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Is Apple Killing Linux on the Desktop?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Jan 04, 2008 03:03 PM
from the multiple-alternatives dept.
from the multiple-alternatives dept.
Domains May Disappear writes "Chris Howard has an interesting commentary at Apple Matters on recent trends in OS market share that says that while OS X has seen continual growth, from 4.21% in Jan 2006 to 7.31% in December 2007 at the same time, Linux's percentage has risen from only 0.29% to 0.63%. The reasons? 'Apple has Microsoft Office, Linux doesn't; Apple has Adobe Creative Suite, Linux doesn't; Apple has easily accessed and easy to use service and support, Linux doesn't; Apple is driven by someone who has some understanding of end-user needs, Linux is not,' says Howard. 'Early in the decade it seemed that if you wanted a Windows alternative, Linux was it. Nowadays, an Apple Mac is undoubtedly the alternative and, with its resurgence and its Intel base, a very viable one.'"
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my rebuttal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Scientists are buying macs in droves (Score:5, Insightful)
Macs were the perfect solution. They ran our geeky unix software. They ran powerpoint which most prefer for presentations. Wireless just worked.
After a brief stint with macs, I'm back to linux. I love free software. I love the fact I can customize the GUI easily. But most of my colleagues couldn't care less. They just want their hardware to work. They will not listen to argument about free software and proprietary lock-in.
Here's an aside about OS X that's relevant for people who work with PDFs, which includes scientists but I'm sure a lot of other people too. One area that OS X beats linux in handily is Preview, their PDF viewer. Preview does the following things that are much harder or impossible to do with linux software:
In summary, I love Linux, but I do believe that the article/summary have a point and that Apple's significant resources in (1) spending money on proprietary drivers and (2) developing software that is in some cases superior is cutting into Linux.
Parent
Re:Scientists are buying macs in droves (Score:5, Insightful)
There are lots of ways to program obviously. I am very happy on my mac with gcc and my text editor. I also use Maple, Matlab, OCAML, Povray and other software and it all works great for me. I am not sure what problems you had, because I clearly can't imagine all possible programming scenarios on the mac, but then again, neither can you apparently.
Parent
Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Insightful)
-- Exactly. Keep in mind since most people are not and will not ever be programmers I fully expect these kinds of numbers.
I work for a very geeky company. Development is our bread and butter, and we're doing it pretty well based on the past couple of annual reports and analyst forecasts.
EVERY SINGLE ALPHA GEEK in the company has moved to using a Mac in the past 18 months. Every single one of them had to fight hard against an official "Windows desktops" policy set by HR in order to get permission to use a Mac.
If you don't like Macs, fine. But don't say "programmers don't like Macs", because in my recent experience programmers prefer them over every possible alternative.
Parent
Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Informative)
-matthew
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Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Interesting)
TextMate is a wonderful editor, tell me an equivalent on Linux.
The Apple Developer tools are said to be excellent, but I've not tried them.
3rd party development environments like Unity blow away their windos and Linux counterparts.
You may not personally like it, but there are enough programmers using Macs on a daily basis that your claim "for a programmer it's an annoyance" is solidly debunked.
Parent
Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Insightful)
Costs might be on par if you try to make the closest specification comparison possible, especially if you take the effort to price out a custom configuration.
However, these kinds of comparisons are flawed because they pit one brand's products (Apple) against some other arbitrarily chosen product line in an attempt to make one side look better, usually Apple. And if you want something less than 5lbs, something smaller than 13.3", or something bigger than 13.3" for less than $1,999, you won't find any luck with Apple without going for used / refurbished products.
Parent
Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Insightful)
However you also say you have stopped moderating. Please, please, please next time you get some points, use them. What slashdot needs is more moderators who have a realistic idea of what the system should be used for. This means not just modding down crap you disagree with, but modding up really good posts to make them more prominent and also to make the posters of decent contributions feel appreciated.
Parent
Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:my rebuttal (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, thank you! For every barrier in Linux desktop adoption there are ten thousand Linux ideologues insisting that the barrier is a good thing, and you are just stupid if you can't deflibberate your cronoodleblitz.
I ran exclusively Linux on desktop and laptop for 3 years. I ran Gentoo. I deflibberated many many cronoodleblitzen. I loved it. Still love it. Still manage 6 Gentoo servers.
I currently run Leopard an a Macbook Pro.
