While a lot of Linux companies are closing one after the other and a lot of people are starting to wondering if GPL software can actually bring some money in, Hewlett Packard gave Linux a big boost yesterday as they announced they would use the operating system to power everything from cell phones to stereos. HP said it would develop new security software for Linux, as well as HP Chai-LX, a program to develop Linux applications for small consumer devices like stereos and cell phones. This may very well be the fruit of the work of one of the most important people in Linux history, Bruce Perens, who was recently hired by HP. Our Take: Even if Linux never make it to the desktop market and be able to beat Microsoft’s OS offerings (Linux covers about 1% of the desktop market surveys report), it sure can have lots of usages in the embedded market, where some say that “this is where the real money is.”
Hewlett Packard Backs Linux
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
GNU/Linux is everywhere, from the server to company networks to the PDA.
Why do people still bitch about Linux not beeing the Microsoft killer on the private desktop?
That’s lame, instead of beeing happy that free software has covered almost any aspect of computing, they still say Linux failed or crap like that.
And btw, other surveys report about 5% Linux usage on the desktop and that’s pretty damn much.
I’m sick of hearing people crying “Linux is not ready for the desktop yet!”. It may be true, so what? Linux has it’s place, live with it.
GNU will never die, even if some market “analysts” figure, that Linux will not be a profitable buisiness. Who the fuck cares?
It is impossible for Linux to have 5% market coverage on desktop PC’s because Microsoft has 95% – which means that ALL the other OS’s have no market whatsoever – 1% is what I have heard!
You say your sick of hearing people say Linux is not ready for desktops, well a lot of people are sick of hearing people raving that Linux will deliver us from evil (Microsoft). The pendulum swings both ways!
The reason people are not just being happy that free software covers most aspects of computing is because these programs are not usually of the same quality as their competing commercial products.
Most people, couldn’t give a damn whether a piece of software they own is open or not, I certainly don’t. For example, I run BeOS and use OpenTracker – because it is better than the original one in BeOS. But, I use Gobe Productive for Word Processing etc. not the open-source alternative Abi-word – because Gobe Productive is better – to me Opensource is not a plus factor or a minus factor – and that’s the way it should be!
Anyway, in regards to the article:
While I think that Linux may not have the requirements to become a desktop OS (ease of use etc.) the embedded market is another story. The first thing going for it is GPL, no licensing fees such as with WinCE, BeIA etc. However, one of the problems is that as it is now, “Linux” is not ready for embedded systems, although I hear there is an “embedded Linux” project around somewhere – I mean why not, there’s a Linux project for almost everything else.
However, this is what *I* think: Linux will be primarily used in backends, i.e Stereos, Cell Phones etc. which don’t need GUI – I do not personally think that Linux will be used in “entertainment devices”, “internet appliances” or Handheld PC’s just yet!
You have to take those marketshare numbers with a grain of salt. I’ll make no claim to know what Microsoft’s real marketshare numbers are, but you have to remember that the numbers will vary widely depending on how you’re counting. Remember that most marketshare numbers are based on SALES. Microsoft has a pretty good idea of how many Windows Licensens they’ve sold overall, and they’d like to take credit for them all. Truth is, I own about 20 Windows licenses, and I only have Windows installed on one of my machines. Virtually every Linux installation out there is also (or only) counted as a Windows installation by these metrics.
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Also remember that most of the PCs in the world are on the desktops of the world’s major corporations. They are glorified typewriters, and although they represent billions of dollars of money that Bill Gates uses to buy gizmos for his house, take all of those typewriters out of the count, and count only bona fide Personal Computers and you’ll get markedly different numbers.
> It is impossible for Linux to have 5% market coverage on desktop PC’s because Microsoft has 95% – which means that ALL the
other OS’s have no market whatsoever – 1% is what I have heard!
Impossible? No.
My guess:
>90% Windows uers
>5% Dual boot Linux and other OS (like Windows)
<1% Linux users
> You say your sick of hearing people say Linux is not ready for desktops, well a lot of people are sick of hearing people raving that
Linux will deliver us from evil (Microsoft). The pendulum swings both ways!
No doubt, but what does it change.
> The reason people are not just being happy that free software covers most aspects of computing is because these programs are
not usually of the same quality as their competing commercial products.
Holy crap… examples? What about Apache, Mozilla (compare to Opera or the old Netscape 4), …
> Most people, couldn’t give a damn whether a piece of software they own is open or not, I certainly don’t. For example, I run BeOS
and use OpenTracker – because it is better than the original one in BeOS. But, I use Gobe Productive for Word Processing etc.
not the open-source alternative Abi-word – because Gobe Productive is better – to me Opensource is not a plus factor or a minus
factor – and that’s the way it should be!
