Will Linux erode Microsoft's dominance as a desktop operating system?

Great Debates
21

Government is definitely the key factor in determining whether or not Linux desktops will be widely adopted. In general, Western governments are trying to balance huge amounts of vendor pressure (e.g. Microsoft) with equally large public expectations re: technology spending and use, especially in terms of security/GWOT-related initiatives.

A few major companies have incorporated Linux and open source into their business models (IBM, Sun, Novell) and have invested heavily in the open source community. They’re still able to profit by charging for support, hardware and related fees, with the additional advantage of using no-licensing as a selling point and they can cut into Microsoft market share without having to develop OSs from scratch. Usually they partner with Linux distro companies, but some are developing their own desktop suites (e.g. Sun).

A few European/Asian cities have already decided to switch over to Linux desktops. IIRC, Microsoft had some last-minute desperate negotiations with Munich before it switched to an IBM-SuSE environment. Other governments are watching closely to see if Munich’s investment (which includes higher training costs for learning the new OS) actually pays off in the long run.

The other thorny problem for governments is procurement. There is a fixed process by which firms compete for government contracts. Figuring out a way for open source solutions to participate in the RFP process (volunteer coders usually don’t have team of analysts writing proposals for USG RFPs) in a way that is not “unfair” to proprietary companies is somewhat difficult. Again, there is serious pressure on governments from big IT companies to avoid this issue altogether. Partnering with a private-sector firm is one answer, but it shouldn’t necessarily be the only solution.

Governments are risk-averse, they like dealing with big, established firms. It makes them feel more comfortable, but also gives them someone to sue if things go wrong. This sort of accountability is very important and needs to be present if Linux is going to make inroads with big governments.

22

PS - I run XP and Linux (Gentoo) at home and use 2000 at work.

23

Pyrrhonist wrote

Open Office is nowhere near as effective as MS Office. Nowhere near. Maybe it’s as easy, in the sense that basic users will find the basic features in MS Office in OO. But for anyone who uses it more than rarely, OO doesn’t begin to compare.

But more importantly than that, OO is horrible at reading and writing Office docs. Again, maybe if you use the very basic features in Office, then your docs may translate. But most won’t. and that’s the real kiss of death. Until OO can work with the standard (which unfortunately is not open), it will not be a contender.

24

I’m talking about what the government purchases for its operations, not what private individuals and businesses select for their own use. Your argument applies to the latter, but not the former.

For various good and sufficient reasons (insuring future availability, insuring non-discriminatory compatibility, preventing the taxpayers from being put over a barrel by a monopoly vendor) government files should be kept in open formats. If an individual bureaucrat prefers a closed format, too bad – official business needs to be conducted in accordance with public policy unless there’s a compelling reason for an exception.

25

This is the scenario where I see the most likely Linux influence in the US in homes:

Very inexpensive device which runs Linux and allows the user to Surf, e-mail and some other basic functions. As more and more applications run over the web, this may end up being the standard device in most homes.

26

<hijack>
The Mac version of OpenOffice suffers from anemic support from Sun. Better instead to use NeoOffice/J, which is a Java port of OpenOffice for MacOS X that uses native Mac features across the board.

For word processing, there’s also Apple’s recently-release Pages application, though it’s not as business-feature-rich as MS Word is. On the plus side, it natively saves documents as XML, and the schema is available to anyone who wants to dink with it.
</hijack>

27

Pages is wonderful. I use it for all my word processing now. It lacks a few features I’d like, but it’s brilliant for a 1.0.

Even with NeoOffice/J, the look and feel is all wrong, and that’s 50% of usability, in my opinion.

28

No it will not.

It has been around for a while and has not even made a dent in the market. Microsoft is a marketing machine and has the backing of most software manufacturers to support their operating system.

The best comparision probably would be Apple, and they have clearly been crushed by microsoft. How can linux stand a chance?

29

Microsoft plan for world domination-stage one complete

30

I put linux on my PC about two years ago. I kept it there for a year. I used it to do something practical about twice. Those two attempts made me feel that, although some dollar amount is infinitely greater than free, it’s still worth it sometimes to pay for productivity and image-processing software. I use MacOS almost exclusively these days. It’s everything Linux should be, and a whole lot more.

31

That’s your best argument? How many versions (and how many years) of Windows do you think there were before it became dominant? (Hint: well over a decade, if you count Win95 as the first dominant platform.)

