Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 29th Aug 2012 22:52 UTC
Miguel de Icaza: "To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions. This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. You would try once, do your best effort to support the 'top' distro or if you were feeling generous 'the top three' distros. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later. Supporting Linux on the desktop became a burden for independent developers." Mac OS X came along to scoop up the Linux defectors.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Add to that the vast numbers of machines that don't get into the statistics as being sold as Linux servers, e.g. probably thousands of machines in academia. I've had my fair share of presence at universities and research institutes and I witnessed only a very very tiny fraction of pre-built Linux servers being ever bought. 99.9% of them were bought as blank (without OS), or built from parts on-site, and I've seen and done a large number of desktop Linux istalls on bought-with-Windows machines as well.