Sorry, but TFA's right. I run CS3; I develop in Eclipse; I have Terminal open almost all the time; I run Parallels w/convergence and effortlessly run Access databases with no library/3rd party control weirdness such as WINE/Crossover gave me.
My business needs are broad. I live in a mixed Mac/Windows/Linux office environment. I commonly am required to mix graphics design, database, and server work all together into one project (image personalization, data scrubbing, variable data printing, bulk snail-mail processing). I need all the above tools. I could do almost all of the above in Linux, and spend hours being unproductive while I was just trying to make things work. Or I can just use a Mac.
Someday, when life is simple for me again, I may go back to Linux on the laptop. (As it is, I occasionally fire up an Kubuntu VM in Parallels for certain things). But until then, I am very content with OS X.
Parent
The Universal Platform (Score:4, Interesting)
I can run Linux in Bootcamp or Parallels, so if I really want something only Linux can deliver, I can have that too.
Mac is sort of the "universal platform", IMO, and a year later, I consider it a very worthwhile investment.
Greg
Not Quite Universal (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason people are buying mac is because they want something new, and when it comes to purchasing a computer your only choices are OSX and Vista for most people. I'd bet anything that if we saw more linux pcs at stores like best buy and walmart, the cheaper linux PC would CLOBBER in sales, because people really do care about cost.
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Re:Not Quite Universal (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh and you can use OS X with completely free as in beer software. I use Abi-word instead of Pages or MS Word.
But unlike Linux I can install Adobe Photoshop.
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Re:Not Quite Universal (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not the case, however. Photoshop on OS X is a port of the old MacOS Classic one. This originally used the Mac Toolbox. It was then ported to Carbon, which is very similar to the old toolbox APIs but tidied up a bit. When OS X was introduced, the few MacOS 9 dependencies were removed and it was recompiled for OS X. No implementations of these exist for any *NIX platform other than OS X. It would be easier to port the Windows version of Photoshop to Linux/BSD/Solaris using Winelib than the Carbon version.
Of course, now Apple have effectively deprecated the Carbon APIs (no 64-bit version) and added a lot of things to make it easier to move apps from Carbon to Cocoa, this may change.
Parent
Re:Not Quite Universal (Score:5, Informative)
I found a lot of seemingly trivial things to be absolutely tedious and borderline impossible on OSX. Something I could have just installed with cpan or apt-get on debian required that I install this lib. Then that lib. Then FINK. Then tweak a bunch of stuff. Then, finally, if I'd sacrificed enough chickens, I could install the actual think I had wanted to in the first place.
I know that OSX is a huge platform among web developers, but I also know most of them are into dreamweaver crap and php, ruby, etc. But I know that it's big enough among them that it can't always be that difficult. For me, however, I simply wasn't willing to invest the absurd amount of energy and time to get my development environment going on it that would have taken me an hour from start to finish on any given linux system. And without that, there is absolutely no reason for me to own a mac (the unix underpinning being the reason I enjoy it so I can do my solaris/linux-ish stuff with it). The only exception being that I do love my powerbook, for ease of networkability in multiple environments and the rather rugged, durable, always-works consistency of it.
I know that I have had to pull myself away from apple.com on more than a few occasions where I was playing with the configurator and so ready to hand out my cash like an idiot, before I came to my senses and said "but you're just doing this so you can have a new shiny toy -- there's nothing you can do on this box that you can't already do on your powerhouse linux box at home... save your $3,000+ and get a hooker, some blow and a couple midgets".
Parent
Re:Not Quite Universal (Score:5, Interesting)
I can understand why you wanted this, but I don't really grok why you thought it would be easy. Unix and Linux are similiar, but they are not the same. OSX is Unix. Never forget that.
Its absurd to expect exactly replicating a Linux dev environment on Unix would be easy. Getting a LAMP stack going in OSX or Solaris, or even windows is pretty trivial. Getting your exact linux lamp stack going in OSX, or Solaris, or Windows is not.
Parent
Re:The Universal Platform (Score:5, Insightful)
You can dual boot into Windows (or virtualize) to mitigate the average user's requirement for Adobe's products and Office, but on comparable (and yes, comparably equipped PCs and Macs are comparably priced when you don't build it yourself) Mac systems you could boot into Linux, Windows AND OS X. Also, if you think that any linux desktop even approaches the ease of use and learning curve of OS X, you've never used either.
