Richard said:
All I am saying is "THAT" is why Linux will not be mainstream in the
foreseeable future.
They all want to be a replacement for Windows, but they just don't
get it!
I'm wondering why you are so defensive... there is room for many other
o/s, talk to anyone who has a Mac and he or she will spend the next
hour explaining to you why Apple produced an o/s 10 years ago which was
better than anything Microsoft has produced to date. Doesn't mean
they're right, but it's a valid pov.
As regards Vista, it may or may not be the dogs bollocks, but it's
nowhere near as fast or as intuitive to the average user, who doesn't
know or care what's under the bonnet, he or she just wants a machine
which will do the job quicky and as inexpensively as possible.
I look after 50+ small businesses over here in the UK, up until
recently there has been very little choice because of the stranglehold
Microsoft has on the pc market, you couldn't buy an off-the-shelf pc
without Windows of some flavour or other on it. And as Microsoft
developed their product range the software became more and more
bloated, more and more expensive... yes, more stable, certainly Windows
2000 was a huge leap forward from the truly abysmal ME (which was a
step-down from 98SE, IMO), and XP up to SP1, possibly even SP2 was a
nasty, unstable piece of software. XP with SP2 is rather good, and I
use it a lot, but compared with what you are asking it to do it's
bloated and requires lots of resources just to run the o/s.
I've been showing some of my clients workstations running Ubuntu, able
to do everything their present Windows workstations do except cheaper,
faster, and less prone to errors. Also very resistant to
malware/vciruses.
So the choice is easy... when it comes time to replace, say, 15
workstations, I can either supply them with fast processors, lots of
memory, and an expensive operating system which is probably going to be
full of bugs for the first 18 months (if XP is anything to go by).
So a basic workstation with Vista and Office 2007 on it is going to
cost them in the region of 1200UKP... a Ubuntu-based workstaiton which
will do exactly what they want running a mid-range processor and with
just 512Mb DDRAM will be less than half that. Much less, since they
won't have to shell-out 600/700UKP for Vista and Microsoft Office.
It'll never catch-up with Microsoft, because most IT Consultants over
this side of the pond aren't prepared to go the extra mile to learn a
new o/s when their clients aren't aware of anything other than
Microsoft products, but if you are prepared to at least look at the
options there's a very good way of saving money for your clients.
I'll still use Vista and XP and other MS products (althogh I've already
converted more than half my clients to use Firefox) because that's what
most corporate people over here expect, but it is becoming easier and
easier to show departmental managers the advantages of considering
options other than Microsoft, and especially when it comes to
servers... I'm seeing very little resistance to updating servers to
some flavour of Linux.
Does