You are right, most people give a damn as long as they get what they want… and that’s definetly NOT the way it should be.
Systems, neccessary libraries, file formats and protocols shoul all be free, so that you have a free choice of what to use.
The more open software is, the better it is for computing in general. You might not see that, but judging on your previous postings, you don’t know much about free software, so you should probably keep an open mind and try to learn more about it.
> However, one of the problems is
that as it is now, “Linux” is not ready for embedded systems
Huh?
Do you know Qt/Embedded? And yes, there are other projects as well, like DirectFB (www.directfb.org) or the Gtk counterpart of Qt/Embedded. Xfree is just the first step.
Here, that’s Qt Palmtop (based on Qt/Embedded):
http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/embedded/qpe.html
Don’t tell me, the GUI wouldn’t be ready.
There is not a “Linux GUI”, there will be several.
Ok – I see what you mean by the marketshare, but as mentioned by the person above, they should be taken with a grain of salt – I’ve allways heard the Linux is 1% and all other OS’s take up 4% – Which allways seems logical to me :/ – But I forgot about dual booting!
Example of good but not so good software: GIMP – PSP is much better. Mozilla and Apache are some of the biggest open source “groups” and I’ll admit right now that these Applications are fantastic! – I Apache on a daily basis!
Forgive me for my comments about Linux not being ready for Palmtops – whew after a look at those websites I was blown away – Qt Palmtop looks FANTASTIC!
For http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2001/August/index.html“>717,925… less” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2001/August/os.html”>less than 1%. While Linux has a lot of usage in the server market, we are talking here for the Desktop. Desktops that people are surfing the net with and use them every day. And between these 700 million hits, Linux has less than 1%. As for the “unknown” OSes listed there (2%), there is always BeOS (which is stupid enough on version 5.0 to not return the OS type), BSD, Irix, HP-UX etc. etc.
Wombat, PSP is not “much better”. Didn’t you read the recent article?
Gimp is already a great alternative for desktop usage. It might miss some features for commercial graphic design, but this will come. Gimp 2.0 is on the way. =)
So what else? Sure, there is many good proprietory software, but free software is catching up much faster. Look at how fast Ximian has pushed out Evolution, it’s almost an Outlook killer already. Compare to Outlook, Evolution is a baby (in age, not in quality). Same for KHTML and Gecko. Compared to IE they are little babys that can already compete against the methusalem of HTML engines.
XMMS, weaker than WinAmp? No way.
Nautilus weaker than any other filemanager? No way (still a bit slow though…
But it’s another baby-age software, give it some time).
Other examples? Let’s see. Gabber, the best Jabber client I know is free. Same for the best and most flexible ICQ client (licq).
About office, sure, MS Office is still unbeaten but MS Office is not “just another proprietory software”, it’s THE proprietory software.
OpenOffice CAN compete with it and it’s outstanding how fast KOffice is catching up.
Gnome also plans to have Gnome Office 1.0 out at the end of this year (Gnome Office is a collection of apps like Gnumeric, AbiWord, Dia, …).
So what else could we use as example? Toolkits? Look at Qt. =)
Desktop Environments? Gnome and KDE are pretty cool. Sure, not as fast and integrated as BeOS, but that’s a problem of the underlying OS, not of the Desktop.
It’s really hard to find anything unfree that is much better than it’s free alternative and that isn’t coded by Microsoft for about ten years.
The only area where proprietory really shines, that is “niche” products like several business applicationsm, educational software, etc.
While free software usually shines for applications that are of very wide use, cause it gets a lot of support.
Wow, Opera 3.6 (BeOS) just crashed but I was still able to copy the text to the clipboard. Pretty damn cool!
Where did I stop?
Well, I think that the general rule “Proprietory is better than free software” is not true at all. Sure, there ARE places where this is true, but those are mostly “classics” like PSP or MS Office, Internet Explorer or little apps without much interest so nobody was interested to create a free project for it yet.
Eugenia, you are probably right. Most people surf the net with Internet Explorer and Windows. But almost everybody knows Linux today (compare that to a few years ago… Linux? What is Linux? It’s a Unix? What the fuck is Unix?) and very very much have it installed, if they use it or not…
I think Linux IS mainstream, because almost everyone knows it. And everyone who likes it, uses it. Not much on the desktop though, but I wouldn’t call a few millions “few”.
It’s all relative.
Nautilus is a pretty terrible file browser. It’s a slow version of Windows Explorer without the truly useful features (like cut and paste). It has some cool tricks up its sleave, such as the view as music option, but overall it’s not so great. Oh, and it’s *slow*.
