Where Linux Gained Ground in 2007

christian.einfeldt writes "Computer scientist and media maven Roy Schestowitz takes a look at platforms where GNU Linux gained the most ground in 2007. In a thorough review which is the first of a two-part series, Schestowitz looks at trends in supercomputers, mobile phones, desktops, low-end laptops and tablets, consoles, media players and set-top boxes. Schestowitz finds that GNU Linux solidified its dominant grip on supercomputers; made huge gains in low-end laptops and tablets; won major OEM and retail support on the desktop; gained new entries into game consoles; and also spawned new businesses in set-top boxes while holding its ground in pre-existing product lines. He sums it all up by saying that '2007 will be remembered as the year when GNU/Linux became not only available, but also properly preinstalled on desktops and laptops by the world's largest companies.'"

I sense some bias...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the desktop, the outlook seems increasingly bright. Two independent user surveys, one from LinuxDesktop.com and another from the Linux Foundation, saw participation more than doubling in just one year. This indicates strong growth that cannot normally be measured. When it comes to free software, obtaining absolute numbers is different from studying trends. If you extrapolate these figures, as some industry watchers have already done, then it's almost safe to assume that the presence of GNU/Linux on the desktop has doubled in the past year.

Oh please. I like Linux as much as the next person (and use Ubuntu on 2 desktops), the the idea that the Linux on the desktop has doubled in 2007 is absurd. Of course I expect this kind of "reporting" from someone who insists on writing GNU/Linux all the time instead of just Linux (it's nice to be accurate, but the GNU pedantry annoys more people than it attracts).

Easy Answer

[Anonymous Coward]

It got nowhere, depending on who you ask.

Where are the commercial game ports for Linux? No one wants to make them, obviously, save for the FPS crowd (and there's only an Unreal Tournament for Linux because Epic passes the buck to Icculus to get the job done, not because they have the in-house talent to do it themselves). There are a few commercial games for Linux, yes, but only a few, and there's very little variety between them. In the open source world we have a few good games (the majority of them being FPS's, what a surprise), Battle for Wesnoth if you like strategy games (turn based ones, that is). Then we have the unfortunate, ugly ripoffs like "Secret Maryo Chronicles," and other games that look like they were developed for a C64. [happypenguin.org] Plenty of selection, not a lot of quality.

We have Parallels for Mac OS X, which seems to be quite capable at running Windows programs at a decent speed, with good compatibility. What do we have on Linux? Wine? Crossover Office? I think anyone who's actually tried to use either of these will probably tell you that if you really want to run Windows programs on your Linux machine, you're going to have to install Windows too...and the fact of the matter is that most of the commercial software out there is for Windows, whether you like it or not (being an Ubuntu user, I would have to say that I do not :>). Apple has the best of both worlds on their platform -- why can't, say, Canonical, or (dare I mention them) Novell? They had a few hundred million thrown at them by Microsoft, supposedly to increase interoperability with Windows and Linux...where are the results?

Distributions are still a fragmented mess, it's incredibly difficult to produce a binary for Linux that will work across all distributions (especially with Gentoo and their whole CFLAGS fiasco...thank goodness that fad died off). As much as you'd like to complain about Windows and Apple, binary compatibility is not a problem. There's plenty of smart, dedicated people out there that could find a solution to this, particularly the people working on the kernel. Why isn't it a high priority to increase compatibility -between- Linux distributions, or to form some sort of a community-based standard...one that actually works (as opposed to the LSB)?

Professional audio? Don't even bother. ESounD, ARTS, JACKD, now PulseAudio seems to be the big name in useless sound daemons...but that doesn't mean everyone will standardize on it. As if we needed yet another sound daemon anyway. If the Linux kernel is supposedly so "flexible" that it can be used in any range of devices from computers to cell phones, then why is it that 18 years or more later after the first release, there -still- isn't an easy way to do very low-latency, high quality audio recording on Linux? Linux distributions could _EASILY_ supplant a lot of the Windows based environments for professional audio if the kernel was up to the task. And for those out there who think that Audacity and Ardour are adequate replacements for ProTools...wake up.

