again
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| nikkels Nov 04, 2011 8:56 PM EDT |
Is he competing with Ken now ? |
| JaseP Nov 04, 2011 9:26 PM EDT |
I've been peppering that article's comments with facts. |
| lcafiero Nov 04, 2011 9:29 PM EDT |
Heh. You go, JaseP! This article was a pretty big yawner. Most offputting? The summary: "Holding your breath for the ‘Year of the Linux desktop’? Don’t. It’s not coming." Thank you, Captain Obvious, but no one has been holding their breath for the year of the Linux desktop for about three or four years now. At least. |
| tuxchick Nov 04, 2011 10:10 PM EDT |
I was going to say I wish I got paid to write throw-away piffle, but I don't, so I won't. |
| hkwint Nov 04, 2011 10:45 PM EDT |
Interesting, there has never been a year of 'Windows on the Desktop' or 'Android on the smartphone'. |
| JaseP Nov 04, 2011 10:51 PM EDT |
There doesn't need to be a year of Linux on the desktop ... There just needs to be gains in market share and/or mind share. That's plenty. |
| helios Nov 05, 2011 9:18 AM EDT |
There just needs to be gains in market share and/or mind share. That's plenty. Without a national or global media advertising campaign, that isn't going to happen. Sure word of mouth works somewhat but how long have we had that going on in relation to where we are now in marketplace awareness? The MS shills would like you to believe it is a whopping 1 percent. Canonical has stubbornly refused to introduce Ubuntu as a product with any prolonged ad campaign. Right now here in the US, Microsoft is fogging and clogging the airwaves with their BS, trying to convince America that a laptop IS a PC and they plug Win7 at every turn. Until Canonical decides they have a product that is worth advertising, we main the vocal minority. |
| Fettoosh Nov 05, 2011 12:43 PM EDT |
Let us face it, average users wouldn't care what drives the hardware of any device they use. All they care about is it is installed, it works good, and is supported. MS marketing is very good at convincing users that it does deliver at all of these. The only way Linux is going to kick a** is by becoming as good or better in all of these. That is why Android is succeeding. Getting the majority of users informed to recognize the benefits Open Source is not going to happen as long as MS shenanigans and lackeys are in abundance.... For the desktop, laptop, & tablets, it will take a commercial company with enough resources to invest and release its own computer devices. I can see Canonical becoming that company when it realizes that working with OEM is not going to be of value to them and their only way of surviving is to produce its own hardware devices Google is going this route but they are planning to change the hardware devices from the normal independent desktops/laptops/tablets to cloud devices. Whether they succeed or not, only time will tell. |
| tuxchick Nov 05, 2011 1:26 PM EDT |
What I weird week. I agreed with something Grishnakh said, and now I see Fettoosh making some good points. Though Google's approach is to hide the Linux parts, lock everything down, and play games with GPL licenses; they're not into promoting Linux, but exploiting it. I don't understand all this needless pain and agony of delivering a good usable Linux desktop. It doesn't need fancy special effects. It doesn't need to be dumbed down. What it needs is for everything to work out of the box-- play DVDs and CDs, networking, peripherals, and removable media. No big deal. It seems that Gnome and KDE devs are tying themselves in knots trying to deliver solutions to non-existent problems. OMG notifications!! OMG window buttons!! OMG wiggly wobbly squiggly lumpy, yeah!!! Hide everything because exposing functionality is icky!! (Gnome, that is.) I give KDE lots of points for pushing ahead into new technologies; they're the only ones. Independent vendors like System76 and ZaReason are doing fine jobs, and Canonical gives them substantial cooperation. They're small, they have limited resources, and they do a great job without putting on a big fake show how hard it is. They put Dell to shame. Though Dell at least has some Linux desktop and notebook offerings, unlike the other Tier 1 vendors, even if they are half-hearted and apologetic and infested with "We recommend Windows" crud. Canonical keeps spreading themselves thinner and thinner, and Mark S. needs to quit pretending and don the black turtleneck. Then maybe they'll make that final leap to becoming a PC vendor. |