And you didn’t read the comments on the Gimp article, virtually all of which concluded that Gimp doesn’t hold a candle to Photoshop.
Well, I wrote a much longer text about this, but AtheOS hung up (when visiting Adobe.com to check the price for Photoshop…), so I make this short.
Before talking about something, you should try to get some clue. You are obviously either lacking this clue or you forgot that free software is indeed does not stand still for months.
You should know that Nautilus has copy and paste since ages… the reason they didn’t include it at the beginning was, that it’s quite confusing feature… but they listened to the customers who wanted their cut and paste back of which they were used to.
This leads to the assumption, that you didn’t work with the latest Nautilus releases which have focused almost entirely on speed and stability. There is no real speed issue anymore. Startup time is a bit slow (I don’t like to wait three seconds for my filebrowser), but once it’s loaded it’s lightning fast and it is still improving (it will especially improve much with Gnome 2.0 cause there is some important work done with the underlying libraries).
I’m also wondering, why you call it a “version of Windows Explorer”. Tell me… why is it? Did you even use Nautilus for more than a day? Please tell me, where the similarities are, besides of that you can show a treeview in the sidebar and that it is used to browse through… err… files.
I never managed my $HOME that fast and comfortable as with Nautilus. I always had chaos and unused crap in it, but sorting mp3’s, images, etc, viewing those files and deciding what could be removed or placed elsewhere became a breeze with Nautilus. It’s so damn usable, other apps should really look at it.
About Gimp: Yes, I didn’t read the comments. But I know for a fact, that Gimp is one of the best image manipulation programs, it improves stadily, it’s available for a wide range of plattforms, it’s available for free and besides of that, the Gimp developers do not arrest free software hackers…
But I guess you just “don’t care” as always, right?
Gimp does it job great, for everything but some professional tasks.
Oh well, I just read the comments in the Gimp threads.
I can comment them really quickly, cause they are are all the same…
The interface does not “suck”, it’s just different. It may be bad for Windows or Mac though, but it’s pretty cool on a multiple workspaces X desktop.
There was not even ONE comment concerning the features of Gimp (besides lack of CMYK seperation), so I guess everyone is happy with Gimp’s feature set (or they didn’t even take the time to look at it).
And isn’t this the most important thing?? FYI, Gimp 2.0 will be frontend independend AFAIK. So you can create your own native Mac GUI or a Photoshpish GUI if you like to!
Gimp is about the features and those are great. It’s for pixel artists, not for prepress companys. It’s also very nice for webgraphics (although I would agree that the interface could be more simple for easy tasks like creating a button).
So let’s make this clear:
Gimp is already a very great product, you can use it for free and for webgraphics, pixel artwork and every other RGB image manipulation.
Gimp 1.4 will feature a code cleanup and a core<->interface seperation, to allow for more interface flexibilty and the possibility to change the core without breaking too much.
Gimp 2.0 will feature CMYK.
Just answer me one question… why does free software always “suck”, if there is *one*, very *expensive* and unfree alternative out there for a *much longer time*, that is still a *little bit* ahead?
Why does Mozilla “suck” because it’s just *almost* as good as one of the probably most important software of the most powerfull software company in the world which is in development much longer and unfree of course. I just don’t get it.
You can still use the unfree products if you think it’s worth the money and trouble. I don’t have anything against non-free software BTW, I just prefer free software and I hate proprietory fileformats, protocols, etc.
I want to have the free choice of my application. I don’t have the free choice if there is a proprietory fileformat which cannot be used with my free application, because of licensing issues or closed specs.
I don’t have anything against non-free Jabber or Gnutella clients. But I have something against non-free instant messaging or filesharing protocols.
They are a pain in the ass and people should just SEE it. Imagine an internet world where the email protocl is proprietory, you have to choose your email vendor, every email has to pass it’s server and you can only send email to other users that use this email service.
Unbelievable? Well, it’s true e.g. for instant messaging and nobody seems to care.
That’s the only reason I spend so much time writing stuff like this. To make people care. Think about it. I don’t want you to do anything, just think about it, keep an open mind and be aware of the situation.
That doesn’t mean that you should stop using ICQ/AIM or your favorite mp3 filesharing service immidiatly. You also shouldn’t sell all your proprietory software.
I just want you to know about the advantages of open software.
Back to coding…
desktop should be easy to install. No linux I have used has been _as easy to install as windows!_ (and windows is not as easy to install as BeOS)
Opensouce != qualty as close sourse that is bs.
KDE/GNOME making linux a desktop os is bs. When they merge, maybe. A constent look and feel is vitel.