Linux on the Desktop Doubles in 2007

00_NOP writes "According to a report on Softpedia, citing Net Applications, Linux usage on the desktop doubled in 2006 — 07: though from a miserable 0.37% to a still not brilliant 0.81%. Given that Linux is free, is based on peer reviewed source (and so inherently more secure in the longer term) and that hardware support is now pretty good, how long are we going to have to wait for the big breakthrough?" Of course the focus of the article is that Vista is kicking butt over Mac/Linux, which is not particularly surprising.

Re:Peer-reviewed source? Come on

But usually the most common aspects of a system (Firefox, Linux kernel, X, Core Utilities) all have many people looking at the source. And there is very rarely an attack on any system Linux or Windows that doesn't take advantage of the things that most everyone has (Think of all the Outlook and Internet Explorer spyware/viruses/Trojans) rather then some obscure program that say 100 people use. And the author was saying that it made it more secure, not that it helped development (which it does also) And for the uncritical examination it is mostly because the Free/Open Source community is in dire need for that application, think of Linux, even though the Hurd kernel was going to come out sometime soon Linux was used because it was there, not necessarily because it was the best (Even though now it totally demolishes the Hurd in capability)

Re:Peer-reviewed source? Come on

So you've extrapolated that because no users looked over your code that no one looks at linux? I'm not sure how anyone could think that follows. I made a video and put it on youtube. Nobody watched it but my family. That's why I don't know what the big deal about youtube is. Nobody looks at video on the site but family of people who submit stuff.

Re:Peer-reviewed source? Come on

Next you'll claim science isn't peer-reviewed because no one reviewed an obscure sociology paper on the spitting habits of an insignificant african tribe?

Re:Peer-reviewed source? Come on

That's funny, as my experience is the exact opposite. I've developed a very small GPL library and posted the project in sourceforge. Although I'm the only developer and I regularly submit packages of the code, the section which is mostly visited is the project's subversion repository. Moreover, I do get patches from random people who browse the code.

Re:Peer-reviewed source? Come on

I used to develop a GPL app, the GNUstep-based character map Charmap. It had a few dozen users, and I'm pretty sure none of them ever took a single look at the source. Only the very biggest applications get attention, and very often quite uncritical examination at that.

In a sort of backhanded way, the fact that nobody bothered to look is a complement!

Programmers typically look at sources when they need it to do something it doesn't already do. There's an itch they're looking to scratch, and your stuff doesn't do it. Years ago, when I was still pretty green at coding, I threw out some code that allowed you to send email through a remote server.

It was about as basic as you could get. [phpbuilder.com] And, the many revisions that happened thereafter over the years [phpbuilder.com] are a clear example of how source review is done.

What I originally threw out was pretty weak, and was extended by other programmers who wanted to scratch an itch that my original code did not fulfill. This is code review at work...

Re:Peer-reviewed source? Come on

I was similarly disappointed. Open-source work is fairly lonely most of the time. To justify doing open-source projects, you valid reasons beyond hoping others will pitch in and help, since that rarely happens (contrary to popular belief). Even with bigger more popular programs, there's still often a single programmer doing practically everything. Users generally don't help out, but post a lot of "Help me, please!" requests, soaking up even more of your time.

I have some projects I'd like to do if I had other interested programmers to make the projects more social and fun. For example, I'd like to implement a P2P file system [slashdot.org] that downloads data only when accessed the first time, caching it on your disk. The idea there is a really tiny Linux installation could be created that has the whole freaking Ubuntu or Debian distro already fully installed, but the files wouldn't really be there - they'd be out on the P2P network, waiting to download when needed, rather than filling up my disk with crap I never use.

Even though such a project sounds super-cool to me personally, getting even one other human being interested takes a miracle. In reality, you just have to write it, and hope the user base grows.

This is the year of Linux on the desktop ..

... now we have 2 installations :)

Re:This is the year of Linux on the desktop ..

Soon Linux will be passing AmigaOS installations at this rate!

Re:This is the year of Linux on the desktop ..

I'm just gonna post the following each time someone says its the year of desktop Linux:

GAMES GAMES GAMES
Most of the top 25 requested apps for wine are games - http://appdb.winehq.org/votestats.php [winehq.org]
(Also note these are games that seem to benefit the most from a mouse)

I know I can do everything else under a Linux based OS (e.g. Ubuntu), but the only reason I have windows OS on my PC is because I enjoy playing games.

