Until the *nix OS gets more market share and/or more of the popular game designers see a reason to program for *nix M$ has nothing to fear. They have cornered the game market and if you’ve ever surfed for ‘how to build a game machine’ you will see that that market has a large and devoted following, much like your favorite “flavor” of linux does.

The less than 1% figure often put forth to support this position is from NetApplications. These guys have clients who are strongly into North American business-to-business stuff. The clients of NetApplications are not representative of the global body of users of PCs. They have very few clients outside of USA/Europe. They get mostly hits from business to business sites and we know business in USA is seriously locked-in to that other OS.

If you look at web stats from BRIC countries you can find up to 20% use GNU/Linux even on non-techie sites. Brazil had a recent quarter where 20% of machines left the factory with GNU/Linux installed. China, Russia, India and Brazil are very friendly to GNU/Linux. National governments promote it.

It is hard/impossible to get good stats on usage because many machines are not on the web, using doctored User_agent strings, and how do you weigh the various language/region/habit barriers? One would need stats from each region with wide popular appeal like Google to give out stats to have a real feel for popularity. Even then, we are not sure how many on-line users there are or on-line machines so every number is suspect.

We do have some hard numbers. If we take NetApps number for that other OS as the high-side/upper limit for that other OS and published unit sales from Apple (3% of PCs), it is pretty reasonable to ascribe the missing units to GNU/Linux. 100% – 88% – 3% = 9%. That is a small fraction but well above almost no one.

IDC and others have surveys but they sell the information at a high price so I have no access.

If the authour had gone to a high school classroom and asked for a show of hands, one would have found about that number, around 10%, use/have used/have seen GNU/Linux. It is happening, but slowly, so I do not disagree with the conclusions of TFA. The fall from grace could continue to be slow in many niches: business, gaming, and a few others but the fall from grace could have a domino effect. When a critical level of ubiquity is reached, barriers to adoption in other niches will disappear. We are pretty well done with hardware barriers now. We are pretty well done with hiding the price of that other OS in the price of an expensive PC and we are pretty well done with no one knowing about it. What is left? The retail/OEM sector has only to push GNU/Linux and it will fly. That started to happen with netbooks and M$ responded with sweet deals. They cannot do that indefinitely, so the end will come sooner or later, but it will come.

Coming from a 3rd world country myself, I have to agree with both of your comments. Very few in India would pay standard prices for a Microsoft OS. But this doesn’t mean Linux is taking hold: almost everybody uses a Microsoft OS. I think Microsoft allows the piracy to continue in the interest of market share.

Second, I have to disagree with the ubiquitous statements about the stability of Linux. It’s become something of a cliche and it’s not really true. I’m a longtime Linux user myself and haven’t used Windows for several years. But I have to say that I’m a little envious of the stability of Windows XP and up. (Yes, you read that right.)

The Linux kernel itself is mostly stable. But let’s take, for instance, Ubuntu. Running 8.10, the sound, wifi and X subsystems seem to have problems constantly. I have to restart those subsystems about once a week. Hibernate sort-of works nowadays, but if I use hibernate I know it’ll destabilize and I’ll have to reboot my computer every week or so. Windows may have started off flaky but 4 years ago when I used Windows XP (on my work laptop) I could go without a reboot for a month. The network and sound never gave me a problem. Currently I’m dealing with a kernel bug in Ubuntu which causes it to fill up my root partition with several GB of messages in /var/log.

You could argue that the problems stem from lack of 3rd party support but that’s not the only reason. What happens very often is that a system that worked perfectly fine will begin malfunctioning once I use the online update tool (as with the kernel bug).

The great thing about Linux, of course, is the online community. I am usually able to fix most of the problems that crop up because some smart person has figured it out. But it does take up a lot of my time, several hours every month fixing this problem or that. I think that is the real problem for Linux: stability.

Let me tell you something: One day at school I unplugged my USB memory stick (the correct way) and the fully patched WinXP blue-screened from that. Currently my desktop computer, running Debian 4 (Etch) has 75 days uptime and the last reboot was because of new hardware. WinXP stable and Linux not? I cant, with the best will, take this one seriously. I wont even talk about the uptime of my server (running Fedora 7) but I tell you, I’ve never seen uptime like that with Windows – not even Win2k, which I still think was the most stable Windows made up today.

