Why Linux is About to Lose

mpawlo writes "Wired ran an interesting piece by Russ Mitchell in the latest issue of the magazine. Mitchell focus on the so called war between Microsoft and Linux and why Linux will have a hard time winning such a war, and especially in respect of the desktops. The article was only available in the paper issue, but is now also available online."

Desktop shipments? Article disqualified.

[geschild]

To use the paltry 1.5% of shipments of Linux for desktop environments to disqualify Linux as a contender for the desktop shows how little the writer knows about Linux. And the writer worked for Red Hat? Please, somebody hit her with a clue-bat. The amount of shipments tells nothing about the installed base and for desktops you can rest assured that the number of shipments should be multiplied by a _much_ larger amount than with server-shipments exactly _because_ of the reduced licensing cost it can bring for workstations! Don't bother to read the piece, it's useless and shouldn't even have been posted here especially since it's a day old.

Karma? What's that again?

Re:Maybe in the short term...

[acroyear]

Dell has not dropped Linux totally. Dell has dropped linux for their cheap, low-end systems, your standard home desktop (so, yes, GNU/Gnome|KDE/Linux isn't "ready" to be a home desktop system...but in my opinion it wasn't meant to be and shouldn't be force-fed into that environment).

Dell DOES still support and distribute RH7.1 on their workstation and server lines, and states they will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

People don't just casually go "I wanna use linux" -- people pick Unix or Linux systems because they want to get something done and have decided that Microsoft products will cost too much and get in the way of actually getting things done. And if you have stuff you "have to get done", generally, you need a high-end workstation or server to do it.

Re:Easy.

[spacefem]

I disagree.

Yes, it was written "for geeks by geeks", but the number of geeks who care about the rest of the world is growing every day. I use Linux as on my desktop, I'm an electrical engineering student, not a computer geek. I'm also urging girls who live with me to do the same, and for one or two of them it's working quite well. Yes, we have our problems, but overall we're really happy with what's going on and feel a lot more invited into the "geek world" by just running linux than we ever did with Windows. The future includes the general population, hackers know that, and we're really appreciative.

Re:Why Linux isn't on the desktop or never will be

[zulux]

Were alrady there for some userse - I'm a consultant for a bunch of small businesses, and have been replacing the "front desk" computer operating systems with Mandrake 8.0 in KDE mode and AbiWord. The secretary types love it becuse they can't "break the computer" and they don't loose work. Just make sure your printer is supported with CUPS and away you go. Granted, the Linux desktop can't replace the whole MS-Office desktop, but in actuall use (for the correct type of user) I've had great sucuess with the above.

Re:Linux has not lost

[pmz]

...just giving up because there's no good spell checker for Linux is silly.

I have had pretty good luck with ispell. It can quietly ignore LaTeX markup and can be invoked within Emacs. Most ftp sites that distribute Linux/BSD/etc. packages have it.

If your definition of "good" is something that is GUIfied, then perhaps StarOffice could satisfy you?

Weird conclusions

[Taurine]

I read this in the print edition last month, so if this doesn't work out, perhaps they cut the web version.

After the stuff about the desktop war, he goes on to conclude that because Linux is already succeeding in the server market, that is where open source developers should concentrate, abandoning further work on (specifically) KDE and GNOME. He completely misses the points that:

1 - Developers are doing this for free. If there is money and market share in developing for the server market, that is where companies will (and do) develop their products for Linux. Open source developers don't often work on things that are specifically there to make money for someone else, and are of no use to themselves.

2 - Its the desktop software that Linux is perceived to be weakest, so why does it make more sense to abandon it and work on the stuff that is already doing well? And how are people supposed to develop the server software without an adequate desktop environment? I get the impression that he wants people to use Windows on their workstation, writing code for Linux. Why would I be happy to give BillG $200 for a WinXP license, but love Linux so much that I did hundreds of hours of free work on stuff that made someone else money?

Fundamentally, this guy has latched on to the current /. trend that you get more karma for slating Linux than you do for boosting it. He has applied this to getting paid for writing the article, and Wired has applied it to getting people to buy their 'zine.

One more thing. The writer specifically says that Kodak digital cameras are not supported. Funny then that my Kodak DC200 works fine with gPhoto for the last year.

Re:How can they lose the war, Easy!

[czardonic]

the goal of a corporation in capitalism is not to become a monopoly, but to become profitable

Actually, the goal is to MAXIMISE profits. In order to truly maximze profits, a corporation must eliminate competition which has a downward effect on profits. As such, monopoly is most certainly ultimate corporate ambition.

