Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 26th May 2003 23:36 UTC
Linux only has a small percentage of the computing market, however Microsoft already considers it a major competition as the open source OS steals the hearts of many users. Following the hard numbers though, Microsoft also increases its market share on both server and desktop space with time. The only logical explanation is that Linux steals quite a market share from the traditional UNIX providers (SCO, Sun, SGI, HP, IBM). But only Sun seems to truly be in a real Linux trouble, as it is the one with a resistance to Linux integration to its full product range.
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> Why must everyone switch to Linux? What features does Linux have that real UNIX OS's don't?
Linux is probably the best server OS on x86 (besides the *BSD's...)
x86 hardware itself has grown in mindshare with a lot of companies and people.. this growth can not only be attributed to Linux/BSD's, but also to the growth of Windows as an server OS.
> As this article correctly points out, companies may be adopting Linux, but only by running on top of an existing system. Why is this? Linux is missing critical features needed to run large computer systems. Some examples are checkpointing, hotswapable CPUs, various specialty hardware, stability testing of the large UNIX OSs.
Yes, adoption of Linux goes on in more of the workstation and new server level.
>Interestingly, Linux users seesm to love to badmouth Sun. This is somewhat ironic because Sun was behind some of important aspects of the GNOME desktop. For instance, they really started the push for fixing up the GNOME UI, and recently added voice synthesis to GNOME for blind users. They have not adopted Linux as an OS because there is no need. Linux cannot do what Solaris can do (hot swap almost every component of a server for instance), and Solaris can do pretty much everything Linux can do.
Uhm, how is GNOME tied to Linux? I've used Linux for nearly five years now, and I've barely ever used GNOME (I prefer fluxbox and KDE, neither of which are tied to Linux or Solaris, or Windows even.)
> One of the strengths of UNIX has always been well published standards. This allows different implementations to be used. There is no reason at all that everyone should use only Linux as the kernel. Nearly all the software for Linux can be compiled for other systems as well.
Yes, but often unfortunatly, there is a lag period for non-Linux systems... a recent case in my experience was trying to get gcc 3.3 installed on a HP/UX 9 server... I only did with much hassle and installing several sets of patches.. it worked pretty much out of the box on my gentoo/linux box a week earlier, however. That server, ironically, is primarily for developers. If we didn't have a lot of legacy custom made close source apps from defunct companies, we might have even gave Linux a shot.