Red Hat's CEO came to my business school to speak today. A student asked whether he thought Linux could overtake Windows in the desktop and he said "not in my lifetime." His talk made it clear that they are primarily committed to the enterprise market and not to us consumer desktop PC customers.

Support for my Red Hat 9.0 ends in two weeks and I tried 4 different replacement distributions of Linux and none works right on my Dell laptop. Originally I learned to use RH9.0 in order to transition off of Windows partly because Window is insecure and unreliable, but mosty because I detest Microsoft's business practices. My idea was that I needed Windows for school 5% of the time and I could spend the rest in Linux using the Dell.

In the meantime I bought a new Mac to see whether I liked it and what's happened is that 99% of my data migrated over time from the Linux / Windows PC to the Mac as I got a feel of what it had to offer. Over a period of weeks, slowly, first my calendar, then my contacts, then music, then pictures, and finally I got addicted to .Mac's web hosting for sharing photos and their online disk storage. Finally I abandonded using Microsoft Exchange based web mail and migrated email to the Mac's sever and client too. In other words, I never actively said 'I change my mind - I will migrate to OS X instead of Linux.' It was more like 'the market spoke' as far as which proved more useful. Why was that?

Over time the following occured to me: outside of class I have only a finite amount of time to dedicate to computer learning. While on the Mac that time was spent learning to build web pages and adding comments and dates to my digital photos, my learning time in Linux seemed to be soaked up trying to solve problems like 'I can't get this thing networked to my other machines without disabling the firewall entirely and I'm really uncomfortable doing that.' That's one example - it was all kinds of other stuff like getting applications to appear in the darn GENOME menu. In other words, to get it working right at all.

In contrast, the Mac just works. Networking with Linux or Windows with SAMBA is seamless, firewall off or on. Plus much of the Unix command line stuff I have picked up in Linux translated fine. Plus I can script the entire GUI when there aren't convenient command line options. I found myself asking this simple question: could I ever get Linux to work any better than OS X already does? If Mac OS has somewhat similar Unix roots, and offers just as much security and stability as Linux but allows me to dedicate my learning time to new creative things like web page design and scripting the GUI instead of getting it to function properly at all, why spend my time working on Linux?

I'm not posting this to slam my Red Hat, or to say 'Mac rules' or anything like that. I'm posting it to say: if Linux is ever going to seriously challenge Windows in the consumer desktop market Linux needs to be FIXED. It needs to WORK. Not just for the very smart and dedicated members of this board, but for people like me: willing to try and learn but not to fall on my sword to swtich. True: the community doesn't want the entire PC using public on Linux because poorly skilled users will ruin the security of this OS. But we DO want growth beyond this 2-3% don't we?

I badly want to see Linux eat Windows alive but after making a very concerted effort I am having a hell of a hard time making the case for why others should switch when I can't seem to make the case very well for myself. And Linux developers decide they don't care about us desktop consumers, then we could see Linux's growth fly up only so long as it can eat up Unix share in the enterprise market, only to run out of steam having replaced Unix in for the corporate account and maybe eaten some Windows share but not having gone much further. That could simply stall the movement and let Windows win, and none of us wants to see that!

Moved: This thread is more suitable in General and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Since this isn't technical, or a question, it has been moved.

bil gates owns a 70% market share in Mac and consiquentally OSx so your still stuck with the same deplorable buissness practices.
but it dose look and run lovley!

Well done for looking into that.

My only thought is that apart from the limited market percentage that Mac have, I feel that IF "they" had a bigger market, then they would be worse than microsoft.

After all, M$/windows/etc is a software monopoly, whereas with Mac's it's pretty much software and hardware.

Whereas it seems an un-written thing within the linux world, that we just want the best software to work with the best hardware for a particular function.

Though it could also be remembered that if linux had the market advantages currently enjoyed by M$ then maybe a linux despot would emerge - who can tell!

regards

John

Let me clarify just a bit - I am fully aware that Microsoft Office has a sizeable marketshare for Office productivity suites on the Mac, and also especially realistic about the probability of Apple becoming just as much of a despot should they ever have become more prolific in the market. I'm already NOT amused with some of Apple's business practices.

Having said that, the Mac's version of a Unix derivative is what our vision for Linux should be: frightfully easy to use, and offering a host of really cool, practical innovations for us to spend our development time on.

What I was trying to say wasn't that Apple is a better company than Microsoft, or even more likeable. What I was trying to say was that our objective in the open source community must be to make Linux much more closely approximate the Mac in its ease of use and in its flexibility to work with different hardware. I badly want to see Microsoft dethroned but I don't think that Linux can grow beyond a small core of highly skilled and talented users unless it gets to be easier to use, and more importantly, unless a far greater percentage of a user's learning time is dedicated to new fun stuff instead of getting it to WORK.

The members of this board are just brilliant in their technical skills. But here's the problem: the bulk of computer users aren't. If we are to grow, we need to make the OS more practical.