And buying an MS or Sony console seems a bit "Meet the old boss same as the new boss".

The numbers are demonstrably bogus

There are currently about 1 Billion PCs worldwide. If Linux had a 0.81% "marketshare", that would equate to a grand total of 8.1 Million systems. Fedora alone provided a fairly accurate measure of installed systems last year (for FC6 IIRC), and the last I heard it was 7 Million and counting.

But that's just Fedora alone. Ubuntu has a significantly bigger "marketshare" than Fedora. SuSE is also a significant player. Altogether, the Linux marketshare is probably somewhere between 3-5 times what Fedora is reporting, which would put Linux at about a 3-4% marketshare, worldwide.

But the point remains that the numbers in the article don't jibe with what most other people are reporting. In fact, these numbers are downright silly.

Also, no.

Please read the fine article. They are explicitly talking about the grow of the Operating Systems, and they don't make any distinction in terms of Desktop or Server. In fact, the word "desktop" is nowhere to be found in the article at all.

Now, one might infer that it's intended for desktops. But that inference is left up to the user. It is explicitly not what the article is claiming. TFA is only talking about their measurements of the total growth of OS's.

Had they stated that it was for Desktops only, and that they weren't talking about servers, this article might have more credibility. But they didn't. They are, instead, trying to misrepresent things.

Wow, these people are idiots.

According to statistics provided by Market Share by Net Applications, starting in December 2006 and through September 2007, Linux doubled its market share. This detail would sound nothing short of promising, except for the fact that the doubling in market share is equivalent to a jump from 0.37% to 0.81%. In the past month, the open source operating system only increased its footprint on the market by 0.4%, from 0.77% to 0.81%.

Only increased by 0.4%?

Try again, that's a 5.2% increase in a month...after more than doubling in the previous year. That is huge. If adoption doubled every year as a percentage of the marketplace, Linux would have 100% of the market within 7 years.

Hey Softpedia...I'll give you $100 a day for a month, if you give me 1 cent on the first day of the month, 2 cents on the second day, and so on, doubling the amount each day for the 30 days.

Re:Wow, these people are idiots.

Its also why Japan is having its densely populated cities (along with other areas) laid down with fibre optic while we're stuck with inferior methods of internet access. Japanese businesses are willing to look at the long-term while American businesses only look to the next quarter.

Yeah...that must be it. It couldn't be because the entire country of Japan is smaller than California, and when you subtract the inhabitable mountains, volcanos, etc. it's more like Nevada. Or that it has some of the densest metro regions in the world, including the world's largest, Tokyo.

Nope, couldn't be that running fiber everywhere is a much smaller and easier task. Must be that the Japanese are so clever and the Americans so dumb.

fibre everywhere, for certain values of everywhere

Well, the densely populated U.S. cities could have been done. Still could be done. Still are not being done. I suspect the size of Japan isn't the only factor. There might be plenty of blame left over to assign to shortsightedness.

Re:meh

My problems with closed source:

No guarantee the software will always be available. This could be because the development is stopped or because the price is raised to the point I cant afford it. With open source this never need be the case.

The people who develop open software are not inherently motivated to try and force users to 'upgrade' to new versions. They are not inherently motivated to break compatibility with previous versions or other software.

Closed source software tends to become tiered with highly desirable features costing more. Open Source has no such issues.

I work with closed source software every day. I have for years. And I'm always annoyed with the crap I have to deal with. I hear comments like yours all the time. It implies that the only advantage to open source is that each individual can themselves modify the code. This couldn't be further from the truth. There are many, many advantages that extend out from the openeness of the code.

An advantage open source has over closed source is that advances made in one project have the potential to aid and further any and every other open source project. Rather than hiding new ideas and technology, it is proliferated to the benefit of users.

I could go on for a while, and a lot of smarter people than I am have done so. It's not hard stuff to find. But I think this is sufficient for now.

RE: Linux on the Desktop Doubles in 2007

Background: I am a sysadmin for a 300+ node Linux shop, and have fairly lengthy experience in Solaris, Windows, and AIX as well.