I haven't run Windows on my PC in over six years, so clearly Linux has been capable of meeting my desktop needs...but the fact of the matter is that there's _PLENTY_ of problems that just aren't being addressed, that could solidify Linux as a real desktop computer competitor.

Re:OSX...

[EWIPlayer]

Article nor the summary says that.

Google is your friend... I'm being general.

Unix is not important to me, I also don't think the majority of people who use Linux, use it because they want something Unixy.

Wow... well, I think you just might be wrong there.

Tons of high quality third party applications and you are going to mention OS X? Can I have what you are smoking?

What do people do most of the time? Photo editing, surfing, word processing, spread sheets, movie watching, music playing, IM, email and gaming. Adobe Creative Suite, Omniweb (very nice app, by the way) - Firefox - Safari (not great), MS Office, Apple office suite (very very slick, IMO), Quicktime with codecs (quite nice, in fact), iTunes (not great, but not bad), Apple Mail (very nice app), various IM progs are all pretty decent, games... I don't play games, so I don't comment. You've got great interoperability in these apps, drag and drop is superb, man... it all just works.

But as well, how about artists? Incredible audio app support like no other. Most of the apps that windows has (and some it doesn't) but supported in an OS that understands how these things should be done - CoreAudio and CoreMidi - not bolted on by some third party guys after the fact. It's integrated and works extremely well. People are tossing out their synthesizers and studio gear for a powerful Mac and their favourite apps, and they're not afraid to take the gear on stage. Try this stuff with a linux box... I still have my wife using a linux box and she can't even get her email to work right because people send her attachments that are *still* a bitch to read on a Linux box, and I am not about to put in the effort to get it all working right... I've grown very tired of doing that stuff.

But! If I were to choose a system for Unix capability, I would choose windows over OS X...

For Unix compatibility, you would choose a non-Unix over a Unix... Thanks for playing :) I just started being a Windows programmer about four months ago - Unix-like, it aint. Wow... what a thing to say - you are probably the first to ever write down such a thing. Congrats.

Re:OSX...

[EWIPlayer]

People don't WANT to use Linux, more people just don't want to use Windows

That's a brilliant observation and it's one I tend to overlook, but you're totally right. People don't necessarily want to use Linux, OSX, freebsd, Joe's OS, but they simply are tired of using Windows and desperately need an alternative. OSX doesn't immediately run on their Windows hardware, so the next choice is Linux.

Thanks for the insight.

Re:Easy Answer

[EWIPlayer]

4) ESD, aRTS, JACK,... Well, ESD was GNOME, aRTS was KDE and JACK was for Realtime with low latency... You forgot about OSS and ALSA, GNOME/KDE and lots of other similar duplicate efforts. GNU/Linux is also about choice... something lots of people have forgotten since the old ages... COMMAND.COM or 4DOS.COM ? Sound Blaster or GUS (now, most of the time, it's the onboard sound card) EMM386 or QEMM386 ?

All I can say here is that you seem to be missing the point. It's not that such things don't exist, they certainly do. All of the different types, the different implementations and flavours are all very nice and fun to have, but they simply don't measure up - they *really* don't. OSX CoreAudio and CoreMIDI are engineered properly. There's only one choice and you only need one choice. It's fast, it's clear and concise, it requires ZERO (read that word very carefully and then ask yourself how much work is required for any of the linux variants) user intervention to work with, there are no "interesting" bits of information that need to be known or configured, or tweaked and played with... etc etc...