Re:Advocacy is killing us

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing to understand is that the chip design industry has always been Unix. Switching to Linux is Sun's loss, not Microsoft's.

In fact, it's a consistant pattern in most Linux victory stories. When you ask what they were using before, it was usually Unix. Not that that detracts from the victory, it just doesn't affect Microsoft's userbase at all, except the loss of a potential sale in the 3% of the market that they don't control.

(In case some folks weren't around 10 years ago - Unix company's hype always was that they were an "Open System" that followed public specifications, meaning it was cheap to switch vendors if need be. The fact that someone took them up on it is not all that interesting, in my book.)

Re:How can they lose the war, Easy!

[LMCBoy]

It's not illegal to be a monopoly; it's illegal to abuse your position as a monopoly.

5 Minute Analysis

[docwhat]

Okay, let's start with the beginning. Mr. Mitchell first (rightly) complains about someone at Red Hat wiping the contents of some worker's laptop to replace Windows with Linux. This is first, a straw-man argument (we can't argue against it, but it has nothing to do with linux, but with a stupid Tech).

Likewise, his arguments about one peice of software (generalized into all Linux word processing software) at a point obviously somewhere in his past (but not current, he no longer works there) isn't terribly suprising, or valuable. It doesn't say anything except that some version of Applixware in the past, didn't do a great job of spell checking.

Then Mr. Mitchell tries to gain our confidence in his ability to criticize all of linux by saying he appreciates Linux "Technically". The fact that Mr. Mitchell then says that the "Linux community is a muddled and unfocused lot" really shows that he doesn't understand how Linux is developed. This is an open source, anyone-can-play, large group of people who can (and usually) do what they want.

Mr. Mitchell's claim that the "the war [for the desktop] is over" is also bizarre. This is something I have heard a lot, but it makes no sense. Was the "war" for department stores over after Sears? How about for the railroads? Nothing is over. The world keeps going. And, as I said above, people in the Linux Community can and will do what they want.

The claim that one part of a community is distracting the community as a whole is also another fallacy. This is not provable and most likely doesn't reflect reality. People who work on the desktop do so because it's what they want to do. They may do desktop work elsewhere (maybe for Windows or Macs) if they didn't have Linux. You don't know.

Of course, what Mr. Mitchell is really saying is that he doesn't think competition is worthwhile. Doing something for the thrill of doing it isn't worthwhile. I disagree. Every major advancement, and many minor ones had people who weren't motivated saying things like, "Who cares? Can't be done. No one will want it." and have been proven wrong.

I'm going to wrap this up, because I got side tracked and have other things to do. But consider his final statements. Mr. Mitchell wants the Linux Community to give up because he wants Linux to succeed. This is defeatist and makes little sense. The Linux community should do what it wants to do.

Finally, just because I have to say this. If you work for a company that sells an OS, you should make all efforts to use that OS. Period. The president of Ford does NOT drive a Toyota. The company cars are not Nissans.

Well I don't know about you, but I feel beter.

Linux wins today at work

[theMissingLink]

This author really missed the boat. I can't believe he worked at Red Hat and didn't understand that Open Source software is written because people want to write it. Not because they feel a need to make Linux win some war in some abstract sense. I'm not surprised he does not work at Red Hat anymore with a lack of understanding of Open Source shown in this article.

On to a winning day for Linux at work. I am an IS manager for a fairly large semi-conductor company. I use a Linux Dell laptop for all my work. Today I watched my guys install 5 new Linux Athlon workstations and remove 5 Suns workstations from design engineer's desks. The 5 Athlons have 3 times the RAM, 10 times the disk and 1000 more CPU Hz than the Suns and cost about one 1/5 as much as Suns cost. Almost all of the design software needed is now supported in Linux. Within a year 100% is predicted to be. Due to the industry downturn we haven't bought a Sun in recent memory, but more Linux boxes keep showing up due to their much better value. Did I mention that most software runs at least twice as fast on a 1.4GHz Athlon than a 440MHz UltrasparcII?

I also approved a dual 1.2GHz Athlon from Penguin Computing to replace an aging Sun E450 to run SAS statistical software. This dual system should run SAS about twice as fast as our 4 processor Sun. And the icing on the cake is our SAS license is about $20K less per year on the Linux server.

Interesting development number 3. Due to the increase in MS license costs, the director of IS is interested in a proposal to use Linux on a pilot desktop project to replace Windows.

So it doesn't matter what an out of touch commentator says. Linux will continue to move in where MS and Sun screw up by not beating the overall value of Linux.