Why Linux Has Failed on the Desktop (and Microsoft has succeeded)

[radekhulan]

Why Linux Has Failed on the Desktop (and how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers)

written by Linux kernel developer

http://apcmag.com/6759/interview_wit...ting_is_boring

I'm timing out on the link with ie7, nothing loads with FF.

I'd love to read that.


EDIT: nvm, opened now.

Edit again! Excellent read. I didn't know ck was bugging out. He hit the nail on the head about the problems with bug reporting, and the devs focus on enterprise solutions. Thanks for posting.

[Wolfhound]

Nice article, it´s a shame Con Kolivas stopped his patchset for linux kernel, I had used it for years in all my linux installs

[Ancient]

Interesting article. He seems to be a bit romantic reminiscing about the old hardware though. He forgets that in the old days much of the hardware being put out was in proprietary form. Syquest disks were great, but you couldn't put them in a Zip drive and vice versa. 3dfx had GLide. Creative had their own propreitary thing going. MS helped to unify all that. If he wants to view that unification and universal interoperability as a bad thing, fine. I'm not sure everyone would agree with him. I certainly don't.

As far as crushing innovation, the Linux developers are free to innovate in Linux. Nobody is stopping them. Unfortunately they don't seem to provide any real innovation. Instead they seem bent on trying to deliver a better clone of Windows. Apparently developer egos amongst their core development groups are preventing that from happening too.

[ViN86]

Originally Posted by radekhulan

Why Linux Has Failed on the Desktop (and how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers)

written by Linux kernel developer

http://apcmag.com/6759/interview_wit...ting_is_boring

umm, why is your thread title so misleading...

/me waits for ghost to enter

[six_storm]

Dang Euro, you're on a roll!

I believe that Linux has come a long way since the first few times I tried it. And yeah, I'll agree that Linux still isn't the best desktop OS available (not the most user friendly OS by a hair) but I think it's awesome how much stuff you get FOR FREE.

Windows *was* the only OS back in the day worth dealing with and just like Ancient said, it pulled everything together well. But now there are alternatives on the horizon and yeah, people are going to try them out. Some may stick with it, some may not. The Linux community is awesome IMO and are coming up with some really cool stuff.

[TheTaz]

Here's an interview with Linus About GPL v3, but has a bit about why Open Source is better than proprietary (Obviously not talking gaming here).

http://www.oneopensource.it/interview-linus-torvalds/

Well, historically, the most important lesson from Microsoft - and one they themselves seem to have forgotten - is simply “Give your customers what they want”.

I think the reason Microsoft was so successful was that they filled a niche with some very basic technology (and in this case, early on, that basic technology was literally the BASIC language - that’s how they largely got started), and they sold it cheap and made it “good enough”. They didn’t play games with the customer.

Of course, that seems to have changed. A lot about the last few years of Microsoft seems to very much be playing games with customers: their licensing and what, seven different “versions” of Vista, and all the DRM crap they are trying to push on their customers are not actually what anybody wants.

So Microsoft has always been good about marketing and selling, and their strong hold on the market has also caused them to become a standardized platform. That’s generally all good for customers. They’ve left some of that behind (now they are trying to splinter their market on purpose with Vista and pushing DirectX 10 only on the new platform, for example), but I think their historical successes are worth looking at.

I think the real issue about adoption of open source is that nobody can really ever “design” a complex system. That’s simply not how things work: people aren’t that smart - nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually “design” things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve.

And doing so in the open, and allowing all these different entities to cross-pollinate their ideas with each other, and not having arbitrary boundaries with NDA’s and “you cannot look at how we did this”, is just a better way.

I compare it with science and witchcraft (or alchemy). Science may take a few hundred years to figure out how the world works, but it does actually get there, exactly because people can build on each others knowledge, and it evolves over time. In contrast, witchcraft/alchemy may be about smart people, but the knowledge body never “accumulates” anywhere. It might be passed down to an apprentice, but the hiding of information basically means that it can never really become any better than what a single person/company can understand.

And that’s exactly the same issue with open source vs proprietary products. The proprietary people can design something that is smart, but it eventually becomes too complicated for a single entity (even a large company) to really understand and drive, and the company politics and the goals of that company will always limit it.

In contrast, open source works well in a complex environment. Maybe nobody at all understands the big picture, but evolution doesn’t require global understanding, it just requires small local improvements and a open market (”survival of the fittest”).

So I think a lot of companies are slowly starting to adopt more open source, simply because they see these things that work, and they realize that they would have a hard time duplicating it on their own. Do they really buy into my world view? Probably not. But they can see it working for individual projects.

Anyway... MS has recognized Open Source as a way to do certain things... and this:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2162940,00.asp

Proves MS wants "in on it".

/shrug

[nekrosoft13]

\and then evilghost walks in and all Hell breaks loose

[evilghost]

RAWR!!!!!

[radekhulan]

Very interesting followup from Linus:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/14008

[hell_of_doom227]

Because Linux sucks. Nobody wants to install or setup video card from command prompt line nowdays. Same for any other app. Also Linux doesn't support DX which makes video card useless, so do gaming.

[six_storm]

Originally Posted by hell_of_doom227

Because Linux sucks. Nobody wants to install or setup video card from command prompt line nowdays. Same for any other app. Also Linux doesn't support DX which makes video card useless, so do gaming.

n00b . . .

Nice new avatar evilghost, I likes!