Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 2nd Apr 2009 22:32 UTC
According to Canonical head honcho Mark Shuttleworth, Windows 7 presents the ideal opportunity for Linux to gain significant inroads into the desktop market. He said so in an interview with InternetNews. While I certainly do hope so, an eerie sense of deja vu creeps up on me: isn't this like the 923298th opportunity where Linux is supposed to make inroads into the desktop market?
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Member since:
2008-05-27
There are multiple communities, with different interests, involved in FOSS and Linux. And none of them, taken separately are as strong as Microsoft. So, basically, they have no chance of overcoming Microsoft and its ecosystem.
Many times their interests are different or totally contradictory. Quick example: Fedora vs Ubuntu vs openSUSE. If they could work together they'd have 3x the manpower for doing what needs to be done: bug fixing, integration work, hardware support improvement. However, we have Ubuntu, which has the right attitude - relatively stable releases at short intervals, stable releases at long intervals, but which lacks the manpower to take it all the way. We have Fedora, with tons of great ideas and improvements, but which has positioned itself as a cutting edge distro leading up to RHEL. As a normal user, I can run neither Fedora, nor RHEL. We have openSUSE, which is a sort of mix, but is hurt by the smaller community (versus Ubuntu) or company/company support (versus Fedora).
So, basically, I can pick neither distro. Fedora tends to allow breakage to force improvement, which I find unacceptable, Ubuntu has lots of unfixed critical bugs because lack of manpower, openSUSE doesn't have the kind of repository Ubuntu has (thanks to Debian).
So if you could mix and match, you could make a killer distribution. It will never happen though.
This kind of thing (80% done syndrome) happens for applications, toolkits, whatever, too.
A FOSS proponent.