I still run Windows XP as my desktop of choice. I only run it because it came with the laptop that was provided to me by IT, or I would probably still be running Windows 2000. Very simply, I use the OS as a tool to get my job done, and Windows 2000 was doing the trick. Windows XP is now doing the trick. When there is something I want to do that Windows XP can no longer do, I will look beyond. If Linux starts to pioneer in new features and areas that Windows and the Mac OS cannot answer, then I will certainly consider it for my desktop OS. Meanwhile, I deal enough headaches from users at the server level that I don't feel like battling with my Linux wifi drivers, sound card strangeness, or having to jump through other hurdles to just stay productive. Of course there are patches and ways around most/all of the issues I have seen, but that doesn't mean its acceptable to me.

Now, cue over to the server arena, and Linux is certainly replacing Windows boxes for all standard day-to-day servers. It does what I need, it does it well, and even offers features and ease of use that the Windows boxes simply cannot match. That was a compelling reason, with cost also being a close secondary, that we now run so many nodes.

Meanwhile, who really cares. If _XXXX_ does what you want, use it.

Re: Linux on the Desktop Doubles in 2007

I still run Windows XP as my desktop of choice. I only run it because it came with the laptop that was provided to me by IT, or I would probably still be running Windows 2000. Very simply, I use the OS as a tool to get my job done, and Windows 2000 was doing the trick.

I used Windows back when using Windows wasn't cool. When Works was what people used and I was being different by using Word. I migrated from Windows 98 to Windows XP quite happily because of one very important feature: the damn thing stopped crashing. It was in fact the only feature I migrated for. Now with the release of Windows Vista I've realized that it has no new features I want. I'll be migrating to openSUSE today or tomorrow and already I'm seeing some benefits just by a little research (Something that's been annoying me is the limitation in columns that Windows spreadsheet programs have. I use Excel/OOo Calc as a flatfile database because it has a nice and easy to use interface. KSpread I've discovered has a lot more then Excel 2003/OOo Calc so I'm glad to finally be rid of that annoyance) already, I anticipate more and more advantages making themselves known.

If Linux starts to pioneer in new features and areas that Windows and the Mac OS cannot answer, then I will certainly consider it for my desktop OS.

Don't you mean have to pioneer new features that Windows XP doesn't have? Otherwise Windows and Mac OS have to compete with these new features AS WELL AS Linux's price ($0.00).

Meanwhile, I deal enough headaches from users at the server level that I don't feel like battling with my Linux wifi drivers, sound card strangeness, or having to jump through other hurdles to just stay productive.

In the past I've tried to migrate and had these difficulties you mention which has stopped me. I'll admit that this time I'm not going to accept failure and I will migrate, but given the many postings on the web these problems are past for most of the popular Linux distros (at the very least for openSUSE 10.3) and so installing it should be as painless, if not less so, then Windows (which many of those I know simply pay the store clerks to install for them because its so difficult). Regardless I'll see later today for myself if the rumors of Linux's installation ease have been greatly exaggerated.

Re:Linux's price is $0.00 if your time is worth $0

People who think Linux costs $0.00 IMHO think their time is worth $0.00

Aaah, I love that meme. Regardless I'll be able to test its veracity soon enough. People who think that the cover price is how much Windows costs also think their time is worth nothing. And yet funnily enough I've yet to hear people say how expensive Windows is when it comes to time. Perhaps its because the time used to set-up a computer is worth the time saved by using the computer. Regardless of OS.

I have yet to encounter an install that worked 100% perfect out of the "box".

Sounds like my Windows experience.

Re:Linux's price is $0.00 if your time is worth $0

I can't speak for the grandparent and his problems with Windows, but for me it's much easier and faster to be productive using Linux.

• Ubuntu installs painlessly on all the hardware I care about (although I did have to take a live CD with me when buying my laptop to make sure everything worked, but that was pretty painless).
• When I update my OS, all my other software is updated as well, so I'm always up-to-date with security patches for everything, with almost zero effort on my part.
• I could probably find Windows equivalents of all the software I use, but it would take a lot of time, and probably I'd have to buy a lot of commercial packages. Even if the money weren't a factor, the hassle of ordering software, waiting for it to arrive, and then installing it on Windows is much more than just searching for what I want in Synaptic and clicking on 'install'.

I suppose if Microsoft someday comes with with a truly brilliant version of Windows I might try it out if I've got extra time on my hands, but until then Windows just isn't worth the hassle.

