Why Linux won’t “Ship on More Desktops than Windows” – Intro

I am a big fan of Linux for quite some time now. My migration from Windows to Ubuntu (although bumpy) was a very successful one in the end.
This is however only because I have an enormous patience when it comes to improve my working conditions on the long term, and, of course, because I’m a fuckin’ geek programmer.

However, I am 100% convinced that I were to be an accountant, secretary or languages student, I wouldn’t touch a Linux even if you would point a gun at me. I want to start a series of articles to prove why Linux won’t “Ship on More Desktops than Windows”. I know is an old topic, but there’s just too much of this in the Linux community and especially in the Ubuntu community.

Before getting threatened by some frustrated Linux garage programmers, I want to state something clearly. As already mentioned, I like Linux and I really really really want to see a decent desktop distribution one day. But this is only because I know what I am doing at least half of the time. The thing is that there isn’t any Linux distro (or that least none that I know of) that is capable to deliver a humanly usable desktop to non-IT-literate users. Such users are the ones around which I want to focus my posts, so I will try to stay out of the development-related topics as much as possible (although there would be plenty of those too, unfortunately).

Most of what I’m going to post is obviously Ubuntu related since I don’t have the time and resources to install a new distro every fuckin’ weekend – I did that in college, but I got a life in the mean time. So to all those CentOS, Fedora or openSUSE fanboys that are going to bitch about things like “oh, but my distro doesn’t (or does) that” – you are totally missing the point. The same for the ones whining about “oh, but this requires proprietary drivers, bla bla, freedom and free software, bla bla, we don’t want to pay to use software” – just die.

My only hope is to have the Linux geeks pay attention to the common user and not the one that is able to compile his kernel at 3 AM. That’s the only chance the Linux has if we really want it to ship on more desktops than Windows.

Stay tuned. Or find out in the mean time what you should be using Linux for.