50 SQLite databases in the room with me right now, on the smartphones the other people here have in their pockets, but you'd never know it. It doesn't matter if anyone knows it or not, in fact the technology being invisible is the point. It's why even the fact that OSX and iOS are unix under the hood is such a triumph.
The goal might have been Linux on the Desktop for some, as a back end guy for me that's always been a distraction. Mobile is making the Desktop almost irrelevant, or at least a niche market, and Linux and Unix are right there, out in the lead. They run the client devices in people's hands, and most of the back end services those devices rely on. They own the future.
(1) I'm a happy loyal iPhone user, but I'm not stupid enough to not realize that would be a bad thing.
You cant conclude that at all. The manufacturers would have had to do something else, and they obviously would have, as in many cases, they were. Android/Linux was an easy, convenient, perhaps even lazy, ship to jump to.
Which also means that one could make a case that the presence of Linux for Android use has distracted from innovation and competition.
This is what so many people missed about iOS when it first came out. Building a software platform is a Hard Problem. The other phone manufacturers didn't come out with relevant, equivalently capable competitors to the iPhone in 2008 because it was physically impossible for anyone do so, even for a platform company with deep pockets like Microsoft, in that time frame. Even Android took years to redevelop so it could get even close.
There was nothing lazy about adopting Android, the handset manufacturers had no other viable choice. The advantage Apple had opened up was wide enough that even WebOS, which was arguably even closer to catching up than Android, failed because it didn't have the same level of long term investment and support from an experienced software company that Google gave to Android. It ran out of time and money, when we're talking about more than just a few years and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Yes, there was a large group devoted to the linux desktop. They never really succeeded at large scale.
But there was also a large group devoted to linux in the embedded space fighting the likes of windriver, qnx, etc. A sub-branch of this was the realtime linux folks. In the embedded market linux is pretty widely used. Even in real-time. Not dominant, but no longer a "WTF" level competitor.
A different group was focused on taking the server world over, at the time a "serious server" was a Sun box runing Solaris or something from HP running HP-UX. Occasionally Irix was used. Lots of things were serving from Windows NT. These days server tends to mean "Linux box".
Related but different was the world of HPC - at the time the big computers were running all sorts of OSes, IRIX was pretty popular, as was Solaris, and other forms of unix. Similarly supercomputing and cluster computing was proprietary OSes, but linux wanted in there too. Now they mostly run linux.
The argument you are making at it's core is that the thousands of people and companies that use and contribute to linux have a single unified goal. This is not true, nor has it ever been. Well, I guess you could say the goal has been "make it useful for my case", and that is a truth, but generic enough to mean anything.
In fact I would say that other than the desktop, an arguably mobile, linux has pretty much dominated the fields it entered.
I say arguably mobile, because it is still questionable if Apple dominated for technical reasons or fad reasons. There are lots of people these days I talk to who say stuff like "I'm thinking my next phone won't be an iPhone". It remains to be seen what will happen.
That is one of the (biggest) merits of linux. Its a "compute core" that can be the start of many products, including but very much not limited to desktops. Sure we wanted linux to usurp the absolute power of Microsoft on the desktop in the 90s, but the "desktop" becomes less of a 'thing' every day, and linux (FOSS in general) is just getting started.
Please. Apple makes decent products, but I'm not aware of a single market they dominate. Microsoft (still) dominates laptops and desktops, Linux (still) dominates servers, and while Apple enjoyed a brief period of dominance in the US smartphone (but not overall mobile phone) market, they dont dominate that either now (and the in the international market, they are borderline irrelevant).
Apple is an influential but marketshare minor player in consumer electronics.
That said, it does feel a little strange to credit Linux at large for what is largely an Android revolution. A good parallel is Unix and OS X; however purely Unixy the core is, it would still feel awkward to count Apple's market share under "Unix."
Only commercial channels like schools and companies, not retail sales to consumers. That too only in the US. It's a disingenuous claim, if not extremely misleading.
Also, top on Amazon doesn't really mean much for many electronics. For example, Windows Phone 7 was a bestseller in 2012. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57411238-94/lumia-900-tops-...