Re:Linux's price is $0.00 if your time is worth $0

Here's where we finally get to the nub of the matter. What it really depends upon is your definition of "get it working 100%". By several of my criteria, gettings Windows working 100% is an unachievable task. There are some things I don't much like about Linux, either, but even the worst of these could be fixed on the order of a few tens of man years. I happen to rate a few dozen man years as less than infinity, the expected cost of addressing my worst grievances with Windows.

My choice to view several dozen as being less than infinity might seem obvious, but in fact, it is not the popular perspective. If you read thinkers such as Danny Kanheman you will recognize that for the most part people don't think the way they claim to think. By the reflex of learned helplessness, people tend to discount the impossible, exactly as my parent poster has done. Subtracting the impossible, one can get Windows working 100% in a fairly short time period, with respect to a learned helplessness definition of 100%.

Learned helplessness wouldn't be so deeply embedded into the human psyche if it wasn't pragmatic.

It's a fairly substantial investment of time, energy, and talent to buck a mainstream trend. For any professional, I think you can only open so many fronts. My LH relative to IT is quad-CT to zero (that's an APL joke, to thoroughly date myself). On the income tax front, my LH would be closer to 7/10. I'm not motivated to win every possible battle. The last thing any nation wants is legions of empowered individuals, so the barriers are substantial.

The general public tends to constitute 100% largely in terms of instant gratifications: can I watch the newest YouTube video straight out of the box? Terms such as "will I still be able to access my personal data ten years from now after all my current software is obsolete?" rarely carries as much weight.

Nor do people stop to think much about why it is that media formats are directly tied to running specific operating systems, as if OS capabilities has much to do with it.

The other point to note is that engaging in LH has a tendency to also invoke the psyche's PR department, which isn't keen to admit any such thing, so people who have the deepest investment in the pragmatism of LH have the strongest rhetorical reflex to promote their choices as "the one true way".

Apple has historically been very good at exploiting this reflex. They do a great job of enhancing the pragmatic value of LH, and correspondingly their infinities are more infinite than most. With the brutal cooperative multitasking and virtual memory subsystem, no Apple OS prior to OS/X was within orbital radius of "100%" by any criteria I've ever accepted. The LH retort: well, you don't need that. But this PR philosophy leads Apple to more truly embarrassing reversals than most, such as their recent concession that the technical advantages of RISC over CISC in the era of 100 million transistor CPUs are commercially negligible.

One of the main terms that holds Linux back is the instant gratification bondage. Full technical disclosure of video card internals would constitute one large step toward playing iNextSonyGoobTube videos right out of the box. If the college age demographic would simply refute their instant gratification ways, and refuse to view any video encoded in proprietary media encodings, this battle could be won in less time than a Peter Jackson post-production cycle. But it will never happen. Public empowerment? Who needs that? Maybe 5% of college age people include public empowerment in their personal definition of "100%".

BTW, I'm quite conscious that posting on slashdot values my time at $0. It's less of a detriment than it might appear.

Re:Linux's price is $0.00 if your time is worth $0

You should be modded down, for you are dumb.

Last week, I fixed two malware-ridden XP boxes. One I fixed by installing Ubuntu. Took me an hour. One I fixed by installing four different malware detectors, waiting five fucking hours to scan through a 20GB drive, and then cleaning out the registry by hand, and then booting to a Linux live CD to deal with a few nasty self-reproducing files, then running all four of the antivirus scans again while I slept. Would you like to talk to me further about what my time's worth?

who cares about market share?

"Market share" only counts MONEY, not "free" installs. If I download ubuntu and install it on my laptop, how do they know? They don't - and they don't care, because there are no beans for the bean counters to count.

Likewise, bootleg installs. I have not yet had a single person seriously inquire about "upgrading" to vista. Many people have, however, brought in spanking new machines to be retrograded - either XP or linux. Many more come in with Vista licenses on the box and unregistered XP installs on the hd.

emachines, gateway and all are now shipping with vista and yet the users are still screaming abou tit and doing everything they can to undo the damage. These folks can spin numbers all they like, real world surveys provide ample proof of the suckitude of vista.

Softpedia - Shitty website, shitty article

Shitty website, low quality news. Just as an example, the same site has a different article that doesn't favor Vista: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Vista-Is-Nothing-Compared-to-XP-Move-to-Mac-OS-X-and-Ubuntu-Linux-65786.shtml [softpedia.com]

Sell it

Here is the problem: you can't convince people that "Peer reviewed source, therefore more security, and oh it's free" is a good reason to switch to Linux.

