Comments on: Happy Birthday Linux!

By: Marcela

Marcela — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 20:04:41 +0000

i’m sorry. i love Gnome, i can’t really get used to KDE, but syniag that they’re more straightforward or easy to use for the complete beginner than OS X is just hilarious.i wouldn’t give neither of them to my mom. and not because they are unintuitive or bad. no. because they’re not organised well enough. i’m not a fan of Apple’s recent innovations’, but OS X is the only OS that can please both a UNIX geek and a 5 year old child. too bad Apple tries restricts everything and alienates devs.

By: Mike Haubrich

Mike Haubrich — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 03:20:15 +0000

It’s a Toshiba. I haven’t looked to see if there is a blue key for it. Will that wake it up for Linux to find it?

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:48:42 +0000

What kind of laptop is it? Is there a blue key for it?

By: Mike Haubrich

Mike Haubrich — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:34:17 +0000

I have just had trouble figuring out how to get Linux mint to recognize that my daughter’s laptop has a built-in webcam.

Other than that I have been very happy with the way that Linux works.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 18:22:08 +0000

Jason, yes, it needs to be considered separately, but not totally unconsidered. Any time *nix is at the base, it counts for something, because it is there because of its qualities, not its marketing appeal.

By: Jason Thibeault

Jason Thibeault — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 16:36:17 +0000

Yeah, you’re right — I was counting only desktops. As soon as you include servers and non-desktop devices (especially mobile ones), Linux wins hands-down. I shouldn’t undercut our cause like that!

One thing I won’t compromise on though is including Mac OS X. It may be FreeBSD and thus *NIX, but it’s got so much proprietary stuff grafted on top that it can’t rightly be considered an open platform.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 00:09:29 +0000

Yeah, I’ve written about that somewhere. If you ask the question, what is the distribution of processor cycles associated with computer users, Linux may well beat everything hands down because so much of what our (well, their) windows computers do is to blindly pass along and occassionally muck up the output of LAMP servers which are doing quite a bit of work, as well as numerous network devices along the way running Linux. etc. Think of all those people sitting there checking their LAMP based email via a linux-powered router while answering their smart phones and reading their kindle. If you count *NIX systems in total (and thus include OS X) the number goes up even further!

By: Ran

Ran — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 23:22:26 +0000

I think whether Linux surpasses Windows in market share depends on how one counts. Windows revenue share is a LOT bigger than that of Linux. In contrast, I’m willing to bet that more units of Linux will ship this quarter.

Some sources indicate that about Android smart phones are shipping at about 200 million units per year. That is probably near the volume of Windows shipments. A lot of other devices, such as the Kindle, have Linux hidden inside. Many HP laptops have a “quick boot” capability that runs a version of Linux. Various industrial systems are based on Linux.

By: Jason Thibeault

Jason Thibeault — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 14:04:21 +0000

You know, it’s funny to me how bad a bet “Linux will probably never X” has been historically. With one exception: “Linux will probably never overtake Windows in marketshare” is likely true as long as Microsoft has an advertising budget and a lock on business desktops. There’s a lot of inertia there. Linux MIGHT overcome it, but until Microsoft folds, I hate to say it, but it’s unlikely.

By: itzac

itzac — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 00:33:25 +0000

Funny, when I plugged my wireless mouse dongle into a freshly installed Windows 7 box, it also just worked. Although, if you’re running Win2k or earlier, I could see a reboot being necessary when you plug in a USB device. I also just had to reboot after plugging my Webcam into the same Win7 box for the first time.

The windows kernel has only recently been able to do things the linux kernel was doing almost all along. It can do most of what the linux kernel can do, but I suspect a lot of developers either don’t know that it can now load and unload most drivers on the fly, or don’t trust it to. So you still get installers that insist on a reboot even though it isn’t necessary.