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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Monday, August 15, 2005

Vista Gives the Linux Desktop a Chance

eWeak:

It's late, it's lame and installing it won't be cheap, so now is the perfect time for Linux desktop vendors to make a charge at Microsoft.

Microsoft recently said that the company was working on two different Vistas: one for everyone, which I'll call Vista Vanilla, and the other for enterprises, which I'll name Vista Pro.

Um, actually, there will be several editions of Windows Vista. More info in my Road to Longhorn 2005 article. His absurd comments about XP Home and Pro (I guess he forgot about XP Media Center Edition 2003/2004/2005, Tablet PC Edition 2003/2005, and Embedded) not withstanding, let's move quickly to the fun part:

The Linux desktop, whether it's from the big guys like Novell or Red Hat or from smaller, but interesting players, like Mepis or Xandros, has areas that still clearly need improvement ... of all the Unix/Linux-based desktop operating systems—all desktop systems, actually—I continue to favor Mac OS X.

Um, right.

Mac OS X isn't Linux. Why does this article have Linux in the title?

So this guy gets bonus points for thinking that desktop Linux has a chance. But he needs to get his facts about Windows straight, as noted above. Even an opinion piece has to be rooted in facts. Windows isn't perfect--it's arguably not even "great" any more, thanks to the constant security issues--but it's not exactly ripe for the picking by an OS that doesn't even have measurable desktop market share.

As a comparison, consider Firefox. It's kicking ass by all measures, but that has amounted to less than 10 percent of the market and one recent survey even says they lost market share to IE in July. And what will happen when IE 7 ships later this year? My guess is it won't be a pretty picture. But it's easy to switch browsers. Switching OSes is another story altogether.

This article is ridiculous.

[ Posted at 9:18 AM | Permalink ]