A couple of Linux fanboys on FR dont make it more than a hobby OS. Fragmented by dozens of distros. No real software publishers support it. No Adobe. No Microsoft. Just guys writing shitty little programs that try to duplicate what real software does. Still cant crack more than 1% or so market share despite more than a decade of “this will be the year of Linux on the desktop!” Have fun with Linux. If you enjoy it, more power to you. I just dont think it amounts to much outside of the server room.
http://www.focus.com/fyi/50-places-linux-running-you-might-not-expect/
You are seriously “stuck on stupid”...
About 80% of M$ revenue comes from
a) server room
b) Windows (the “forced sale” product)
AAPL Revenue soaring past M$, who is missing the boat. The consumer is no longer supporting M$’s P & L as they did in the 1980’s-90’s. Now, it’s IT shops that don’t quite have a clue yet.
But yes, I agree that Linux is not baby-proofed enough for prime-time, even the desktop environments. Far too many things will bite you as you set it up. And it’s far easier for a person who’s worked in IT than for a civilian to undertand terminology, etc. man pages are... well... forget about that. The commands are mostly big conglomerations of functionality with wacky, cutesy and mostly inconcistent abbreviations.
Security problems plagues Windows even worse than linux, of course.
But Linux needs a real “consumer-oriented” distro; the opensource dudes seem to not be interested in that so far (go figure!). It needs to work out of the box and be locked down tight. Geeks don’t understand “simple”.
You’ve heard of openoffice, right ? It reads all the M$ formats and has it’s own. Word processing, spreadsheet, etc., runs awesome. They just have their own scripting language that’s not MS/VB. Then again only corp fin geeks use Excel scripting.
The GIMP does image manipulation, i.e., photoshop. I have no idea how it compares, but not bad for free.
A lot of opensource now also runs on Windows. Open office does. Download it - the whole thing is only about 150M I think. It’s free, loads up in a few seconds and works great. You’ll never go back to paying for that commodity software again, no need to.
M$ software is not really needed any more; all the apps that you think you need windows for - there’s free stuff out there. So you run it all under windows. Then you realize that all that stuff runs under CentOS, which is the free Red Hat, which is the linux flavor that most big companies are using.
There are all these industry-standard formats of files, a whole world out there that M$ has to begrudgingly support now. The old trick of “you need M$ file formats, languages, etc.” no longer holds. Mostly people need the web browser today, and they’ve been ported to every OS. The people who really are devoted to their hardware/OS - Apple people ! They have no need to switch to anything else; got everything they need.
Adobe supports linux like nobody’s business, BTW. Flash player even works in 64-bit linux. I’ve run all the desktop stuff on an 8-core 64-bit linux box; it was just like a super-fast PC.