The War Is Over, and Linux Has Won 593
xtaski writes "Dana Blankenhorn bluntly states a reality that many have known: 'The war is over and Linux won'. With Oracle and Microsoft putting Linux in the spotlight and positioning themselves to grow with Linux. 'A new report shows that 83% of companies expect to support new workloads on Linux against 23% for Windows. ... Over two-thirds of the respondents said they will increase their use of Linux in the next year, and almost no one said the opposite.'"
More crap (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux has lost (Score:2, Interesting)
Meh, real men run UNIX anyway.
Seriously, I think some of the Linux distributions are putting themselves in jeopardy by aligning themselves with corporate interests and for accepting and distributing binary blobs from vendors. Corporations are simply using the Linux community as a way of off-loading their development costs.
Re:Pearl Harbor (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Server side vs. Client side (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure how true this is.
A member of the worship band I play in was at my house yesterday, and sat down at a machine to show me something. It was one of the sunflower iMacs. He'd never used a Mac before, so I had to show him where the browser was, but other than that, he was fine with it.
After about twenty minutes of poking around the 'Net, with me not even watching him (I was looking for something else on another machine), he just randomly says, "Hey, you know, I think I like Macs."
I don't think I've ever heard a Mac user say that about Windows, especially on their first exposure...
Re:There will be multiple "wars". (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:There will be multiple "wars". (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not talkin cell phones and PDAs. I'm talkin things you use that you NEVER think about. What do you think runs all the slot machines in vegas? Keno machines at truck stops? Station pumps at EVERY BP gas station in the USA? Etc etc. That's a huge marketshare that's pretty much hidden from the public eye.
Linux has already gotten what it's gonna get. Don't expect it to gain any double-digit percentage of market-share in the next decade...it just won't...unless Microsoft takes Novell and incorporates it into their own stuff natively. Maybe we see Windows 2010 with a *nix kernel in it and it runs pretty much all apps.
Re:There will be multiple "wars". (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Pearl Harbor (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:There will be multiple "wars". Pearl Harbor (Score:5, Interesting)
Speak for Yourself, Re:More crap (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux won't kill Windows in the next decade and vice versa. No one is winning but rather both sides are in a pissing contest they refuse to admit is worthless.
That sounds even handed but it's whack. The pissing is vastly one sided. No one in the Free Software world has done anything to "fight" other than state the obvious shortcomings of non free software. Microsoft, on the other hand, has spent billions calling free software a "communist" "cancer", and extended all of the tools they used to destroy their non free competitors: non-standard "extensible standards", secret file formats, and threats for vendors who would carry anything else. The real problem M$ has is competing. They had a difficult enough time matching non free competitor's offerings. It's impossible for them to match free software. Just look at the monster that Vista is - it's the end of the line for the non free way. Only M$ really cares about market share. Free software vendors know there's more than enough work in the world for everyone to be a winner. Projecting M$ like attitudes onto free software developers and users is deeply offensive.
Does "Aunt Tilly" make a difference? (Score:5, Interesting)
Aunt Tilly is an interesting statistic, nothing more. Look at what she does -- she browses the web, uses wireless. Apparently she needs to edit sudoers for some bullshit reason -- but I think it's bullshit for you to even bring it up; an ordinary Linux user does NOT have to do anything with sudoers, and in fact, I've touched the file maybe once, and I do far more with my box than Aunt Tilly ever will.
But regardless, look at what she doesn't do.
She doesn't spend between $50 and $500 a month on new games.
She doesn't make decisions about what new software a multi-million-dollar company is buying and deploying on hundreds of desktops.
She doesn't develop software... period, not to mention software that is so intricately bound to some quirk in the Windows API that she causes headaches for Microsoft itself when they try to fix their OS.
She, as so many people have made so perfectly clear, doesn't care what OS she runs, so long as it works. Thus, if Linux were taking over in a big way, she might buy an Ubuntu machine and not even know it. She certainly wouldn't be having these "Aunt Tilly" issues you so colourfully describe if Linux came preloaded on her computer and already set for her wireless card.
If "Earth from Space" doesn't work on her computer, and Linux has sufficient marketshare, she'll complain to the Smithsonian, not to her OS. The Smithsonian would be forced to use actual web standards, not made-up proprietary ones.
She doesn't impact, in any real way, the success or failure of Linux, other than perhaps word-of-mouth, and whether she tolerates websites going down or her credit card information being stolen.
