Yet again, desktop Linux won't claim a year
"[Insert year here] is the year of the Linux desktop!" That has been the Linux community's refrain since at least 2001. Yet it never comes true.
I am an ardent open-source advocate, but I admit to perplexity as to why the Linux community so desperately wants its year on local systems. Who cares?
Now Netbooks are giving Linux desktop enthusiasts yet another reason to proclaim a year of the Linux desktop, despite the fact that four times as many Linux Netbook customers as Windows customers return these machines because they find Linux unfamiliar and cumbersome as a desktop operating system. As ITWire suggests, 2009 is unlikely to mark any significant change in the Linux desktop's fortunes:
2009 isn't the year of the Linux revolution, after all, but (rather) more of the same delusional fantasy land that Linux users have been living in the past few years.
Remember: if you want to get real work done, you use a computer, not a smartphone. With today's Netbooks offering 10-inch screens, 92 percent sized keyboards that are actually pleasurable to type on...people can actually do more than just consume media.
If you want to only consume media, then get an iPod Touch, an iPhone, or some other handheld media player....The Linux revolution on the desktop, notebook, or Netbook may yet come in the years ahead, but it certainly won't be 2009, and it certainly won't be through even less powerful Netbooks than are available today.
While I do believe that Ubuntu, in particular, will make headway through its Linux leadership in Netbooks, I concur that 2009 is absolutely not going to be the year of the Linux desktop--just as it hasn't been for the past decade, despite proclamations to the contrary.
As I wrote recently, we already have the Linux desktop: it runs in the cloud and is called Facebook, Google, etc. There is little need to have Linux running on my local laptop when the real game is in the cloud now.
It's time to move on. Next year won't be the year of the Linux desktop anymore than 2010 will be. Why? Because we don't need a Linux desktop. We need to accelerate efforts toward the cloud, which is open source's game to lose.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
http://blog.laptopmag.com/asus-ceo-reveals-eee-pc-sales-numbers-plans-for-touch-eee-pcs-and-more-eee-family-products
It's ok to be objective, but please don't scare potential first-time Linux users away. My wife can't tell the difference between Xandros and XP. Let's keep trying to stick it to MS.
Your last remark about "stick(ing) it to MS" only shows your blatant bias and misplaced agenda in the whole thing. You see 'Microsoft' and automatically jump on some irrelevent anti-Microsoft bandwagon in some futile attempt to try to make youself seem superior for using linux. Unless you work for some linux organization what would you personally gain if the whole world switched to Linux?...absolutely nothing. You confuse your Linux fanaticism with superiority and are unwilling to acknowlege that Linux has some very serious shortcomings that have kept it off of the mainstream desktop for the 10+ years that Linux has been around. Simply being free is not enough. Nor does having dozens of versions of Linux floating around the internet make it easy for anyone to latch on and take the plunge. Most people do not live and breath computers and they have better things to do then concern themselves with the OS. People are simply getting tired of hearing this stupid "Linux is superior" rhetoric and every year that goes by only makes it more irrelevent.
C-Net rarely if ever has a front page article in their news section about Linux.
SuSe "your Linux is ready"
"N" Novell.
A news for you: the main venue for viruses distribution is social engineering! A biggest security hole sits between a chair and a keyboard! It doesn't matter what OS is. If you can have people to run something, at a pretense of useability (like "download that new codec to see this video"), they're pwned!
2. Administration with these modern desktops shouldn't require going into files and changing them. There's a UI for almost everything a user would need to do. If you know of any exception to that, then that's a problem, but I know of none.
3. User communities like Ubuntu Forums and openSUSE Forums are very inviting to new users. I know that in the openSUSE Project, our IRC chat channel, which is linked from the Help page at openSUSE.org, has a pretty good vibe toward new users too. The mailinglists tend to be more hostile, unfortunately, primarily because it's more advanced users asking more advanced questions, most support for new users is done in forums and chat. (also with openSUSE you can buy a boxed eduction that includes professional telephone support from Novell)
Kevin "Yeaux" Dupuy
openSUSE Project
kevin.dupuy@opensuse.org
(i) hardware manufacturers want to sell heavyweight PCs ? they put all efforts into supporting Vista, but NOT into OSs that are light and work fine on smaller or older laptops.
(ii) Ubuntu is lame, and lacks drivers required to support those new laptops. The problem is actually getting worse as newer laptops have more and more hardwired features. Not only internal to the laptop, but many external devices too ? just today a friend tried hooking up his Nokia 6220 as an external drive, and got a ?filesystem is not supported message? (yet it works fine on XP SP2). Life is too short to have to spend time adding/patching incomplete OSs.
