Linked by David Adams on Fri 18th Apr 2008 16:26 UTC, submitted by sjvn
"Recently, both Novell and Red Hat went on record as dismissing the idea that the consumer Linux desktop is going to be taking off anytime soon. It's not? Has anyone told Asus and Xandros? Everex and gOS? How about Dell and Ubuntu? They're all doing great with consumer Linux desktops." The enterprise Linux leaders are not the ones making strides on the desktop. Does that mean that the Linux desktop has no future, or just that they've let their business focus let them drop the ball on that segment of the market?
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Member since:
2005-07-06
"They care about familiarity and what their friend down the street has."
If they dont have special needs they will care about one thing only. Price and what it can give them in return.
Thats it.
Price and what features it gets / $. This is the mentality of most people.
Now back to special needs; this could include the followings:
1. a student who is asked to bring office 2003/2004/2007/2008 suite to produce office applications' files that are compatible with his teacher's and other students computers. (will end up buying windows or a Mac)
2. an employee who works in an office and uses special programs lets say ACT! and Quickbooks and Outlook 2007 for his work and would like to take his work to his home; this guy would need only one kind of an OS (ie the same one used at work)
3. IT worker on a repected Servers going back to home and would like to manage remotely everything. (Sun/Linux/other Unixes will help him)
4. a programmer: would buy his platform that he develops for
5. a Scientist: would buy a Unix/Mac workstation
6. a car diagnostic/ health diagnostic workstation; will also have special needs
7. others and others and others
Now average people would buy their computers based on their capabilities to run the following applications with acceptable stability/performance:
1. Browse the internet including bad web sites
2. Manage Music/ Videos and be able to create them or edit them then produce them to CD/DVDs
3. Chat like crazy with others or talk via internet calls
4. if they get nastier they will start experimenting with P2P networking and file sharing making their computers a kingdom of infestation.
5. Start gaming like crazy for 16hours on LAN parties
6. other crazy or exotic stuff
once people get the point that their systems new hardware fails to please them, they would start looking for alternative which is closest to what they do.
they will find the following:
1. Gaming cannot be corrected unless you switch back to xp or become consoly
2. others are available with least efforts if you buy a mac (but you need to steal to pay for a mac)
3. go extreme and dirty by installing Linux to find at the end the distro that suites his needs and after spending hundreds of hours to find solutions of linux problems and probably he will end up wearing a corrective lenses.
this is the computing that most people do (again if they don't have special needs)