Musicians write and perform music and the apps themselves are designed to let them do that with a minimum of hassle. Do you really think that any pro musician wants to spend any time whatsoever setting up the OS audio, let alone even having to choose which audio code to run, when OSX requires nothing of the sort and outperforms Linux anyways? I think that's the point of this whole thread (and others)... Linux may not have missed the boat here, since time is fluid and who knows what the future will bring, but OSX has given the Linux community what it's been craving for years - Unix on the Desktop - and it did it while the Linux community is still trying to figure out how to do it. Closed source simply did the better job here - it does happen. Apple could ignore any hardware issues since they controlled everything, and they could focus on the job at hand. OSS has much more "cowboy" related hardware issues to tackle, and it's not nearly as focused - OSS writes "everything" while closed source writes "something".

Who the hell could be surprised at the outcome?

Re:Easy Answer

[Kethinov]

[quote]Making software that works right out of the box requires a grown up sitting at a desk working their ass off 40 hours a week getting paid a nice fat wage.[/quote]

This is why most of the best open source software is written by people who work for a company which derives its profit from elsewhere.

Re:OSX...

[Kymermosst]

Yes, but those of us that want a real ****ing button with a real tactile click are out of luck. Especially people like me who think the pad is for pointing, the buttons are for clicking.

Until Apple sells a laptop with at least two (preferably three) independently clickable buttons, I'll never get one.

Oh, and a USB/bluetooth mouse or trackball is not an option. The point of a laptop is to have everything you want built-in. Ever try using a mouse on a plane?

Fragmented mess?

[betterunixthanunix]

People who say that a problem facing Linux is that there are too many distributions and too many different ways to do things have the wrong perception of what an OS is. Different distributions are different operating systems, and expecting binary compatibility across different OS's is folly regardless of what kernel is in use. That's why systems like automake/autoconf exist, and standard API's like POSIX, exist, so that source code can be recompiled on different platforms without too much pain.

"Linux" is not a single operating system, it is just a kernel. The kernel can be run without GNU utils, without X11, etc.

Re:Easy Answer

[Xabraxas]

Musicians write and perform music and the apps themselves are designed to let them do that with a minimum of hassle. Do you really think that any pro musician wants to spend any time whatsoever setting up the OS audio, let alone even having to choose which audio code to run, when OSX requires nothing of the sort and outperforms Linux anyways?

First of all ARTS and ESD are being deprecated and OSS has been deprecrated already so take them out of the picture. Linux can do low latency scheduling and in combination with PulseAudio, JACK, and ALSA it is a pretty powerful audio workstation. Thrown in Ardour and the whole thing is hard to beat for the grand price of FREE. In fact I would love to know what CoreAudio does so much better than these technologies. Do you have specific features in mind or are you just stating your opinion? I don't know anything about CoreAudio so I would love to know.

As for musicians' ability to install a Linux audio workstation...they don't have to worry about any of that. That's what distro's are for. There are even distro's geared towards audio and others towards video and graphics. It doesn't seem like you have been paying attention to Linux development for the past few years.

Check out 64 Studio [64studio.com]

Re:Easy Answer

[entrigant]

Where are the commercial game ports for Linux? No one wants to make them, obviously, save for the FPS crowd (and there's only an Unreal Tournament for Linux because Epic passes the buck to Icculus to get the job done, not because they have the in-house talent to do it themselves). There are a few commercial games for Linux, yes, but only a few, and there's very little variety between them. In the open source world we have a few good games (the majority of them being FPS's, what a surprise), Battle for Wesnoth if you like strategy games (turn based ones, that is). Then we have the unfortunate, ugly ripoffs like "Secret Maryo Chronicles," and other games that look like they were developed for a C64. Plenty of selection, not a lot of quality.

