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."
Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
All i can say is "about time". It's nice to see this happening just before the UEFI change-over as well to help ensure than Microsoft doesn't lock out other OS options, or at least there's a token commercial opposition. I'm not a fan of Canonical's Unity desktop, but I know some people are, and it definitely looks (and acts) better than 'Metro''. Overall, Canonical's timing could have been a bit better, but it could have been worse. Just before the change-over to a questionable version of Windows, and after a couple of fairly major OS X scares is a decent time to get some advertising in place.
Re:Very Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Very Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Finally (Score:4, Interesting)
So the users that reject the "rock" get to find the "hard place"? This isn't the way to differentiate yourself.
Some time ago I made the mistake of recommending Ubuntu to some friends wanting to ditch Vista on their laptop, but this was right before the window-controls debacle. I give them credit for persisting until Unity, but last time I saw them they'd gone back to Vista (and will probably buy a Win7 laptop before 8 comes out). I guess Vista actually looks good after experences like these - "Ubuntu? Wrong way, go back!"
i bet what they dont mention is (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Very Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it is a shame that Ubuntu users are locked into Unity with absolutely no way around it.
Oh, wait...
Ubuntu's primary appeal is to users who will never willingly stray far from the default UI --- even assuming that they are aware of the alternatives.
The upcoming UEFI disaster. (Score:2, Interesting)
The main problem with UEFI is that it is so complex and bug-ridden that the only use for it is going to be preventing the removal of malware. If ever there was a system that needed to be "so simple there are obviously no errors" it is this one, but instead we have an implementation that is larger than the Linux megalithic kernel.
Oh, and the future is not going to be X86, and Microsoft blatantly attempting to lock out all other OSes on other hardware.
Re:Best of luck, but I don't see a major impact (Score:4, Interesting)
I find this scenario much better than the alternative: Windows Starter.
In all countries, it should be mandatory to offer an OS-less or free-OS choice; it should be illegal to provide windows only pre-installs, because that is benefiting a particular corporation which is anti-competitive at best.
It is the user's problem if they buy a windows license or install ubuntu, but at least they are not forced to pay the Microsoft tax.
In my work, many brand machines with windows pre-installed have been wiped in favor of Debian. So is not like the opposite doesn't happen, all it takes is a company policy change and thats it.
Ubuntu pre-installed will introduce it to people who would have never tried it before, even if they wipe it, they will now learn there is "something else" out there... And perhaps one day they will give it another chance, perhaps after utter frustration and countless windows reinstalls, or the Windows 8 Metro Experience ;)
It doesn't matter if the impact is minor, choice is always good.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cool.... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not just a lower and more savvy userbase that reduces the malware on linux...
The system is better designed than windows has been, with a number of features that make the spread of malware more difficult, for instance:
central updates of all software (vs windows update which only handles the base os, leaving acrobat/flash/java easily exploitable)
non root user by default (which ms have finally caught on to, years after everyone else)
downloaded files dont have execute permission by default
file extensions are not only less important (aren't used to determine if a file is executable) but are also not hidden by default
doesn't automatically execute anything on inserted media
package management - users are less likely to download and execute random binaries, if they want to install something they can select it from the package manager
Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
What is sad is how little you seem to know about ARM which has no ASLR except in ICS and it has been found wanting [h-online.com]
ICS is an operating system [wikipedia.org] version.
There is no ICS version of ARM.
so YES YOU CAN screw the boot sector by simply writing to the correct memory address (which since we are talking hundreds of thousands of identical handsets isn't hard)
The thing you want to look up is memory protection [wikipedia.org]. This is before we even start discussing the .NET runtime which is what should be providing the protection against hostile code running in user owned memory space on a Microsoft environment, which is what we were discussing.
I will now just quote part of your post, putting beside each other two different things you said:
the engineers at Google they are idiots since they are doing the EXACT SAME THING as MSFT? [.....]The ONLY difference between MSFT's version and Google's is that Google has a "dev mode" that will cripple the security
Ah yes, the engineers at Google are doing the "EXACT" same thing except it's different. Yes. Not "a very similar thing". Not even "the same thing" but "the exact same thing". But different. I think I have a tip for you from a real actor [youtube.com].
But hey, what can one expect with troll in their name except trolling.
Given the quality and hilarity of your post; I guess I should take it up full time and not just when people fail to read the article. I thought you guys were professionals.