Toby_Tyke's Journal: I just noticed a funny thing...

I just noticed a funny thing. I had a few minutes to kill (I'm going out in a bit), and I was idly checking my Slashdot posts to see if anyone had replied to any of them, when I spotted this funny thing.

First, a spot of background. I'm a linux user. I have four PCs within reach right now, all of them running some kind of linux. I'm typing this on Ubuntu 5.10. I've been using linux for over six years in one form or another. I regularly drive my other half up the wall extolling the virtues of Ubuntu over XP, although she must have listened to some of it because she even bought me a linux format magazine subscription for gods sake. I love linux

Which makes this funny thing even funnier. What I noticed, you see, is that a lot of my postings are, for want of a better description, anti-linux. Just recently, I've predicted that linux will fail to take any significant share of the PC gaming market, and argued that XP boots faster than ubuntu. I don't even use XP except at work. Why am I doing this?

Well, I think I'm doing it because blind zealotry drives me nuts. I regularly see posts on slashdot modded as insightful that really are no more than some uninformed fanboys wet dreams. For instance, look at this guy claiming that game developers are going to shift development to linux, or at least start making their games OS agnostic and easy to port. No, they really are not. They are not going to go to all that trouble to chase less than one percent of the home user market. And yes, thats where linux is at the minute. I know the distortions of the slashdot echo chamber might make it seem like linux is conquering the world and Vista is going to be huge disaster, but no, neither of those are true either.

I'm enthusiastic about linux, I really am, but it's still years away from making any significant inroads into the consumer market. And when I say significant, I mean apple level market share. Now just keep in mind, most games and consumer apps never get a mac release, because apple only has a 4-5 % market share. Linux is years from that point. Never mind toppling MS. So, to quote the great Harry Enfield, just calm down.