The people who would need to use Linux are: gamers, business executives, IT people, and software developers, not necessarily in that order. These people are the only people who will actually make a conscious decision one way or the other, and they're certainly in a way to make other key people sweat.
For instance, let's say a large company suddenly decides to go pure-Linux, but they've been buying from Dell. They switch to someone else. As one company after another does this, Dell will either be forced to start selling computers without an OS (and at an actual, legitimate discount from the Windows ones), or even start preloading Linux, or they'll lose business and someone else will fill the gap. With enough companies doing this, it becomes viable for an OEM to decide it's cheaper to support their few home users by preloading Linux and supporting that than to deal with Microsoft. Home users will be faced with a choice -- actually spend $250+ on an OS, or switch. My feeling is, Aunt Tilly, given the choice, won't want to spend $250 on something she doesn't care about anyway. Many of them may even notice how nicely their work computers run, and will take Linux home with them.
Another scenario: Gamers, who have long built their own systems or ordered ludicrously expensive ones from the likes of Alienware, discover Linux -- cheaper for the custom-built, and available in a shiny case from a game-specific OEM, already pre-configured and tuned (so none of your "ndiswrapper" complaints). They start running so many games under Cedega that game developers decide it's cheaper to support Linux directly, with cross-platform games, than to keep dealing with the nightmare that is Cedega and actual Windows support. Eventually, games no longer run under Windows, and gamers either dual-boot or switch completely. Anyone who cares about that demographic starts developing Linux versions at least, if not exclusively, for all their major apps, so eventually, non-gamers start to switch, going to their gamer friends for technical help.
Finally: Software developers discover Linux. Be it some killer language or some killer tool, or simply the fact that Linux provides none of the hassle of Windows, and really isn't lacking anything -- even today -- that a software developer would want for his job, they start to switch. They start
Lest we forget... (Score:5, Interesting)
The war is over, virtualization won (Score:4, Interesting)
WHO is winning? (Score:4, Interesting)
None of these reports is faultless, and they measure different things from what the parent article measures. But there seems to be no crisis for Microsoft for the time being.
Re: (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact that I can't play games like Max Payne unless I want to shell out for Cedega (which does work quite well for the games it supports officially) has nothing to do with Linux "not being up to par with Windows" where games are concerned. It has to do with the copy protection that the publisher chose which it is a crime to reverse engineer. Once again, an artificial restriction made for business reasons. I had a laptop from work at one point that I had to install Windows drivers in an NDIS Wrapper to get WiFi support for Linux with. Again, not a limitation of Linux at all, and quite a clevelr solution, I might add... The problem was that for business reasons, Broadcom had decided that they didn't want to release any specs for their WiFi chip. Seeing a theme here?
In my case, Linux won enough for me to ditch EVERY Windows box I owned and run only Linux. If I need access to something in Windows (which is typically due to DRM issues), then I use virtualization. It's also been a lot cheaper for me since I can now have EVERY piece of software I want and I don't have to worry about licensing it for each machine I've got. The NLE video suite Cinelerra, is a perfect example. I *could* buy multiple copies of Premiere for the six machines I have here at home to do video editing. Or... I could just install as many copies of Cinelerra as I want on all 18 of my systems and use it's clustering features to have a nice little free renderfarm. But, my needs are a bit more advanced than most Windows users which is why I still think that having Windows around for the normal user is just fine. And, no that's not an elitist statement. I'm just saying that there aren't many people who have 18 systems at home, like to do video work and need/want a render farm.
I won't really go into what Linux offers over Windows unless pressed, because most of us here know the truth about what Linux can do that Windows can't.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, your installation comments are correct in one regard, most people use what's already installed on the computer as it comes from the store. And that, very shortly, is going to be Vista.
And that, my friend, is where the balance lies. Any success Linux will have at the desktop level will have to come at the expense of Windows Vista. Or in other words, MS is going to have to blow it big time to give it an opening. And if Vista suceeds in fixing a good portion of the security issues and other problems currently associated with XP... then Linux simply isn't going to get that opening.
Because the majority of people aren't going to want to give up all of their old software and games and repurchase them just so they can move to a "better" platform. Especially when that "better" platform doesn't even support the majority of those products. Again, you're right, they just want to use the same programs in the same manner.
And if Linux expects to exploit that opening, should it come, then it had better be ready to support all of that hardware: computers and printers and cameras and everything else. And they're better have a common face: 50-plus all slightly different and incompatible distributions and desktops and installers and drivers are not going to cut it.