| Grishnakh Nov 05, 2011 4:54 PM EDT |
tuxchick wrote:No big deal. It seems that Gnome and KDE devs are tying themselves in knots trying to deliver solutions to non-existent problems. OMG notifications!! OMG window buttons!! OMG wiggly wobbly squiggly lumpy, yeah!!! Hide everything because exposing functionality is icky!! (Gnome, that is.) Notifications are actually pretty useful on a desktop or laptop system, and if you want to compete head-on with Windows you need them. I'm not sure what you mean by "window buttons", since we've had maximize/minimize/close buttons on windows on all WIMP systems now for about 25 years (except now with Unity and Gnome3 that think we shouldn't minimize anything and that everything should run full-screen). The problem with KDE IMO is wasting resources on desktop search, indexing, semantic cr@p, etc., instead of concentrating on just getting the regular desktop UI system bug-free and completely stable first. If you want to compete with Windows, you can't have something where your dbus process pegs the CPU at 100% all the time and you have to log out and log back in every day to avoid this. As for Canonical, they're not the only one with resources to promote Linux on the desktop; Red Hat has those resources too, but they consciously made the decision some time ago to specifically not target the desktop for some dumb reason. Of course, it doesn't help that they're a Gnome distro, and actually employ Gnome devs like Jon McCan't, instead of promoting a DE that actually stands a chance of winning over Windows users. Chasing after the Mac users, as Ubuntu and Red Hat are doing, is not going to bring you a lot of new users; Mac users are already a tiny minority, plus they're fiercely loyal to Apple, unlike Windows users. |
| 750 Nov 06, 2011 7:56 AM EDT |
Android succeeds because it is on products sold at the corner electronics store and by major carriers. I wonder how big a success wal-mart had with the linux computers they sold for a while, or how many got along with the linux running netbooks like the early eeepc models. It basically needs to be in stores, booted up and logged in so people can give it a spin and see how it functions. Having the neighborhood geek wave a cd-r around will get things nowhere except with other COMPUTER geeks. And so excludes anyone that happens to use a computer as a tool while pursuing their real geek passion, rather then it being their passion. And lets face it, most labeled as geeks right now are web or media people waving around Macbooks, Wacoms and cameras. |
| helios Nov 06, 2011 10:20 AM EDT |
The Linux computers at Walmart were destined/designed to fail. They had bottom-end specs running Linspire as the OS. I've worked on several and while many of them were not branded as e-machines, that's exactly what they were. Power supplies were failing left and right along with swollen and leaking capacitors within 4 months of initial service. It really wasn't an honest marketing opportunity for Linux. Linspire? Geek please. |
| BernardSwiss Nov 06, 2011 2:10 PM EDT |
Well, the EeePC 901 in British chains was available in a 50/50 ratio. And the Linux models sold out while Windows models gathered dust on the shelves. But ASUS wouldn't ship more Linux systems -- the officially stated reason was in part that they were committed to making/shipping the units in equal numbers, even though Linux was selling better. There was some additional excuse that it was because of an shortage of Atom CPUs (ie. it was Intel's fault, rather than Microsoft's -- and it is true that Intel fought against the netbook phenomenon, too.) I say excuse, because even when this apparent shortage was over, Linux systems didn't return to the display shelves -- and of course that was blamed on Linux systems "not selling" and alleged "high returns". http://www.lockergnome.com/blade/2008/07/14/asus-says-lack-o... http://eeepc.net/asus-puts-the-blame-on-the-lack-of-linux-ee... http://www.reghardware.com/2008/07/14/asus_linux_eee_901_fam... At the earlier EeePC 900 launch, Asus predicted that Windows would outsell Linux 60-40 despite Windows model costing up to twice as much. |
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