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:2005-07-12
"Firefox, Adobe Flash and a whole list of other applications (that I get fed up with repeating) all get by just fine with a single .tar.gz binary distribution for all flavours of Linux."
Good point.
However, it took Adobe a long time, and development effort, to work the kinks out.
Remember, up until Flash 9, any release of Flash for Linux was always upwards of a year behind the release of the Windows and Mac versions.
Adobe actually blogged quite a bit about that. They have developers in their ranks that are big Linux fans, and the company generally wants to be as cross platform as possible.
But bottom line is that it took considerable effort on Adobe's part to get Linux versions out. They've worked out the kinks now, but it took a major commitement to get there.
They blogged about how they could not rely on the versions of gcc, glibc, various libraries, config files, and the actual locations of all those things, for producing a binary distribution that would actually work properly across as many major Linux distros as possible.
Adobe is a huge company with deep resources, and it was hard for them.
The point is, it can't be hard for an ISV, or IHV, to target Linux, if Linux is ever to be a true desktop platform. It has to be both easy to target Linux, and there has to be a good busines case to target Linux.
And it's not a true desktop platform, it will never make it as a major player in the desktop market. True, it's made inroads, and true, it has a loyal following (including me) and strong niche.
But as a platform, Linux is a mess.
Member since:2005-07-24
So they should stop blogging about their self-inflicted woes and collaborate with the distos to get the damned thing into whatever "nonfree" repos the distros have.
Work within the system that the OS provides rather than fighting it. Of *course* swimming upstream is more difficult than swimming with the current. No surprise there. Duh?
Edited 2009-04-03 17:34 UTC
Member since:2005-07-01
Well that's true. It's possible versus easy. Linux needs to be easier than Windows. I don't think that can ever happen for the whole platform. Individual distributions need to step out on their own. Never mind that Linux is difficult to develop for because our distro's the easiest OS in the world to develop for. That's where Ubuntu needs to be. Right now, they're a very long way off that.
Member since:
2005-07-01
Ubuntu already has all that. Linux never will. It's the nature of the beast. Linux is the source code for a multi-platform kernel used in servers and embedded systems as well as desktops. It has no package manager and no desktop of any kind.
What we all recognize you mean is that the big Linux distros - Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, etc. - should unify on these things. And, of course, it's politics more than technology that prevents that. But that will never change.
That said, the LSB has given us universal binaries for those very platforms. And "package management" is only needed for OS components. Most stuff can just be installed to a subdirectory of /opt, with maybe a symlink in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin.
Firefox, Adobe Flash and a whole list of other applications (that I get fed up with repeating) all get by just fine with a single .tar.gz binary distribution for all flavours of Linux. I don't think the problem is as bad as you paint it.