Assuming that the average home user wants to dual boot in the first place. Too many computer geeks assume that their needs are the needs of the majority, and more importantly, that their abilities, resources, and desires are common, when in fact they are not. Most computer users don't want to dig into the insides of their system. Most of them never even loosen the screws on the case over the life of the system. They've never built a computer, they don't want to, and they never will. They don't like installing new software and they HATE upgrading their current software.
They aren't us. Don't assume they want the same things we want.
Parent
Re:The Universal Platform (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Biased, however.... (Score:5, Informative)
I'd like to add in another reason why Linux is not growing as fast as OS X use: fragmented distros. Supporting multiple flavors of Linux is simply a pain in the ass and the typical end user of Linux is likely to have their own preference (Red Hat, Yellow Dog, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc...etc...etc... In fact, last time I looked there were over 1000 different flavors of Linux and BSD and with the exception of OS X (a descendent of BSD) every single flavor that I've tried out of that 1000 all required significant effort just to get the OS up and running with wireless networks, not to mention all the various voodoo required for the printer support.
No, for me it is all about getting work done and I don't want the OS getting in my way or becoming an impediment to accomplishing things and I don't want to have to spend time with all of our students on various flavors of Linux. In retrospect, the last project that we worked on with a contractor got developed for Red Hat and in terms of system support, backup, management and more I really wish we had developed it for OS X now. That is not to say that we will not develop our algorithms cross platform, as that is our goal to release them totally open source, but for anything that is going to be developed for intensive use or for further development it is going on OS X and taking advantage of all the platform specific pleasantries such as Cocoa, Core Image, Core Animation, Quartz and more.
apples 'n' oranges, perhaps (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the bottom line is that Linux is, and always will be, a bit of a hobbyist and/or experimentalist bleeding edge platform. It's like the difference between commercial radio and amateur (ham) radio: the former is all about "getting work done," as you say, and so it's streamlined, standardized, and widespread. The latter is about experimenting with new ways of doing stuff, about cooking it up at home by yourself, about trying out your individual creative thoughts and ideas. So it's idiosyncratic, quirky, customizable, and thinly spread.
Each has its place, of course. Without streamlined standardized production platforms, people trying to get stuff done who don't give a hoot about computers and software would be endlessly frustrated. Without weird individual experimentation, advancement stagnates. (I don't doubt that one of the reasons OS X is so much more useful than, say, OS 9 or, God forbid, that bombing monster Mac OS, is because it was goosed by Linux coming up fast from behind.)
Parent
Point of view (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Point of view (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Linux market share? (Score:5, Informative)
OS X sales can be counted, Linux downloads more or less can't.
Also, those must be US-only figures, surely? OSX 7%!?
Source? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Source? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Yes... (Score:4, Insightful)
meh statistics (Score:5, Informative)
From 0.29% to 0.63% is an increase of ~117% of market share for linux.
Isn't that a bigger victory for linux?
The relative market share increase of linux being about 1.5 times that of the mac...
Re:meh statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:meh statistics (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Yes, for me at least. (Score:5, Interesting)
I liked Linux and was slowly switching until I got to see how nice OS X was and became (as it was released/updated). There is a very good chance I spent most of my time on Linux at this point if it wasn't for OS X. My brother is probably the same was, as are many others in small IT department I work at. OS X provides us the unixy goodness we love (command line and such), with a great GUI that's easy to use and commercial software and things "just working". I've been on a Mac for a few years now, yet I still discover nice little things (like my Mac keeps separate mute statuses for when I have headphones plugged in and not plugged in, so it adjusts automatically as soon as I plug my headphones in.)
If you are not a hardcore FOSS person who wants the source to everything they run... OS X provides a fantastic environment for a great many people.
Source (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, (Score:4, Insightful)
Take heart: Apple is actually killing Linux slightly less than it used to.
Apple's resurgence helps Linux, not harms it (Score:5, Funny)
2. Linux will get cool stores, too
3. OOO is just as good as MS Office
4. KDE 5 will look just like Aqua
5. Gimp and Adobe work alike.
No, it's not flamebait, just reality.
Who uses support? (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps it's because I work in IT, and I'm smarter than your average Tier 1 support monkey... But I can't imagine a normal person saying "I can't connect to the Internet, let me call Microsoft".
Then again, I could be completely off base.
Re:Who uses support? (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft could really care less about the average home user. They don't really care if your experience sucks, they don't really care if you pirate it, and they don't really care if you can't figure something out. They do care about the average business though. They do care if their experience sucks, they do care if they pirate it, and they do care if they can't figure something out. Support is where the real money is.