Most people don't understand what peer reviewed source means, have no idea of the security of their PC (and not a care in the world anyway if they can just drop a virus checker on it and "solve" it) and, Windows and MacOS came with their system anyway, so are ostensibly free.

Linux has to actually expose a feature people want and do it so that it increases productivity and feels better than Windows or MacOS X. There was a podcast on The Register the other week with Mark Shuttleworth - the basic premise of part of it was that Compiz is cool, but useless, and it's the hope that enabling it by default means developers will turn it from a cool whizzy 3D smooth suave thing into something that improves user's experience, and their lives.

And that's why MacOS X and Windows win, because MacOS has Genie Effects (this is the carrot) but it also has Spotlight, and iTunes, and iPhoto, and Quicktime, and all the other stuff people want and need every day (this is the stick). Where MacOS has a soft, warm and inviting stick, brandished by a really hot chick in leather and a penchant for candle wax, Linux's stick has a poo on the end, and is brandished by a 300lb atheist liberal.

Re:Sell it

Linux's stick has a poo on the end, and is brandished by a 300lb atheist liberal.

That would be a 300lb atheist libertarian. Get your facts straight. Sheesh.

Yeah, thanks to ME.

I'm proud to say that I'm one of those new Linux users (Ubuntu). I'm honestly very impressed with it; I expected to like it, but not find anything mind-blowing.

I love the application manager, I love the ability to switch desktop workspaces, I love how I can update everything from one spot.

However, one thing has kept XP on my system (dual-boot)-- drivers. I can't find drivers for my printer (Lexmark x7350), or newer ones for my webcam (Logitech Quickcam Communicate STX). I can't use my printer at all, and my webcam is using some way old drivers and is very blurry-- looks much better with the newer ones on XP. I've looked around, but not found anything to help me out... and I'm not even close to being talented enough to write my own.

According to Moore's law

With doubling every 12 month, Linux should take the market in 7 years with 103.68% desktop share (you can have more than one desktop per person, right?). Hey, what do you mean it's not a valid application of Moore's law, which is no law?!

It's from their fucking access_log statistics

Their article, and to a greater extent the inflammatory Slashdot article, incorrectly portray these statistics as some universal truth handed down from the gods. In fact, if you look at the article, you'll see that they're merely talking about their own browser user-agent statistics. In other words, they pulled them out of their ass last time they stuck their head up there (perpetually about one minute ago according to the site).

Ubuntu is king of the Linux desktop, and Ubuntu users get the vast majority of their software through Synaptic, a genius piece of software which if introduced in Windows would put "Softpedia" out of business within a year. In fact, I can't think of any reason for a user of any major Linux distribution to need anything from "Softpedia's" website. We have our own more community-centric sources in every case.

Fuck Softpedia.

Breakthrough == applications

TFA asks:

Given that Linux is free, is based on peer reviewed source (and so inherently more secure in the longer term) and that hardware support is now pretty good, how long are we going to have to wait for the big breakthrough?"

What is holding Linux back from massive adoption is software. Very simply, it's just not as good as the proprietary stuff found on Mac/Win. This is NOT to say that the stuf on Linux is BAD, but it's just not equivalent. OpenOffice is very very good. But not as good as MSOffice. GIMP is very good. But not as good as Photoshop. And so on down the line.

The strength of Linux and FOS is also its weakness - having a volunteer developer army. Herding cats isn't as effective if you don't have a big sack of kitty kibble for incentive, or the ability to cut off the kitty kibble as a goad.

Perhaps this will change a bit now that China's getting more involved with Linux - perhaps they can come up with dead-solid apps that are absolutely equal to, or even exceed the abilities of the following applications that are (for me) essential:

1. Photoshop
2. Ilustrator
3. InDesign
4. MSOffice suite
5. FinalCutPro
6. Ableton Live
7. Propellorheads Reason
8. Soundtrack
9. iDVD
10. Flash
11. Dreamweaver
12. Contribute

That's what I use, and I use all of the above, all the time. Some are Windows, some are Mac. I am not a programmer, and I don't have the time to do that. So, it's A: Not My Problem and B: Someone else's job to come up with these apps.

Until the above are developed, I will have little use for Linux.

RS

Lies, lies and statistics

Where do these people get their statistics from?

If I buy a branded PC I buy windows, if I then download and replace windows this doesn't get recorded. All that is recorded is the sale of Windows.