The following publishers develop comemrcial linux games:

http://www.pompomgames.com/ [pompomgames.com]
http://www.garagegames.com/ [garagegames.com]
http://www.introversion.co.uk/ [introversion.co.uk]
http://frictionalgames.com/ [frictionalgames.com]
http://sillysoft.net/ [sillysoft.net]
http://www.basiliskgames.com/ [basiliskgames.com]
http://www.guildsoftware.com/ [guildsoftware.com]
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ [shrapnelgames.com]
http://www.rune-soft.com/ [rune-soft.com]
http://grubbygames.com/ [grubbygames.com]
http://www.caravelgames.com/ [caravelgames.com]
http://www.planewalkergames.com/ [planewalkergames.com]
http://www.graalonline.com/ [graalonline.com]

There are also the high profile ones such as neverwinter nights, the doom and quake series, unreal, etc.

There are many high quality independant titles such as neverball, you mentioned wesnoth, crimson fields, flight gear, torcs, the spring project, total annihilation 3d, tecnoballZ, powermanga, tile racer, pingus, clonk, freeciv, ultimate stunts, planeshift, scorched3d, VDrift, silvertree (not complete, but being created by the wesnoth guys so likely will not be vapor), ufo: alien invasion, scourge, etc.

http://spring.clan-sy.com/ [clan-sy.com]
http://www.wesnoth.org/ [wesnoth.org]
http://torcs.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://www.flightgear.org/ [flightgear.org]
https://icculus.org/neverball/ [icculus.org]
http://ta3d.darkstars.co.uk/ [darkstars.co.uk]
http://linux.tlk.fr/games/ [linux.tlk.fr]
http://tileracer.model-view.com/ [model-view.com]
http://pingus.seul.org/ [seul.org]
http://www.clonk.de/ [clonk.de]
http://freeciv.wikia.com/ [wikia.com]
http://www.ultimatestunts.nl/ [ultimatestunts.nl]
http://www.planeshift.it/ [planeshift.it]
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/ [scorched3d.co.uk]
http://vdrift.net/ [vdrift.net]
http://www.silvertreerpg.org/ [silvertreerpg.org]
http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
http://scourge.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Many of these are very impressive independently made free games. Perhaps they lack the multi million dollar marketing budget and won't make your geofrce 8800 gtxz 45 x super elite ultra melt, but theya re *fun* games, and they are numerous. Also keep in mind this publisher and free game list is only what I could find in 1 hour of searching.

Then there are freed older commercial games such as warzone 2100, homeworld, descent 1 and 2, doom, quake, etc.

Lets not stop t

Re:Easy Answer

[misleb]

I can build applications against the Windows 2003 SP1 platform SDK and they certainly will not work correctly on Windows XP SP2 (Having done this myself, runtime errors popping up randomly are most common to happen in such cases).

The question is, why would you do that when targeting say, Win2k, is adequate for most applications?

If I build applications against the latest Windows XP SP2 platform SDK. You will also find that running them on Windows XP (no service packs - a 2001 OS) will likely cause these applications to crash (if they don't crash while starting up, they will definitely crash when you minimize the application).

If you're running XP with no service packs in 2008 you're going to have a lot bigger problems than running apps from a developer who doesn't know how to target his Win32 applications for maximum compatibility.

To put it simply, these issues exist on Windows on too - I should know since I have had a tonne of issues with this on most operating systems.

And yet the end users rarely sees the issue on Windows. Linux users, on the other hand, often can't run the same package on different versions of the same distribution spanning more than a couple years. Look, I'm no Windows fan. In fact, I dread using the OS for anything more than playing games, but it does have one thing going for it and that is decent backward and forward application compatibility.

At the end of the day, this really depends on how the distributions decide to package their content. There are some like Slackware which make binaries that appear to 'run anywhere'.

I haven't used Slackware since around 1996 so i can't really confirm this, but the fact that so many things depend on your distribution only goes to prove my point.

As for OS X... Nevermind the architecture change and the Rosetta bugs with big endian and little endian. I can't get quite a few applications from 10.2 working at all on PPC versions of 10.4 or 10.5.

Well, least you can run apps for PPC on x86 at all. Windows and Linux users are still struggling with 32 -> 64bit on the SAME architecture.

