Goblin wrote:
Whilst I use 100% Linux systems at home and only torture myself with
Vista at work, Ive said for a while that the market share/penetration of
Linux is a double edged sword (IMO)
I dont think it can be argued that Linux is now more popular than its
ever been (whatever figure you want to put on it) however consider that
Linux has been moving along quite happily all these years without todays
surge in popularity.
I have said on numerous occasions that I believe the binary slug of
Windows is partly the responsibility of its users as Microsoft has (IMO)
pandered to them and tried to make a "jack of all trades" OS to please
everyone. The result is (IMO) a bloated and buggy piece of coding that
leaves many users getting little benefit from it but just like a drug
addict cannot function without it.
Do we really want to see Linux with the market share? Forgetting that
at least partly, the reason why Linux is so secure is because the
exploits/malware etc aimed at the Windows users are viable because there
are so many more Windows users. If Linux was in Windows position, would
we see the same?
How would Canonical react to a user base of billions? How would Linux
as a whole cope with the numerous requests and demands of a massive
amount of users that want something done with a single click and are not
interested in learning anything?
I love Linux, I, like every other Linux user has spent considerable time
learning the system. Next time you are on your distros forums look in
the help section for a new user posting something like "why cant I get
the spinning cube to work like on Youtube?" and then consider that
Windows has many of these users who are wholly unsuitable for Linux.
Is this the type of user we want coming over to the Linux platform?
Only if we want to see our beloved distros end up like Vista (IMO)
Lets hope that the Linux user base continues to grow with users who want
to learn a new system and want a change. Lets also hope that Microsoft
keeps the users who, IMO are responsible for what we see in Windows today.
Goblin
http://www.openbytes.wordpress.com
With any GPL'ed software, you can always go off on your own, or with as
many friends as you can gather, and make it what you want it to be.
Each of the larger distros now have million of users. If ten years from
now, Linux usage is say 20% instead of 1% or 2%, and there are 200
million Linux users, I see no reason why you couldn't build a purist's
distro that has certain practical barriers to the kind of people you
might want to exclude, just as there are now. There will always be a
core of Linux users who are as technically inclined as the average Linux
user is now. It is just that in the future there will also be many
Linux users who are far less technically inclined. I don't know why
there wouldn't still be enough people to support the kind of distro or
even the kind of kernel you prefer.
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