Ubuntu Will Soon Ship On 5% of New PCs 441
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Phoronix: "Chris Kenyon, the VP of sales and business development for Canonical, just spoke this afternoon at the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit about what Canonical does with OEMs and ODMs. He also tossed out some rather interesting numbers about the adoption of Ubuntu Linux. Namely, Ubuntu will ship on 5% of worldwide PC sales with a number of 18 million units annually."
Re:Very Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Very Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people wouldn't know a desktop manager if it came up and bit them in the ass. They would not have any idea that they could be more or less productive. It's not on their radar..
Re:Very Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it is a shame that Ubuntu users are locked into Unity with absolutely no way around it.
Oh, wait...
Place Holders for Pirated Windows Install (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Finally (Score:3, Insightful)
What I would prefer is that the key be provided so i could sign any other OS.
Re:The best part... (Score:4, Insightful)
what the fuck hardware are you running? or are you just stuck in the 90's
I am sorry to say while Linux has improved its hardware support, I find that it runs into those wierdest gaps in its support. A video driver that refuses to detect native resolution, or leaves pixel droppings. A wifi card that does WEP but not WPA. Things like that. Most people do not find a PC that will meet Linux compatibility. But get a PC that works, then later try Linux, only to find those little glitches that makes it feel cheap. It is usually the driver and hardware companies not being forthcoming. But still it doesn't work right people won't like it. Insulting people who report hardware problems helps no one. If you want a world where Linux is common on the desktop you are going to get your head out of the blind zealotry, admit your OS of choose isn't perfect and help fix it.
Re:My first thought was answered in the article (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how many systems shipped with Windows get wiped and Linux installed.
I know I've done about twenty.
Re:The best part... (Score:4, Insightful)
what the fuck hardware are you running? or are you just stuck in the 90's
I am sorry to say while Linux has improved its hardware support, I find that it runs into those wierdest gaps in its support. A video driver that refuses to detect native resolution, or leaves pixel droppings. A wifi card that does WEP but not WPA. Things like that. Most people do not find a PC that will meet Linux compatibility. But get a PC that works, then later try Linux, only to find those little glitches that makes it feel cheap. It is usually the driver and hardware companies not being forthcoming. But still it doesn't work right people won't like it. Insulting people who report hardware problems helps no one. If you want a world where Linux is common on the desktop you are going to get your head out of the blind zealotry, admit your OS of choose isn't perfect and help fix it.
This is one of those "I'm sorry if the correct way of doing things offends you" type of situations. If you don't like surprise problems (neither do I), the way to do it is to match the hardware to the operating system. Not the other way around. With modern Linux distributions this is downright easy, but this is general to any OS.
If you're not willing to do that, your best bet is to buy a system that already has Linux pre-installed, as another poster has mentioned. That way you know the hardware is compatible. That's also general to any OS.
Those are the two correct ways to do this without a (with Linux usually small) risk of preventable compatibility problems. They are not exclusive to Linux. If you don't know how to do these things, you can at least recognize that you're out of your element and ask someone who does. That's the prudent thing to do when you're about to invest a non-trivial sum of cash or time in something you don't really understand. That could be cars, computers, financial securities, whatever -- the principle is the same.
None of this requires technical expertise because that can be supplied before a rash decision is made. I don't know what it is about computers but people seem to shut down whatever common sense they possess, even when they demonstrate it elsewhere. I can see why they're tempted to blame the computer, because then it's "not their fault" and they avoid (i.e. run from) admitting to themselves how little sense they used, but that doesn't solve anything. It's just a weak excuse.
So, you suggest helping to fix the OS. That would be fixing what isn't broken. This form is a common one: suggesting a technical solution to a non-technical problem. That can be tempting sometimes. It's unfortunately misguided because it's entangled with effects while failing to address causes.
The OS can add support for more hardware but that doesn't mean that blindly buying hardware, later throwing an OS on it, and praying that it works is good decision-making. It's still the impatient, error-prone way to do things. More hardware support only means that the (usually small) risk of compatibility problems with this particular OS gets a bit smaller. That's why anyone who has problems here and complains instead of accepting the lesson is whining.
Truth explaining what their mistake was is in a non-malicious way would be the help they need. Afterwards you can try giving them the help they want, by supplying the driver(s) they lack or by finding some kind of workaround. That's if you really care and are not just trying to get rid of them with a quick-fix.