As for OS X versions and backward/forward compatability... 10.3 is pretty much the minimum that you need these days. While not as good as Windows, it is better than the Linux distribution mess.

Running packages that were built for another specific distribution is in my opinion, a bad idea for any operating system. Linux isn't unique to this.

I'll assume you're using the term "distribution" lightly and are including major versions of an OS such as OS X 10.4 vs. 10.3.

In which case I can only say that you often have little choice. It woudl be awesome if all developers could produce unique builds for every major release of your favorite OS, but it just ain't going to happen. I've been running OS X Leopard since it came out and I don't think I'm running a single application that is targeted specifically for Leopard aside from the apps that came with it. The only reason Linux is even usable when you do a major upgrade is because nearly all the apps are upgraded at the same time. But this isn't very sustainable. At some point there's just going to be too much software out there to include (and test) in the with OS and still maintain a reasonable release schedule. And using commercial software is still a problem.

-matthew

Re:Fragmented mess?

[Kelbear]

Diversity as a quality taken by itself is definitely useful. However, in this case it diversity is bringing up cross-compatibility issues. If software works on one fork of diversity, but fails to work on another, each fork has been locked into that road, resulting in less diversity everytime a fork is made.

Windows definitely has limitations that Linux OSes can offer(I definitely prefer this alternative to the Windows Startmenu and startbar/systray), but in terms of software, Windows has more compatibility with more programs. When a program that's important to the user doesn't work on one platform that's a valid reason to stop using that platform, even if it's not the platform fault that the program isn't compatible.

My EEE PC is a small offshoot of Xandros 4, an offshoot of Debian. I want to run Ventrilo which has been made to work for Ubuntu with Wine and a hacked together script, works spotty on mine, but hopefully that script /might/ fix it. Thank goodness somebody in a forum went and made that script for people like me. I want to add the plugin "Extended Preferences" in Pidgin. I just drag+dropped the .dll into the plugins folder for Pidgin on my Windows desktop and laptop. But as for my linux laptop, I can't do it since it's made to work on Ubuntu, or Redhat, and some other OSes, I don't know the differences between them, but I do know that I don't have them, and they don't work with the EEE PC without creating issues with built-in hardware functions

So I try to compile it using ./configure, finds that I don't have a compatible C compiler? I don't know what compiler I've got, what it wants, where to find it, how to find the answers I want. Every one of these additional steps and requirements for installation is more complication and another lock-out point. I'll have to live without this plugin that worked on my Windows machine.

I tried installing Mumble instead of Ventrilo, a program made multi-platform off the bat via QT dev tools. Instructions are there for windows and 4 other major linux distros...but not mine. Installed it on my Windows machines with the installer program. Great program, much better than Ventrilo. As for instructions for other open-source OSes: I need to compile it with QTmake a command that I need to implement by installing QT dev tools via synaptic. After doing so, QTmake still doesn't work. Troubleshooting takes me from mumble, to synaptic, to QT, to EEE PC forums, but the answers elude me, if they're even out there.

I honestly don't know a lot about Linux, but I do know that the commercial OSes work for me, while Linux is far more complicated and do not work. I would love to use a free solution, but when things don't work, I'm going to continue to pay for those commercial OSes and so will others at my level of technical expertise and all those below. Compatibility and simplicity is a very real problem for Linux adoption and would have to be addressed for Linux to surpass Windows and OSX.

It's not that these problems don't exist for commercial OSes, it's that they're not nearly as common, involved, or significant.

Thanks, but no thanks.

[Haeleth]

That might be today. Check out the OSx86 project. It might not work for you but it's worth a shot.

Yeah, very nice, I'm sure. But I can run Linux on my hardware legally. Unlike some people, I prefer to respect copyright holders' wishes and only use their intellectual property in the way they desire. Come back when I can run OS X on my hardware without violating the EULA.