Re:It's about time (Score 1)

With all of this talk surrounding the prospect of a boom in GNU/Linux desktop marketshare, is seems that many are forgetting that the desktop market in and of itself has evolved into a varied and diverse landscape depending on the intents of the user of the machine. It's not as simple as cheering on the continued success of GNU/Linux adoption in the embedded and server markets but anxiously awaiting the ever-elusive "Year of the Linux Desktop."

There's a notable difference between placing a supported bulk corporate purchase of a specific distribution of GNU/Linux on all desktops in a given company accompanied by a trained IT staff and trying to market a Lindows machine at Walmart to Joe Sixpack. Both are rightly desktop computers, but the scenarios surrounding their use are so different that the relative success of either instance is not comparable: they are truly different markets.

To claim the desktop market as the final frontier for GNU/Linux adoption is all fine and good, but do take into account the variety of sub-markets that comprise the whole. It's much less likely that Jill Sixpack is going to be rushing to buy Dell or HP machines preinstalled with GNU/Linux to use as his sole home PC. As others have pointed out, the lack of preinstalled proprietary crapware could very well make this option more expensive in addition to the difficulties that would be experienced with practically all boxed software, including games, not being native to her operating system (what does that even mean to her?).

No, much more likely to be widely successful in the shorter term is massive amounts of corporate installations, situations whereupon the both the purchasing company and HP would see a real benefit not having to pay the Microsoft tax. There would be no crapware in these instances anyway. Such bulk purchases are a very large incentive for OEMs to choose hardware options with drivers in the Linux kernel, directly putting pressure on hardware companies to release driver source code, or at least hardware documentation. It's all a complex and intricate chain of successive events, but it's obvious where it's leading.

It's been an incredibly arduous and taxing war to get adoption and quality of the most viable free software operating system this far. But momentum is only gaining, inertia in full force, and the more entrenched GNU/Linux becomes, the easier it will be to keep the acceleration of its evolution increasing all the time.