Tell ya what jeopardyracing,

I should agree about anything that makes the OS easier, especially for those with zero experience of it, but if you suggest that in one or two places that I can think of, you get moaned at - big time.

It's often a case of some people, who use certain "versions" of the OS, seem to be of the view that it's OK for "n00b's" to use mandrake, redhat/fedora, SuSE, etc etc, but you suggest that their "power distro" has a nice, easy gui install and you get lots of crap about exclusivity, knowledge, loss of variety/configurability etc etc etc.

Maybe it's just me being naive, but I just don't follow why "those" people come out with what I feel are somewhat "elitist" comments. Surely, if the so called "power distro's" just had the nice/easy install option, then it would remain just that. An option i.e. "they" can take it, or leave it.

For example, say gentoo (which I can say about, having had some experience of), instead of just offering the stage 1, 2, 3, 3+GRP versions of the install, that they had say, stage 4 (which would include the "GRP" pre compiled binaries and a full auto hardware detection/configuration), then some of us would just go for that and see what it's like. Rather than presuming that it's "probably too hard for a newbie".

What do you think?

regards

John

I think you're really on to something there. I couldn't agree more that there is an elitist flair to some of the posts I have read.

One thing that's very interesting about the LInux community is that it does lend itself to generalizations! There are the PC wizards who are turned off by easy distros and irritated by silly questions, the newbies (me, since October) and everyone else in between.

I guess that means that the community is also not going to easily come together with a unified, realistic strategy to defeat Windows. I hate to think that, but it takes being of a single mind on things like 'whether it's better to be easy to use or complex for flexibility (though I can't see how OS X is any less flexible for 99% of users)' or "whether we want to win the Enterprise or consumer markets.'

At the end of the day, what we REALLY need is for one of the Linux distros to link up with a harware manufacturer and have the balls to ship their distro OEM. They need to have the courage to stand up to MS that way. And NOT Lindows, which I see as a security disaster (ie ships with first user root, targeted toward poorly educated customers - the worst of all worlds). I mean someone like IBM saying "why not offer this to our customers?" A dual boot maybe. Only by integrating hardware can we get any real traction in the market, I beleive, because it solves 90% of the things that drive people crazy.

The apparent lack of coherence seems to be connected to two things as far as I can see.

The first few of the "usual suspects" are commercial-ish distro's mandrake, SuSE, etc - which would have originally included redhat, but that's sort of changed since redhat's policy change, and made it so fedora is just "redhat supported". then most of the others have a "community" structure (this obviously excludes the likes of lindow's, lycoris and Xandros - they seem to have an "instead of" policy, as opposed to mandrakes "an alternative to" attitude - not sure if I've explained that properly?).

Anyway this seems to translate into relatively small companies, that don't have the necessary commercial clout (and it'd include redhat, even though they've got "more than most") and "enthusiast" distro's - whose objectives seem entirely different.

The second factor is that the medium/large OEM's are subject to microsoft's restrictive licence i.e. that they must sell every "box" with windows pre-installed (or in a few cases they'll supply a system with a linux distro installed, but you have to pay the M$ licence charge, irrespective of whether you have windows or not). Which appears to be one of the main reason's why you only see quite small hardware suppliers who are openly prepared to provide linux boxes directly i.e. with no strings attached.

This is the main reason that I feel that at least one of the distro producers should "grab the bull, by the horn's" and produce a straight forward installer, but be able to retain their own version of the newest packages and support. And this is why it's such a "tough nut to crack". That cost's - big time.

But there's quite a few expensive downsides as well e.g. if a linux based system where to become the defacto standard, would all the crackers/hackers/scripties/etc etc just focus their efforts at linux systems instead?

regards

John

FANTASTIC IDEA - One of the distros should say...let me think about this. How can I justify charging for my OS? I know...by taking some of the grunge work out of setting up Linux and mating my distro to a specific make and model of PC. SCREW trying to convince an OEM to have the courage to take on MS by bundling it...I'll just go ahead and say

1) what is one of the highest volumes of PCs out there for sale

2) Customize my distro for it - hardware and all

3) advertise that on my site.

Now THAT's value added. We Linux users could then have the choice and say...if I'm buying a new PC and like Mandrake, for example, here's a distro that's been matched to specific set of hardware... here's a distro that I'm willing to pay for because I save time on the grunge work and get going quickly. NICE. Great idea. As a LInux distro you do this for the top volume PCs of the big players: Dell, HP, IBM. This is a great idea.

In answer to your second question I think it's a valid concern that security suffers from ubiquity. But I think when we are 3% of the market we have a long way to go before we get there. further: how can we ever grow if THAT'S our concern? If Linux really is more secure inherently than Windows, then we are we worried about becoming more popular? Finally, LInux will most likely always attract a more knowledgeable user than Windows on average, which really helps the OS stay more secure.