(iii) Linux is surprisingly buggy on laptops. Sorry, dudes, but Windoze is more stable. I also find many things slower (eg wireless), or apps are just not the same (Firefox on Ubuntu 8.10 is out-of-date cf XP)
(iv) Linux fonts suck!!! I don?t want to hear about all the tweaks you could do ? Windoze fonts are nice without you having to waste time. Even with all the expert tuning in the world available to you, Windoze fonts still render better. And if you disagreem and think Linux fonts are actually nicer than Windows ?. then you are a minority ?. MOST people (i.e. mainstream) disagree with you.
Sorry, Linux lovers: JUST GET OVER IT. If you love your Linux apps, do as I do:
a) buy a laptop which fully supports a MS operating system. Go for the entry-level OS. This OS is your best bet at stability and support of the basic environment
b) much of the Linux type command-line stuff is available with Cygwin.
c) have a Linux server sitting somewhere in your room, ready to serve your favourite apps via Cygwin/X or VNC
d) if you cant have a separate server, then run VirtualBox (or qemu) on your base MS OS with a Linux distro which will give you the least grief.
Yes, this means scurrilous hardware vendors such as HP, and the evil Microsoft, have won.
If clicking 3 buttons for a full install is too much for you, I submit you shouldn't be using a computer.
Rapier,
Linux has a consistent UI, what isn't consistent about KDE or gnome?
I really don't see how clicking buttons is intimidating.
**************
My parents struggled with XP, and now have no issues running opensuse 11. They also don't have to worry about malware infecting their system and keeping a myriad of security tools updated.
Also your comment "what isn't consistent about KDE or gnome?" answers the question. The on-going civil war between KDE and Gnome is really whats keeps any Linux distro off of mainstream desktops.
And "clicking buttons", you think its easy because you are arrogant in your knowledge, but what about people who are fearful of *any* change, even a Windows Update can be challenging to these people and you want them to back up their data, install a barely out of beta operating system, install entirely new programs using words that sound like a foreign language(apt-get? rpm? ***?), reinstall their data, and then act as though nothing is different?
Until tech-heads and Linux groupies give up their arrogance, and understand the problems normal users have, Linux will never go onto a mainstream users desktop.
I missed this little gem.
***? Are you truly that stupid? The cloud is a BS marketing term that the clueless use, no wonder you like it.
So you don't need an OS on your laptop to get to Google anymore?
LOL You are a joke.
If you do a Linux installation correctly, you will spend hours and hours researching hardware compatibility, device driver support, etc. In fact, you will spend more time researching it (before you install a single byte of Linux code) than I have spent on one year's worth of system administration on my Mac.
Linux is a fine alternative for servers and embedded devices (e.g., TiVo, routers).
Until hardware manufacturers stop releasing proprietary binary blobs and open source their driver code, the device driver issue isn't going away. And the excessive system administration won't go away until the device driver issue is resolved (amongst other things).
Sadly, the thing that will probably never change is the crummy documentation.
Sincerely,
a former Linux system administrator (1998-2002)
I've done a Linux installation correctly on my box at home within the last year (Ubuntu). It took all of an hour to download, burn onto a CD and install and everything works without a hitch. In fact that particular box has an older CD player in it that ONLY works in Ubuntu - winblows gave up on it years ago.
A few years ago I tried Debian - boy was that fun! Definitely not for the squeamish, so I'm guessing that (or something similarly painful) what you tried.
You may have been a Linux system administrator, but you a bit off in your comments.
That also has to do with customers believing they were getting Windows, or not being informed enough that it wasn't Windows which falls into the marketing for the Netbook makers.
For years, they claimed that "Linux will killl Windows", "Micro$oft sux!" and "Windows/M$ is dead". Every single year since late 90s they have said that "this is the year of desktop linux". They have trashed and fought any reasonable person that saw that linux is just not on par with Windows/MacOSX.
Now that they finally see this is a war they can't win, they suddenly start saying "Oh! Who cares about desktop anyway? We don't need the desktop. Desktop is irrelevant".
It is nice (and even quite enjoyable) to see even people like this open source zealot columnist finally see the reality.
First of all, there is not one Linux user but at least 30millions of them so do not generalize their behaviour, everybody is different.
Second, do not compare the 90s the 2000s and what will happen in 10 years, things do change and it's not because it hasnt changed before that it will never change. Dont get me wrong here, i have no idea about what will happen to Linux in 10years, and YOU have no idea either. I remember 10 years ago, a nerd told me to try Linux, I did and gave up 2 days later. Today I use ubuntu on a daily basis.
The cloud is something that IS happening, people use their webbrowser more and more and their desktop less and less.
That list of except for is getting longer by the month. The last thing Linux will dominate will be the desktop and it will take years. Unfortunately these people that don't believe this only use the desktop so that's where their opinion comes from. For them, they need to just get out more and see the world.