Re:The best part... (Score:2, Insightful)
Every once in a while I think about getting off the Apple treadmill and buying a commodity PC laptop to run Linux on
How come? Apple laptops are just commodity PC hardware these days anyway, what's the actual issue you have with the Apple laptops? I haven't installed Ubuntu on a mac since my 2007 imac and even then things went pretty smoothly from what i remember.
Re:The best part... (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking of "no Microsoft tax" I'm curious how many of those 5% of computers will be running windows in less than a year? People will go with the cheap option then get a pirated copy of windows.
Re:The best part... (Score:4, Insightful)
Many people also have very little hardware knowledge and are intimidated by the technical aspects of computers. Furthermore, for even veteran Linux users, compatibility is not always clear. I agree with your post in principle, but it feels a little like a fantasy world instead of reality.
For example, a couple of years ago my wife got a Wacom Tablet to play with and wanted it on her Linux system. I struggled with that thing for hours on Debian until I gave up. I moved to my Gentoo server, recompiled the kernel, built a module and it worked fine. I have been using Linux exclusively for 10 years and I still run into problems like this every now and then. Had I not done this, she simply would have switched back to Microsoft just to get her tablet working.
If GNU/Linux wants wider adoption, hardware compatibility and the concept of "it just works" is still a major problem.
Re:The best part... (Score:2, Insightful)
Blah blah blah blah windows=works linux=lecture.
Re:Finally (Score:4, Insightful)
Unity was crap. The iterative improvements they've made after the gnome3 change-over have brought it miles from where it was.
You can keep crying about how Ubuntu ought to go back to the Windows 95 arrangement, but I'm rather glad they don't hogtie themselves over the usual luddite whining.
There are lots of other distros for people like you. Go use them, and stop bothering the rest of us.
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, Microsoft and much of the rest of the computer industry see it the other way around: The PC x86 platform is open because of the "mistake" IBM made in 1981, and MS and rest will do their best to avoid that "mistake" to their bottom line again (or so their short-term thinking goes). The tradition of interchangeable extension cards, CPUs, RAM, etc. is the exception. Look pretty much anywhere else, and it's "not invented here", and competing standards all over. The phone industry couldn't even agree on a common charger plug before it was mandated upon them by EU law.
So what does the future look like? Well, no need to look through a crystal ball, just look out the window: Patent lawsuits over mundane stuff like slide-to-unlock and rounded corners. Google buying a complete company (Motorola), not because they want to sell phones, but because of the "patent war chest". Full break-down in innovation: Just go to any smart phone section in your local mall today, and it's a long row of almost identical devices. Slabs with ever bigger touch screens, which are less hackable than any IBM PC ever was.
Back to the BIOS lock-down issue, it is not unreasonable to expect that the IBM PC platform will diminish over time. Laptops are already outselling desktops, and phones are shipping in similar numbers. It might not be ARM which takes over everything, but x86 will surely fade at some point. And when that day arrives, MS and the rest will say: "Well, it's not x86, so we can screw you over any way we like".
As for the apologetic losers around here, who defend these practises, and toss away our freedom like it was leftover food; most of them are shills, astroturfers, or employees of said companies already. They will keep their cosy jobs and wonder what the big freedom fuss was about.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The best part... (Score:4, Insightful)
...isn't that a preconfigured OS is installed on the computer. It's that a computer is sold with all of its hardware functional in Linux, so when one buys one of these, one can wipe the vanilla install off, if one chooses, and install one's own favorite distribution and know everything will work.
I'm no windows expert, however I recently had to build a windows machine as the other windows machine, running skype, had some broken problem, and I was only in the country for another day.
Took a recently decommissioned ubuntu machine, found a CD rom drive, and put windows 7 on. The machine is from about 2009, just before windows 7 came out.
After the long tedious install I found that the network card didn't work, and the graphics were stuck in 800x600.
A look (from my linux laptop) online revealed you have to download "drivers" to make hardware work? Windows gave little clue as to the type of graphics or network card, however I eventually found the equivalent of lspci, and managed to find the pci-id (using my linux laptop again). Finally found the motherboard manufacturer, only to be told this motherboard had something like "boxed support", and I couldn't download the driver.
As time was running out and I had a plane to catch I had to give up. I'm now going to have to fly half way round the world again to fix the mess.
Moral of the story? If you want something to just work, just slap a recent ubuntu on.
Windows is only $300 if your time is free.