32

It’s only been generally usable for the last couple of years. And only in the last 18 months or so have major players in the tech industry begun to rally around it. Linux IS a threat to Microsoft. It’s a product that can never be “crushed.” Linux can take on Microsoft in a manner no one else ever has – Microsoft can’t undercut them with low pricing. Linux already costs nothing. Or you can buy a box set with an OS, an office suite (a couple, actually) and the Mozilla Internet software (which is better than Microsoft’s options) for less than the cost of a Windows upgrade.

In the developing world, the lower cost of Linux will win converts. As companies fight to lower their overhead, having free software on the desktops of their users will be more appealing.

Microsoft has no price advantage over free software.

They have little to no technical advantage (people forget that when Microsoft really drove Apple to the margins in the mid-1990s, that Windows had some key technical advantages over Mac OS).

They have a decent ease-of-use advantage… but the fight between Apple and Microsoft proves that that’s of passing value.

33

As a linux user (debian on the desktop, slackware on the laptop), i cant see linux doing any serious erosion in the home PC market, but the original intent iirc was to be a developers OS, for developers who couldnt afford Unix distros. It has moved beyond that because its flexible, but an average home PC for an average user doesnt need to have that or the complexity of the controls that comes with some of the more powerful (useful) tools. Then theres the issue of PC hardware mfgs who wont develop drivers for linux kernels, which creates a lead time (which in some cases is indefinate) for drivers, which means linux user A might not be able to use nifty hardware X until some other linux user creates a kernel module. Add these to a general lack of interest (or surplus of intimidation) in how computers actually work and linux becomes more of a hassle than an operating system for the average computer user should be. And i would probably not put linux on my mother’s or grandmother’s PC because there isnt a support structure in place for generally naive computer users for linux, while there is for Windows.

but thats just my two cents.

34

The same could be said (on a different level) of the Windows Control Panel. Any default setting will be too complex for some, and too basic or un-versatile or patronising or restricting for others.

This is one of the places where market forces can help Linux improve its position. Each manufacturer needs to compete with others - as more start to offer Linux support, or even simple releasing enough technical information for open-source projects to be viable, then others will follow suit. Not all of the manufacturers are stupid - they know that many people who make big decisions about bulk purchases are Linux users in some capacity, and that many of them have sympathy for the whole principle of open-source software.

It’s a generation thing. Coincidentally, at work today, I was discussing with a colleague how many new employees need extensive training in the specific database applications etc. that we use…yet any 16-year-old work-experience-placement kid just sits down and works it out for themselves. (And I’m talking about a really obnoxious badly-designed front-end, to a convoluted selection of databases organising esoteric data.) These same kids are the ones who are analysing HijackThis results for their parents, and God knows what else.

My point? All this ability is annually progressing into the workplace. It’s not unreasonable to expect young employees in almost any field to simply know ‘how a computer works’, to a fairly sophisticated level.

This is my position precisely. I’d be confident in the hypothetical Grandma finding KDE and Windows equally difficult to get used to, and also see her aclimatising to both. But with an ISP helpline that terminates in Bangalore with an employee who says “What’s that?” when I mention Linux, or with the inability of the kid down the street to fix the thing when I’m on holiday, it’s not a good option. However, some of these things will change, as the prominence of Linux grows.

35

I am guessing that most of the people here who contend Linux is too hard for Grandma to learn have not used any recent versions of GNOME for any considerable amount of time. It is simpler, more logical, and easier to learn than any other interface I have used.

I also suspect that most of the people here who contend Linux is hard to set up have not used any recent versions of Fedora or Ubuntu. I have installed these distributions on many computers and generally they just work. Occasionally they have problems, but they are seldom difficult to solve.

I cannot really comment on Open Office, since I almost never use it, but the few times I have used it it was more than sufficient for my needs and I see no reason to think that it is any worse than MS Office, at least for most users. And I can point out that it works very well for my sister, who uses it frequently and is far from being a computer expert. (She is running Fedora Core 3, by the way, which she likes better than Windows.)

There are alternatives to OpenOffice in development, such as GNOME Office (Abiword and Gnumeric), KOffice, and Siag Office. They are not as featureful as OpenOffice; however, in my experience the majority of users, and certainly almost all home users, need only the most basic functions of an office suite, and both MS Office and OpenOffice tend to be overkill. For these people Linux has more than adequate solutions.