Market share is hard to analyse, I would imagine the Windows share is less than people think, purely because there's so many extraneous Windows licences sold.

Linux on the desktop is still a PITA

My installation of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn a few months back went flawlessly and was very simple. Linux has the install sorted, no need to keep on working on that part okay? It was good 5 years ago. People are obsessed with the install process for some reason.

However Flash doesn't work in my browser because I'm running a 4 year old architecture - AMD64, and the creators of Flash haven't deigned to recompile the Linux version for 64-bits. Maybe if Linux had Mac OS X-like Fat Binaries people would be encouraged to create cross-platform binaries, rather than just create a simple IA32 version.

Installing the graphics card drivers was hell. For 4 months the graphics card was not supported in Linux anyway, so I had to run in VESA mode. However nVidia finally decided to release 8600GT drivers for Linux, and I thought "Hooray!". The install was hell. Due to idealogical beliefs that border on religious extremism you can't just install the drivers. Oh no, you have to recompile the kernel headers and then do wizardry. Not a problem for me, although it took some time because for some reason I don't like spending my free personal time doing sysadmin stuff, so I try to avoid it as much as possible. I tried many forms of instructions online, but they were either for a previous version of Ubuntu, or incorrect. After hours of searching, I finally found a tool called Envy. It worked. Many thanks to the author of Envy. I now have desktop effects - some pointless, some useful.

However the system update mechanism now tells me that I have updates available for the kernel headers and other things, and I'm petrified that by installing them all that hard work would be undone. So I'm now ignoring the updates.

Let's not talk about how many configuration options Ubuntu removes from applications like gaim and so on. Want to have a listing with small buddy icons? Well fuck off, we've removed that possibility. Oh, but there's a plugin for editing the .gtk-rc file - yeah, that's user friendly. NOT. This is a stupid retarded and backward attitute. I approve of not installing 25 text editors by default, but don't remove options from the one you do provide.

Until there is a Linux distribution that is simple, yet has the power available for those that want it, Linux will not gain a lot on the desktop. There needs to be a mechanism to install essential third-party drivers that is as painless as Mac OS X and Windows.

And just to be sure, it isn't about catching up to Windows any more, it is about catching up to Mac OS X. It just works, it's simple yet powerful, it's a full Unix, it looks nice, the desktop effects are very useful and accessible, and drivers install easily.

Re:Linux on the desktop is still a PITA

However Flash doesn't work in my browser because I'm running a 4 year old architecture - AMD64, and the creators of Flash haven't deigned to recompile the Linux version for 64-bits. Maybe if Linux had Mac OS X-like Fat Binaries people would be encouraged to create cross-platform binaries, rather than just create a simple IA32 version.

Adobe has not released a 64-bit version of the Flash plugin for any platform, yet. Nor have I heard of any beta ones either. So how is this a PITA with Linux? As for the rest of your post, you seem to be obsessed with OSX (you may want to seek help) so why don't you just continue to use it as a [Ff]ree OS that works just fine for millions of users obviously is not up your alley.

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/productinfo/systemreqs/ [adobe.com]

Random thoughts on the topic...

...how long are we going to have to wait...?

Well, it's something I've been thinking a lot over the last years, and I'd like to share my thinking with you lot:

At this point, I don't think we're going to have a major breakthrough until Linux becomes third-party friendly.

Let me explain.

At the moment, the whole experience of using a Linux distribution is balanced between two parties: the user, and the developers of the distro. Linux distributions in general have come a LONG way in minding the user's convenience, but I am still not sure this will suffice.

Because the success of other platforms (well, Windows, alright) doesn't boil down to user friendliness, I think that much is clear by now. No, what made its success is that it fosters a rich environment of third parties -- entities that are neither the OS maker nor the user, yet benefits both.

Something that is still a long way from penetrating the Linux culture, I think.

At this point, let's imagine you're a third party (and as such, not particularly involved in the Linux world as such -- to you it's just a platform among others) and you wish to ship your software for Linux. What are your options? Well, and that's assuming you're even going to bother trying to figure out the whole mess, you can: try to ship various packages (.rpm and .deb, really) in the hope of covering a sufficient user base, while hoping it won't completely break next time some distro upgrades to libwhatever.so.52; or you can try to get your software into the package repositories of all the major distributions (and thus become entirely dependant on the goodwill of each distro for access to your software); or you can try to package the software your own way and hope for the best (that's what Loki did for their games, for instance), which is still vastly suboptimal because it's a lot of additional work for you and you still have no guarantee it'll work well, due to countless issues [autopackage.org], the least of which not being that ELF has real, real issues where it comes to binary compatibility. Oh, and yeah, you can also just ship the sources in a tarball, hereby reducing your user base to the demographic of Linux geeks.