Take a page from Apple's book. Every Mac desktop and notebook shipped comes with OS X. No "lite" or "media" or "pro" versions. No choice between 50 different-named different-looking different-acting versions. Just OS X.
Personally, I don't think you guys can get past your differences and make it happen.
(BTW, just for the record, I know about OS X Server, but we're talking about the desktop here. Try to stay focused.)
Re: (Score:4, Interesting)
I do hope that you have at least worked with Windows since 97 or use it from time to time. Windows from 1997 Win95/Win98 is quite different from the NT based model of XP and Vista.
There are very few things you can do on Linux that you cannot do on a Windows system based on the NT architecture of today. From running in a GUI off mode to even not utilizing the Win32 subsystem and just using the BSD subsystem to write, compile and work with *nix based applications.
Your statement about capabilities is VERY true when comparing a *nix OS to the DOS model Windows of the 90s, but it fails when trying to make the same assertion about the NT and modern based Windows versions.
I don't want to pick on your post, but your comments would be like me saying I stopped using Mac at System 8.x and then defining my statements based on the limitations of the System 8 OS. And as most people know, the difference between a Mac running System 8 or 9 and a Mac running OSX is quite different, as OSX has very few architectural limitations. The same is true of modern Windows, there are very few architectural limitations.
I won't really go into what Linux offers over Windows unless pressed, because most of us here know the truth about what Linux can do that Windows can't.
In 1997 you could make a very long list of applicaitons and concepts in use on Linux that just were NOT possible on Win95/98, yet today there are almost no applications or concepts in use on Linux that are either available or in use on Windows.
So I will ask, give us even one example of something that Linux is capable of that Windows is not capable of doing.
I will even be kind enough to go first with a very basic example of something Windows can do that Linux cannot do at the core architectural level. Windows is based on the NT architecture, which is a hybrid kernel concept that allows it to host OS subsystems. This is also why the NT architecture has been called a client/server kernel concept. What this gives NT that Linux cannot do is the ability to natively run multiple OS subsystems concurrently that also can communicate with each other at the kernel level.
Win32 is an example of one subsystem in use on Windows and runs independantly of other subsystems like the *nix subsystem, OS/2, Win16, and Win64 subsystems to name a few examples. The subsystem OS architecture concept is not virtualization nor emulation, as each subsystem are true OSes acting independently with their own subsystem level kernels that sit on top of the NT architecture.
It is even rumored that MS has worked on a non BSD based *nix subsystem for Windows that is Linux based and would be able to run anything Linux could run with no virtualization or emulation and it would also have the ability to talk to the other subsystems, like the Win32 subsystem.
Ok, your turn...
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
To give you an example, few years back I had a PC dual boot Linux and Windows. I used a dial-up modem to access the internet. On Linux I could get 4K a second, but on Windows, 2K a second or close to zero. That was tested by switching between different OS using the same phone line and ISP. Both OS wasn't running anything other than a web browser.
Bear in mind, most if not all Linux programs are free, their authors take pride in what they do. Unlike Windows, started out as a product to make money. What's the explanation for a paid OS and modem driver is slower than a free OS and modem driver?
Linux vs. windows (Score:3, Interesting)
I wasn't the original poster but.... Windows NT 4.0 was 1996 and it included the kernel features you are talking about (I don't believe 1995s 3.51 did because it didn't support alpha but I may be wrong). So I don't know what the 1997 has to do with your point.
Now as far as a capability of Linux that isn't part of Windows: directly manipulate hardware from the GUI/CLI. I all the time have problems with getting windows to actual perform OS functions:
* rescan the SCSI bus,
* pass a packet to the ethernet card exactly as specified (i.e. have the ethernet card emit a specific stream of bytes)
* allow me to pass a message to a piece of hardware the OS isn't seeing
* allow me to access a drive by cylinder
And yes, given how buggy PC hardware is, how buggy PC hardware is these issues have come up and on each of them I was able to diagnose and repair problems in Linux that I was not able to do in Windows. The core purpose of an OS is to be the interface between hardware and programs and Windows does not interface well between cmd.exe and hardware.
In addition the standard complaint about the lack of a powerful command line interface holds. The ability to script apps and stream between them is huge. There is nothing stopping the NT architecture from supporting this ability but the apps don't support it and the OSes (with the exception of Unix services for Windows) don't. And then you can build on this one more level up with termcap. There is no way that I know of to have cmd.exe (or for that matter most other terminal emulator) allow you to handle weirdness on the other side.