Parent
Re:Who uses support? (Score:5, Informative)
It is "couldn't care less". The point of this expression is "I do not care at all, so I cannot care less, because there is no such thing as negative care [reference.com]"
You essentially said "Microsoft cares about average home user and is threatening to care less." Which, I believe, is not what you tried to say.
Faithfully yours, semantics Nazi
Parent
The answer is no. (Score:5, Informative)
And also.. it's very easy to blame others for your problems. What problems are those? Well, they are the plusses of Apple's and Microsoft's solutions. They are those software or productivity suites that those respective companies have which Linux does not have. It is not Apple or Microsoft's fault they have those things as much as it is Linux's fault for NOT having them, or for what they do have simply not being as good. You can only blame yourself for what you lack in comparison to what is the widely accepted and used norm.
It's all a geek dream anyway, that people doing work for free is going to somehow outperform people who do their jobs to get paid and rely on that payment to sustain the quality of living they are used to. Not to mention that during this time that the people are writing free software they have to be working for a living; working on other projects and with other distractions. It just doesn't add up that Linux could be better than Apple, or even Microsoft, despite how completely fucked Vista seems to be so far.
Now, I know there are many ways you can tear up the logic in this post, and I freely encourage you to do so. But ultimately what you need to do is explain why, if my logic is flawed, the situation is as it remains today.
Lies, damn lies and statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8 [hitslink.com]
0.12% of all devices that access the internet are IPhones? How many did they sell?
0.63% for Linux, which means that only six times as many Linux computers are used to access the internet as IPhones.
About one persent for Linux and about seven for Mac: I would buy that. Sounds reasonable, since many open source guys I know use a Mac for desktop stuff.
But with those numbers for the IPhone the numbers look more like something someone pulled out of their a**. Plus all the computer lab computers at our universities got converted to Linux over the past years. And our university is not Linux friendly in any way. So I imagine that this would happen at many universities and colleges.
Re:Lies, damn lies and statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
That having been said, I don't really trust the stats provided in the article. They claim 0.6% Linux usage, but most other [wikipedia.org] estimates based on web traffic put Linux usage at 0.8% to 3% (and as we all know such techniques are inherently error-prone; e.g. Linux users may spoof their agent string).
As usual, estimating Linux market share is nearly impossible. It can be interesting to look at the numbers, but I wouldn't make any sweeping arguments based on such uncertain data.
Parent
Linux has staying power (Score:5, Insightful)
It's still largely a hobbyist platform. (Remember, I'm talking about Linux on the desktop, not on the server.) But given a time-span long enough, Linux is bound to be a major player on the desktop (possibly even the dominant player).
The economics of Linux don't place the same value on a perfected user experience. But it does place some value on user experience. That value only goes up over time. What was the most user-friendly Linux distribution in 1996? What was the installation like back then? Now compare that with installing today's Ubuntu or SUSE or Fedora or Mandriva or almost any distribution that you randomly pick off the front page of distrowatch.com. The difference is huge, and the user experience can only continue to improve.
If Steve Jobs is the great master of the user experience, what will happen to Apple if when he quits or dies? I don't know the answer to that.
But I know what will happen to Linux if Linus Torvalds dies... Pretty much nothing. Linux is analogous to the internet. It keeps getting bigger and better, and it has no weak link. The same cannot be said for Apple or Microsoft.
WINE has their priorities screwed up... (Score:5, Insightful)
For many people and companies, myself included, WINE's ability to run WoW on Linux as a "platinum" app shows technical expertise, but a lack of vision. There would be much more interest in the project (and possibly a cash infusion) if they publicly declared something like "WINE v0.9.xx will fully support MS-Office 2003 on Linux by this summer..."
Wishful thinking on my part... I doubt that CodeWeavers (a big sponsor of WINE) would allow that.
It definitely did for me. (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to be a pretty hard-core Linux on the Desktop guy. Every PC I ever built or bought (laptops) dual-booted Windows and Linux. At one point in college, I was even writing my essays in HTML to print from within Netscape 4, as there weren't any decent Linux word processing software (that was free ;)) circa late 1996.
I kept Windows around because there was-and-is a lot of stuff that Linux doesn't do well, if at all; Photoshop (GIMP wasn't a contender until GimpShop, too little too late), Office, Final Cut Pro, StarCraft, etc. OpenOffice (NeoOffice) is finally to the point where it's almost an Office replacement (in my line of work, I have to volley a document back and forth a dozen times or more between my office and third parties', with Track Changes and Comments and those aren't in OpenOffice).