Compare with Windows: just put the binaries in a ZIP file or an installer. Done.

And let us not mention the issue of drivers. At this point, shipping a driver for Linux, when you're a neutral hardware maker third party, involves either sending the kernel maintainers your code and hope they'll consent to include it in the main kernel tree at some unknown point in the future, or ship some manner of hack that will try to compile your driver against the installed kernel, which will simply not work if the compiler, or even the right kernel headers, aren't already installed. (To be fair, the initiative that was recently spoken of on Slashdot, about some company developing Linux drivers for third parties for free, is interesting and might improve the situation lots.)

In short: when you're a third party, supporting Linux is generally not worth the pain.

This is a very bad situation for us, because we need hardware makers to support our platform, so there isn't an ongoing gap of weeks or months between the release of bleeding edge hardware and its support on Linux, and there is just plain not enough of us to reproduce the functionality of all the software third parties are making for other platforms

Admittedly, projects like Klik [atekon.de] and Autopackage [autopackage.org] are a step in the right direction, but isn't it too little and perhaps even too late? I don't know.

Because the main, the core issue here is not technical.

The core issue is that when you discuss something like Autopackage, the response typically amounts to "Why don't you use .debs | use .rpms | fork your own distro?"

And this, my friends, is why

Re:hypocrites

'Think its a coincidence that Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro, and it just happens to be the most dumbed down?'

I think you are giving Ubuntu an unfair shake here. Yes Ubuntu simplifies most common tasks and has very sane defaults for most applications out of the box but it manages to do that without sacrificing flexibility and utility anywhere. It's crazy to me that people are still using plain old debian when Ubuntu does everything Debian does as well or better, it is basically a debian superset.

I have used many distributions, Linux from scratch, gentoo, redhatian, debianish, and of course slack. I am comfortable performing any administration task in any of them. Using Ubuntu leaves me the flexibility to change or customize anything on the system but allows me to get from fresh install to fully configured system in dramatically less time than other distributions. People are using Ubuntu mostly for desktops but I use it for servers as well.

I have no interest in systems that are difficult or hard just for the sake of being so. In a system like Ubuntu you keep all the strengths of Linux as a platform and gain the advantages being able to quickly and easily configure most aspects of the system (or in most cases, not having to configure because the system uses sane defaults that more or less match what you would have set anyway).

Windows and MacOS are systems that have been dumbed down at the expense of flexibility and configurability, Ubuntu is not.

Re:OS X

Ugh. And I even had mod points. I couldn't resist:

but no good reason why the UI and "user experience" shouldn't be better than that offered by OS X or Vista

It is. I have *never* used a system that had the seamless interface that (Gnome or KDE) + Beryl has. Expose? Check. Zoom(useful for graphics design)? Check. Invert (useful for web app creation)? check. Taskbar previews? Check. Drag and drop from an SFTP or FTP site to your (graphics, text, etc) editor, and save within the editor? Check and ONLY check in KDE and Gnome. Windows and OSX still can't do that. Show hidden files? Simple hotkey (control+h (for "hidden")) in Nautilus (Gnome's file manager). In OSX? Edit a config file, kill finder (from terminal). In Windows? Tools->Folder Options->view->show hidden files. Virtual desktops are still not supported in Windows (unless there are 3rd party apps I don't know about... the ones that existed last year were cumbersome hacks, well intentioned as they were), and in Leopard they are a new addition. Linux has had for ages.

I've used OSX, I've used Windows a TON, and the interfaces that really seem to increase my efficiency just tend to be Gnome and KDE. The only advantage Windows or OSX give me are 3rd party apps. That is NOT an inherent quality of the OS, just a simple circumstance. Circumstances can change.

I cannot find an interface I like better than (Gnome or KDE) + Beryl. Maybe you like OSX better, but it just frustrated me. It's all a matter of opinion. Before saying that Linux (by which you only actually mean Gnome and KDE) hasn't caught up with OSX (by which you mean ONLY the interface since the kernel and many drivers already existed) in 15 years, maybe you should think about that.