But in any case I don't disagree with you that the NT kernel has a better design than the Linux kernel. However the Linux kernel actually has more features. For example the number of filesystems actually supported, the number of network protocols actually supported.... There is no reason people couldn't reverse this, but they haven't.
In short the problem that windows has today is the same problem it had in 1995. Windows apps (with some exceptions like Office) do not offer "power user" features as part of the paradigm.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I use NoScript with only a few sites white-listed. Is that why I don't see memory issues?
I'm running on Linux. Is that why I don't see memory issues?
I do use Flash and Java, often heavily, so that can't be it.
Re:What Linux can do and Windows cannot (Score:3, Interesting)
Except perhaps the thousands of industry-specific programs that are written for Win32 because "that's what everyone has". Tool and mold shops have automation and cutter-path software that's virtually guaranteed to be Win32 as Irix and Sun have fallen out of popularity due to cost. Insurance companies have quoting and client-management packages that are written for Win32. Banks. Manufacturing. Accounting. Damned-near every industry seems to have at least one must-have application that's Win32 only. Business runs on Win32.
Try to automate any task in Windows, it's a real PITA. Programmers often end doing things through kludges like Excel macros for the lack of a good text-based interface. For instance, let's say you were sent a project that has dozens of directories with thousands of files in it. Let's say you want to rename all *.jpeg files to *.jpg. How would you do that in Windows? In VMS that would be a piece of cake, in a Unix system it's more complicated, for i in *.jpeg; do mv $i `echo $i | sed s/jpeg$/jpg/ - ` ; done or something like that would do it, but the easiest way to do it in Windows that I can think of would be a VB program.
Sadly, the "for" operator has existed in the Win32 shell since WinNT 4.0 which was released July 29th, 1996 according to this cute Wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT [wikipedia.org] Further, it's time to mention that part of the massive staying power of Win32 is that availability of free/cheap utilities to fill pretty much every gap in the as-shipped OS is stunning. Not happy with the Win32 shell? Fine. Throw Kixtart into the mix. http://www.kixtart.org/ [kixtart.org] Don't like Kixtart? Okay, try 4NT which has a massive scripting language built in. http://www.jpsoft.com/ [jpsoft.com] Want to automate GUI functions? Okay. AutoIT. http://www.autoitscript.com/ [autoitscript.com]
But again there are two points here: first, your experience with Win32 seems to be a decade misinformed and two, almost without fail where there's a lack in the Win32 product, there's a cheap or free way to satisfy it. Or, more likely, three or four ways.
Ironically, ease of installation, which is often cited by XP users as an advantage of Windows over Linux, seems to be one of the areas where Linux shines. I have created a standard system configuration script with twenty or so functions, one for each type of application.
Once again a member of the pro-Linux crowd misses the point. Joe Average doesn't even remotely WANT to know how to "create a standard system configuration script". They don't want to know about apt-get or package files. The OS install is the OS install, and Win32's installer only asks a couple of questions, which almost always work if the user accepts defaults. Applications? Virtually always "insert the CD and accept defaults". Grandma can manage that, and she's had two strokes and is suffering from Alzheimer's as well as too much LSD in her earlier years. It doesn't matter at all that us geeks can write install scripts and create pre-built images. Home users and business users don't care. IT managers may, but IT managers have access to deployment packages and desktop management packages such as MOM http://www.microsoft.com/mom/default.mspx [microsoft.com].
If Linux wants the desktop, Linux has absolutely got to do things automatically for the user. "Ooops, found a new printer you plugged in... want me to search the Internet for a driver? Okay, found one. Hey lady, you can just print now."
I think being an open and free system is an advantage in that people make it evolve towards what the users prefer, rather than
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
First off, SATA is about 2 years old so it's about as late and great as the OS he's talking about. Second, it's not just that, it's also the difficulty providing it with the driver. A FLOPPY drive only? Come on!
I haven't used my floppy drive in YEARS, I don't even know if it still works. Virtually everything is on CD, DVD or USB mass storage device. Requiring a floppy is a lazy carryover.
And that, my friend, is where the balance lies. Any success Linux will have blah, blah, blah
Linux is ALREADY growing in users. It's been a steady, slow process but it shows no signs of stopping. You believe something that's already happening isn't going to happen because Microsoft is going to do something they have a long track record of not being able to do?
Because the majority of people aren't going to want to give up all of their old software and games and repurchase them just so they can move to a "better" platform.
