Is Linux a Viable Platform or A Disruptive Force?
Put on your boxing gloves, this is going to get interesting!
17 years ago yesterday Linux was introduced to the world and during those years Linux has found a devoted and loyal following. It powers most of the web servers world wide and is the geek os of choice.
Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote
their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying
to cut your teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your needs? Are you
finding it frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-
nighters to get a nifty program working? Then this post might be just
for you :-)
As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I’m working on a free version of a
minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage
where it’s even usable (though may not be depending on what you want),
and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution. It is
just version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already), but I’ve successfully
run bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress etc under it.
Sources for this pet project of mine can be found at nic.funet.fi
(128.214.6.100) in the directory /pub/OS/Linux. The directory also
contains some README-file and a couple of binaries to work under linux
(bash, update and gcc, what more can you ask for :-). Full kernel
source is provided, as no minix code has been used. Library sources are
only partially free, so that cannot be distributed currently. The
system is able to compile “as-is” and has been known to work. Heh.
Sources to the binaries (bash and gcc) can be found at the same place in
/pub/gnu. [via]
But in 17 years you think an OS would move out of obscurity and more into the main stream. It’s kinda clear the public pines for Windows over any OS. Matter of fact MSI found that consumers return Linux PC’s 4 times higher than XP.
[MSI's CEO in an interview said] that their experience shows that netbooks with Linux are returned four times more often than those with Windows XP. This would indicate what others have already noted, many consumers pick up the cheaper systems and then realize that the Linux system is not what they are used to so they return it. If you recall Walmart discontinued the sale of the Linux-based gPC in stores earlier this year, probably for the same reason. [via]
Now, is Linux too advanced for the public to use and will be relegated to the innermost geek circle? Is Windows really better? Are people afraid to leave what they know? Is the MacOS more disruptive to the computer ecosystem then Linux? I’m interested to know what OS you back and what your feelings about Linux really are!