I would agree with the others that the major impediment to the growth of Linux is the unwillingness of companies to write specialized software for it. However, much of what I love about Linux software comes from its being open source and often community driven: that is, no advertisements, no spyware, no design decisions intended to promote a corporate agenda over software quality, and the ability of a single organization (such as Debian) to provide all or almost all the software the user needs, integrating it into the system, providing bugfixes, and keeping it free of spyware and so forth. The disadvantage of this model is that highly specialized applications tend to be sparse.

So, perhaps Linux will never seriously challenge Windows because of the lack of specialized apps; or, perhaps such apps will become common and prominent and it will become Windows Lite. Personally I would prefer the former.

36

I’ve been hearing this for years. You could have changed the dates on this thread to 12 months ago, or 24 months ago, and it wouldn’t have seemed at all out of place. And yet today, Windows remains the OS of choice.

And 24 months from now I bet we’ll have another thread on it. And 95% of all the people reading it will be using Windows, 5% will be using Macs, and the number using Linux will be well below half a percent.

In the developing world, the lower cost of Linux will win converts. As companies fight to lower their overhead, having free software on the desktops of their users will be more appealing.

Microsoft has no price advantage over free software.

They have little to no technical advantage (people forget that when Microsoft really drove Apple to the margins in the mid-1990s, that Windows had some key technical advantages over Mac OS).

They have a decent ease-of-use advantage… but the fight between Apple and Microsoft proves that that’s of passing value.
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37

Not seriously until Linux can manage near everything, including installing and configuring hardware, using wizards and happy dialogue boxes. Joe Dell will never read a HowTo or write his own scripts.

38

It isn’t LINUX that’s so hard to set up - it’s setting up anything else onto a LINUX system.

No, I don’t love MS - but the Windows installers, even when they leave huge piles of unnecessary crap on your computer are easy. “I agree,” “Next,” “Next,” “Next,” “Next,” “Next,” and presto there’s an icon I can double click on and launch the program. And when something goes wrong, there’s frequently documentation. Often, documentation written by people who do not believe the masses are beneath them and are unworthy of understanding the program.

For a lot of LINUX programs, the functionality is there, but usability, design, and documentation aren’t. With open source it’s hard to get those things in the programs. You end up with a lot of “by me, for me, if you want something else, figure out how to customize it yourself” and that’s great if you’re looking for something to tinker with - but if you’re looking for something to just work…then…

39

There is a continuom (sp? I have no clue) With Linux on one end, Microsoft in the middle and Mac on the other end. What is this, you might ask, I’ll tell you, and it is becoming more and more important with the advent of spyware.
Typical Linux enthusiast: Likes to be involved in the inner workings of the computer and software. The pleasure is in the ability to know that if anything goes wrong, he can fix it. Its about ownership and knowledge, and although it requires a lot of work to set up, the select few who want ot work that hard, AND posess the abilities will do it an appreciate the benefits.

Windows is in the middle. Sure there is this sort of “hacking” mentality, but obviously nothing to the extent of the linux world. But a windows user does get pleasure from his setup. There is so much customization available with windows because of the number of programs. I’ll give an exampel. A windows user might like his off-brand MP3 player because he has spent the time to set up his library and create a system that helps him listen to the music he wants to.

Mac is the extreme end. It just works. The Mac user or the beauty of the Mac is in not caring about the process. “I don’t care that I dont’ know, but somehow it takes care of all of my photos and I always know where they are!” This is an example. For instance, a windows user might need to know sometimes that thier fotos are stored in c:\documents and settings\username\my documents\my pictures

When said Windows user understands and appreciates how it works on windows he feels comfortable. But the mac user doesn’t know but they get the same result. Instant access to their photos regardless of the situation.

Spyware is a huge factor in this. Spyware requres people to be much more of the windows/linux type when the reality is that most aren’t. Nobody wants to run Spybot. Sure there is some satisfaction in maintaining your own system knowing that you are in control, but most people aren’t in control. So when spyware explodes as it has recently, then you’ll have people unsatisfied.

So I don’t imagien Linux ever taking over windows any time soon. I imagine Apple gaining more market share. Not too much, but enough to capture the people that aren’t inerested in understanding their computers.

40

Sorry, Ubuntu…I installed it… My video card wasn’t supported so my display was messed up in a way that is hard to describe, plus I couldn’t make it larger than 1024x768. Why is that? That’s so small. Plus it didn’t detect my WiFi card.

Sure they are better but still a major hassle

Oh, and try to get a normal computer user to understand apt-get

or install any kind of software, to be honest. Coming from windows with the .exe double-click process to this whole garbage about compiling stuff? NOBODY wants to do that!