I have used many versions of Linux, Windows and a bit of Mac. They are all starting to look very much alike and as Ubuntu becomes ever more user friendly the time will come when Microsoft will have to lower its prices or lose market share to easy to use Linux desktops. Linux is already doing the world a favor by putting pressure on Microsoft to lower prices and pay more attention to its customers. The only reason it remains so wide spread is familiarity. XP is now a fairly stable system and is very familiar to people. Vista has not made an impact. So the only way Microsoft overcomes the XP conundrum is to stop supporting it and force people to adopt the new system. When that happens the learning curve starts again and Linux will be an alternative.
This will be a slow process but every day Microsoft loses market share and if it doesn't get its act together, lower prices and pay attention to its customers the trickle will turn into a torrent.
I even have evidence to back up my opinion instead of simple pure trolling. When a company has to trick it's customers into thinking they like their products, it's game over. Few things in the world have made me laugh as much as this mojave experiment M$ is doing. Set up the OS so the customer doesn't see that pain, set it up on a super computer so the customer doesn't see the performance issues, allow them to play with a few applications instead of making them suffer installing them and when the customer says "this ain't so bad" tell them it's the current product instead of some revolutionary version like you told them initially. The definition of FAIL if I've ever seen one!
What has changed substantially is the growth of the Internet. In the past, software support came from the company that wrote the software. With the Internet, support comes from every corner of the globe. That model supports open-source software
Now I can get advice from thousands (or millions) of users (through wikis and forums, etc). instead of from a handful of software engineers who may or may not actually understand that the software written by a different part of their company really doesn't work. (Vista users may be very familiar with that scenario).
The Internet empowers Linux and begins to make closed, proprietary OS's like Windows obsolete.
Yes, XP was a good OS, but it is aging and operating systems will continue to evolve. Linux is free to do on a global level, unlike Windows, which still just comes from the Northwest United States.
No, it hasn't. It's been the refrain of lazy tech journalists and random bloggers. I've never seen anyone significant in the "Linux community" say that, at least not unless it was in a way that actively engaged with the problematic side of the statement.
Oh, and that's an incomplete statement. That was Acer's assertion (notably, the Aspire One has an extremely slow system drive that is only 8GB in size, and a fairly shoddy Linux implementation). When asked, Asus said that was not their experience.
"There is little need to have Linux running on my local laptop when the real game is in the cloud now."
Every year, technology columnists talk about running all their applications inside a web browser. They started talking about it in 1996, and have not stopped talking about it since.
Having a go at some Linux people for their "year of the desktop" talk, and then seriously wielding a cliche that's even older, is laughably hypocritical. Linux users don't really talk about "the year of the Linux desktop" anymore as it's clear that things are evolving and gradually getting better, rather than exploding. It'll be like one day in 2017 someone will say "Hey, you know, 2010 was a great year for Linux".
Having bought an Acer Aspire One I have to agree with an earlier poster, that the Linux machines aren't being returned due to problems with Linux, but due to "I thought I was getting Windows" and also the horrible distributions being put on some of these machines. The version of Linpus on the Aspire One is shocking, and I hate the thought that people assume Linux is always like that. If you use a distribution that's not been tied up in knots, you can have a great Linux experience on a netbook.
- by Expatriot December 19, 2008 5:29 PM PST
- "Adobe squeezes AIR out of beta for Linux users" (CNET http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10125963-2.html) notes that it is only for a few distros, and thus highlights Linux's biggest flaw, both on the desktop and on the server:
- Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (44 Comments)Every distro is different from every other distro -- there is almost an infinite combination of kernel versions, scripts used (BSD or System V), directory layouts, and other included pieces that make up a complete OS. (Never mind the different flavors of the day that seem to come and go.) At the risk of inciting a riot, its accurate to say that Linux is not an OS in the traditional sense or in the same way as Windows, OS X, or even FreeBSD.
If you are technically proficient and your distro has everything you need and/or want, it is all too easy to dismiss this as a distinction without a difference, but it is obviously not the case.
On the server, if certain programs are available only for some Linux distros (to use Adobe Air as an example, if not the best one), and other programs are available only on certain others, then is there any "true" Linux? And what happens if you need a combination of programs that are not all available on any distro?
Consumers, especially those who are looking for light switch type simplicity, which OS X personifies and Windows offers to a lesser degree, aren't likely to be impressed with the difficulties of having to choose a distro from a multitude of possibilities and having to learn all sorts of arcane technical information just to make it work, all with the possibility they made a wrong choice, thus having to go through the loop once again.
Linux reminds me of the old British sports cars (British cars in general?) where you had to tinker with the engine everytime you wanted to go for a drive. It may be free in the sense that you can obtain it for free, but the true cost can exceed that of OS X or MS Windows if you have to pay for support or to get someone else to make it work, or even if you value your own time.