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Porting free software to Windows
Porting free software to Windows
Posted Dec 16, 2004 1:56 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)Parent article: Porting free software to Windows
I doubt that people would stay on Windows due to inertia if all of the applications they used were available on whatever platform they wanted. It takes a lot of effort in updating things to keep a Windows system working at all, especially for a non-expert. It's faster these days to install Linux than to install a windows update. The inertia people have is really the applications.
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Porting free software to Windows
Posted Dec 16, 2004 3:00 UTC (Thu) by bryce (guest, #16388) [Link]
Agreed. The assumption seems to be that people will be choosingthe OS based on the applications. I think this is a faulty assumption.
Honestly, most open source apps are still struggling to catch up with
their proprietary counterparts.
In a way I think it goes the other way round. Linux itself can
win fine on its own merits. People consider switching to Linux
for philosophical, monetary, quality, or other reasons but
then pause and ask, "Uh oh, what about all the apps I'm used to?
And are my files going to port over correctly?" If the applications
they use are available everywhere, then this becomes a non-issue and
it smoothes out the transition costs for them.