Linux desktop domination "just a matter of time" (DesktopLinux)

Posted Nov 22, 2006 12:34 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

How about TCP/IP? That was definately 'open source'.

Linux is pretty good at infrastructure style stuff now.

Other examples are things like Apache web server came out and took away market from commercial web servers. Or Gnu utils probably put a lot of compiler/development tools companies out of business that would otherwise still be around.

Eclipse IDE has taken off in a big way, it seems. It's crushing the IDE market from what I heard and is now a rival for Visual Studio.

Then you have Linux itself as a server operating system. It's put SCO out of business and Solaris is now itself open source, more or less. Netware is pretty much dead. It's eating it's way up into propriatory Unix and may even be eating MS's lunch on the whole "lets kill Unix" thing they've been trying for a while now. Linux-related server sales is a multi-billion dollar industry now.

Beowolf clustering.. taking a cheap PC and turning it into a supercomputer, is now the dominate form of High-end computing. Something like 70% of the Top500.org run Linux. Most of the top 10 run linux.

So open source has proven itself pretty well I think as a competitive item.

Just no desktop yet.

I think that it seems a good way to get people to use Linux is to have open source applications for Windows. Show them what they could have and such.

That's nice and it works to a certain extent, but I think that adoption of open source software for the desktop is going to coincide with the rise of Linux as a desktop.

Right now the problem is mostly exposure.

Sure I listen to the radio 'Kim Kommando' show (sunday afternoon talkshow about helping people with PC issues) and they have talked about Firefox quite a bit and I hear other applications get mentioned time to time like Audacity (getting recommended over some propriatory thing) but the singificance of them being Free software or how it relates to Linux isn't mentioned.

I think that once people begin realising that these programs are just the tip of the iceburg and Linux can make their lives considurably better (as far as it relates to computing) then I can see adoption picking up.

For instance once people figure out that instead of taking their computer into the shop to have Windows repaired they can still browse and do what they want with Knoppix CDROM and it's free then that's going to be good stuff. That has a real impact for some people.

Like my parents and my little brother. I am not around to fix their computer so when it busts it can be difficult for them to get running. So Windows corrupts the partition table. Well they don't know how to fix it.. but my Little brother knows how to burn a cdrom so they used Knoppix for a few weeks.

That's some good PR if other people pick up on it. But people need to know about it first! Most people probably have no clue that you can do something like that.

Posted Nov 22, 2006 12:45 UTC (Wed) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]

And what proprietary/non-open source application is it replacing?

> commercial != proprietary

The problem with proprietary applications is the commercial vertent (where money talks more than users). An open source project with the same mindset has exactly the same disadvantages (until there is a fork, which can be difficult in certain areas where patents and NDA's are involved).

The truth is that if a certain proprietary application is as responsive to community requests and security issues as open source, people would not see a reason to change (at least not the the ones with a politic view of life). But the need to make profit ends this (it's not economically viable, management says), unless they charge a big deal of money for support (and then open source has a chance).