I’ll be one of the first to jump with glee if it’s indeed true that Linux is more stable than WinXP. I’ve had some uptimes like yours back in the day (running OpenSUSE on a desktop about 4-5 years ago) on a desktop.

My current setup is a Lenovo T61 laptop running Ubuntu 8.10. Almost everything is straight out of the Ubuntu repositories; I prefer not to tinker too much. It works, it’s got more and better features than WinXP, and I imagine I’m mostly more productive than I’d be with XP.

By unstable, I don’t necessarily mean that it suffers a kernel crash (though I’ve had the flashing CapsLock a couple of times). But sound or fonts or X crashes happen very often, and these occasionally necessitate a reboot.

Oh, and regarding Vista: It is fun to bash, and has several shortcomings, but it is not as bad as anyone has said. Performance is lower and resource use is higher than previous Windows, but name me a version of Windows that that wasn’t true for.

Sure, there still exists too large (though shrinking) number of Win games that cant be ran with Wine but personally I can live with some level of compromise – it has so far succesfully ran almost every game that I have tried so I’m happy :)

Oh, and Wine in fact has (mostly functional) DX implementation and support up to DirectX 9. So maybe *nix/Wine might be enough for your needs too? Or maybe not – but the development goes on so I’m pretty sure that if not already then at least in future it will do the job for you too :)

I’m in the IT field. I’ve supported Windows (2000/XP/Vista), Linux, and OS X. Which one caused the most problems for my users? Not the supposedly “poorly designed” Vista. Not the supposedly “not user-friendly” Linux. No, the product put out by the Steve Jobs publicity machine was the biggest nightmare. Without a single hesitation, I answer that question, “OS X.” From the fact that it won’t run a lot of software that is supposedly “Mac compatible” (and you can bet that Microsoft would get blamed if software that was supposed to work on their OS didn’t) to the poor implementation of IPv6 to difficulties with its wireless networking capabilities to the claims that you can run Windows programs on it. (If anyone ever even suggests to you that Parallels is a functional product, cut that person out of your life immediately. S/he is leading you down the road to a nightmare.)

Count me as someone who uses Vista on a daily basis, both in my personal life and my professional life; I have had zero problems with it. I even run programs on it that came with my Windows 98 (first edition) computer. I think the UAC idea is a sound one. People whined that Windows was not secure enough; now they whine that it requires them to authorize actions all the time. (Which, in actuality, is no different from a Linux distro asking for the root password before performing certain actions.) They whined that IE was insecure and too integrated into the OS. Changes were made, and they still whine about IE –despite the fact that Microsoft has been ahead of Apple in introducing security features into its native browser. (Safari was dead last in line for anti-phishing measures.) Even worse, when a security problem with Firefox’s password manager was uncovered that allowed users of so-called Web 2.0 sites to post hidden code that exploited the PM, some in the open source community wanted to write it off as a problem for the sites to deal with; they did not want to make changes to Firefox to protect the users. Do you think that kind of response would fly if it came from Microsoft?

I love Open Source as much as the next tech nerd. However, I see the value of Windows, and I think the hysteria over Vista was just that–hysteria. It grew to incredible proportions as it was stoked by the Mac fanboys and marketers. As for the Mac OS, I don’t really care for anyone who takes Open Source software and makes it proprietary–especially when they charge obscene amounts to sell it back to the willing dupes and ask them to pony up yet more for an extended warranty. (I won’t even get into the users of that OS who act as if they’re taking a big stance against the corporate evils of Microsoft. Do they really think Steve Jobs is running that company out of his mom’s basement? Don’t they remember how much they spent on his over-priced products?) If people want to use a *NIX variant, there are plenty of them out there. Show some commitment and learn to use them.

One day at school I unplugged my USB memory stick (the correct way) and the fully patched WinXP blue-screened from that.

That is certainly odd. I’ve never had a problem after removing a jump drive from a Windows computer (or any other computer, for that matter). In fact, I’ve yanked jump drives out of all my Windows computers without bothering to stop them first. Never lost any data from the removable drive. Never had a problem with the computer. (Although I don’t recommend that; I only do it if there are extenuating circumstances.)

I think we tend to forget that there are people out there who are comfortable growing up with MS, IE, Outlook, etc.. and that short of Vista setting your PC on fire, people will continue to use MS based products.

My wife is not super savvy on a PC, and she has not interest in learning another OS because of reasons she has either yet to experience, or have been greatly exaggerated.