I returned to Mac (my last Mac previously was a PowerBook 5300/100 with System 7.5.x and MachTen (http://www.tenon.com/products/machten/ [tenon.com]) around OS X Jaguar, on an iBook G3/600. That thing was indestructible (fell off the back of my motorcycle at ~40mph and survived outdoors for a week before I recovered it, still works 4 years later), and led to a PowerBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook (engineering school tote-along), iMac, Mac mini HTPC...
What I love? Running Perl / Apache / PHP / MySQL / etc. in a comfortable "native" UNIX environment, while still having all my GUI goodness with Mail.app, Safari.app, Preview.app, Office 2004, StarCraft (yeah, I'm way behind the times in gaming, don't care, don't have time), etc., all a click away as native apps. Plus, now with VMWare and Windows, I can keep around the software I need for school (XILINX, Visual Studio Pro 2005, etc) on one platform. Front Row is a great HTPC interface. AppleScript lets me automate flipping between it and my Elgato EyeTV, with the sleek little Apple remote control. Awesome industrial design (Macs are pretty; most PCs look cobbled together, with the possible exception of the VAIOs).
I haven't run Linux in years, except at the office where we setup a big Linux file / backup server. Even my home server is now an old PowerMac G4 with matched (and software mirrored) internal hard drives and OS X Tiger Server. The UI is better, the third-party application support is there, and most software I want is either a single-click .dmg install or no more difficult to install than it is on Linux (through Darwin Ports and fink), often easier (fink vs. yum, for instance).
Most servers I'd deploy would still be Linux, as Apple's hardware is expensive in that market niche and there's no value add (I'm going to be running the same AMP software stack regardless of OS X or Linux as the underlying platform). But on the desktop, unless you're totally cash-starved, there's no compelling reason for me or most of the techie people I know to run Linux on the desktop, and lots of good reasons to use OS X instead.
This is a trend that's been building for a while (I jumped in 2002, the biggest geeks in my circle jumped shortly thereafter): http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/29/1818256 [slashdot.org]
You are right on (Score:5, Insightful)
There are a lot of geeks who are reluctant to admit it, though. Most people pinned their hope on Linux + GNOME/KDE for delivering us from evil. While GNOME and KDE brought Unix miles ahead in terms of GUI usability, neither matched the elegance and power of the NeXTSTEP interface developed years before; the evolution from NeXTSTEP to OS X has further secured this lead.
The defeat of their favorite candidate for Unix GUI Savior left many geeks unwilling to even consider or support the idea of OS X as a real Unix, as an improvement to Windows or existing Unix GUIs, etc. Sour grapes, basically. The whole experiment goes to show that in software, as in government, in the ideal case you want a well-backed tyrant with his head screwed on straight. That's Steve Jobs.
Parent
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this is an important detail. While OS X may compete in some peoples minds in the desktop realm, in actual fact they are complimentary. While some OSS advocates may decry OS X as "proprietary", the fact is that Apple releases a lot of the core of their OS as OSS, uses a lot of OSS software in OS X, and they embrace standards (as opposed to trying to co-opt them).
What this means in practical terms is that OS X and Linux integrate together quite easily. For example, stick netatalk and Avahi on a Linux system, and you have a really easy and Mac-friendly file-server.
I won't claim that Apple is always perfect, but at least it's fairly easy to use OS X with other OSs, especially when it comes to Linux.
(I've had the thought int he back of my mind for some time that if I had the time and resources, I'd love to fork a Linux distro to create a Mac-friendly-Linux distro. All the parts are there -- it just takes someone to put them all together).
Yaz.
Parent
Re:Not true! (Score:5, Interesting)
Because Windows suffers for its "it'll run on damn near anything" design. It's designed for lowest common denominator, and it's impossible to test every possible combination of hardware.
Mac OS X has the "it just works" reputation it does because it's written for very specific hardware and can take full advantage of all the capabilities of that hardware. As soon as you can install OS X on any shitbox you can cobble together, you lose that.
The closest you'd ever get would be like the post-black-hardware NeXTSTEP days, when the OS supported certain motherboards, CD drives, etc, and you had to use what was on the NeXTSTEP HCL, or you were SOL. But don't hold your breath-- since Apple makes most of their money from hardware sales, they'd be cutting their own throat. Like when they allowed Mac clones and the cloners nearly bled them to death.
~Philly
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