You're generalizing yourself as everyone. MOST people never upgrade the OS on their PC. When it comes time to upgrade, they buy a new one, preloaded. Besides, using this silly logic every new video game console would have failed.
And if Linux expects to exploit that opening, should it come, then it had better be ready to support all of that hardware: computers and printers and cameras and everything else.
Linux already has better hardware support than windows. Neither OS supports everything the other does, of course, but this is a non-issue.
And they're better have a common face: 50-plus all slightly different and incompatible distributions and desktops and installers and drivers are not going to cut it.
Personally, I don't think you guys can get past your differences and make it happen.
It will never happen... and that's a good thing. Not all users are alike. It doesn't have to happen for linux to succeed. The goal is not to replace an old monopoly with a new one. The goal is to restore a free market.
Re:What Linux can do and Windows cannot (Score:3, Interesting)
NT can be embedded. Millions of devices use it that way. For starters, every single Xbox and Xbox 360, many cars (remember the MS-bashing article about some Lexus locking someone in when the Windows embedded car computer crashed?) So... that's that.
The biggest advantage of Linux over Windows for me is ease of use, and that seems to be an intrinsic advantage, because Windows, as its name implies, is predominantly GUI oriented. A graphic interface is better for some jobs, a text interface is better for others, just like a spoon is better for eating soup and a fork is better for steak.
Criminy I hate this argument.
A GUI can do everything a CLI can do. A CLI can not do everything a GUI can do. To say any user can get their work done using only a CLI is ridiculous. To say that an OS that concentrates on the CLI has greater "ease of use" is doubly moronic when most users, most of the time, will be (and should be) using the GUI to get all of their work done.
The only task a CLI is better at are tasks that were specifically designed to run in a CLI. Basically, any process that was designed to run in Unix before decent GUIs for Unix came along. And even then, to be more efficient in those tasks in Linux (say, developing software with VI) you have to bend your mind around the way the computer interface works, spend months learning the arcane VI and MAKE syntax that have no practical application anywhere else. Honestly, I think the main reason that system is still used instead of IDEs like Visual Studio is bull-headed stubbornness: "I had to spend a year learning VI, you young guys should too!"
Linux users always cite examples like, "select every third file whose name begins with D into a new directory FOOBAR, then select every fourth file from FOOBAR into the original directory translating their name to begin with W." Yes, that's easier to do on a CLI. And no, nobody, EVER, does anything like that. Ever. Stop making contrived moronic examples of how great the CLI is.
As a last minor point, (nearly) everyone on Linux using the CLI is doing it IN a GUI, where they have multiple CLI terminals open, sometimes transparent, and might drag files from the GUI into them to get the path typed out, etc. Even the CLI benefits from the GUI.
As a last-last argument, Windows has as many tools in the CLI as Linux does, whether or not it's "GUI-oriented." The difference is that the CLI in Windows users different commands and syntax. If the Linux users who complain about it spend as much time learning Microsoft's as they do Unix's, they'd probably be just as efficient in it.
For instance, let's say you were sent a project that has dozens of directories with thousands of files in it. Let's say you want to rename all *.jpeg files to *.jpg. How would you do that in Windows?
Forgetting for the moment *why* someone would want to make their JPEG files into JPEG files (talk about a contrived example!), it would be a two-liner batch file in Windows, probably less. I'm not a CLI expert in any OS, but I'd wager Windows' CLI has a command combination to do this at least as easy as Linux's.
but the easiest way to do it in Windows that I can think of would be a VB program.
Your lack of problem solving ability/imagination does not a OS defect make.
Ironically, ease of installation, which is often cited by XP users as an advantage of Windows over Linux, seems to be one of the areas where Linux shines. I have created a standard system configuration script with twenty or so functions, one for each type of application. There are functions for DVD playing, scientific applications, office applications, graphics, development, electronic circuits design, etc. When I install a Linux system, I install the basic system and run my script, after uncommenting the function calls for the types of applications I want in that compu
Re:What Linux can do and Windows cannot (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux users always cite examples like, "select every third file whose name begins with D into a new directory FOOBAR, then select every fourth file from FOOBAR into the original directory translating their name to begin with W." Yes, that's easier to do on a CLI. And no, nobody, EVER, does anything like that. Ever. Stop making contrived moronic examples of how great the CLI is.
I do something very like that several times a day, on Linux. Namely, grid server management. I don't know how I'd manage a grid of many hundreds of servers using Windows, where different servers required different actions.