The Way the Rest of the World Views Linux

January 21st, 2008

I ran across this comment on a ZDNet article. This one made me laugh. I do realize though that this must be the way that the rest of the world views Linux. While I still use a Windows machine as my daily development machine, all of my servers that I own or manage are running Linux (Redhat Enterprise / CentOS). The concept of Open-Source (specifically an Open-Source Operating System) is so hard to get outsiders to understand.

Why Linux Will Not Displace Windows - Comment

4 comments on “The Way the Rest of the World Views Linux”

01

Hold it… computers can run Vista? When did *that* start to happen…!?

jd

John Dowdell at January 21st, 2008 around 11:41 am
02

@John - I have heard rumors to that effect, lol.

David Tucker at January 21st, 2008 around 1:28 pm
03

I’m gonna state a controversial opinion here. I don’t want the rest of the world to adopt Linux, and here’s why:

Right now, Linux is made by and for people who *understand* computers. Microsoft used to make good products when their target market was people who understand computers. As soon as they started making an OS for the rest of the world, the OS became dumbed down and fettered with oversimplifications and condescending metaphors. Most recently, Vista is an operating system that assumes that I am the stupidest user in the world, and gives me warnings about viruses and security when I try to do everyday things that developers do.

As long as Linux remains the effective property of only highly specialized computer power users, Linux will remain a powerful operating system.

Anyway, things will change when a personal computer is replaced by an appliance that only runs AIR applications. With AIR, users don’t need to be exposed to one single operating system command or message. By that, I mean take Tivo for example. Tivo is a Linux box but its users are not expected to understand a single thing about the OS. If my Tivo ran AIR, I would just simply select an application to run, and it would run it.

Why should we live in a world where anybody even cares what their OS is?

Harry B. Garland at January 21st, 2008 around 5:38 pm
04

@Harry - I totally understand you. I am actually not one of the people that thinks that everyone should switch to Linux. As I stated earlier, I still use a Windows box as my main development machine. One of the great things about Linux though is that there are so many different flavors. My hope would be that in the future there would be a flavor that truly excels at an easy desktop environment (Ubuntu is getting close) and another flavor would truly excel as an Enterprise level server platform (RedHat Enterprise is doing a pretty good job).

It seems that in the future the only things that will really matter is that you have a platform with a web browser (and of course, Adobe AIR).

David Tucker at January 22nd, 2008 around 5:31 am