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With another of his graphs derived from StatCounter data, blogger and Linux advocate Robert Pogson reports
It was only a few years ago that the sycophants of M$ were trumpeting that */Linux was struggling to reach ~1% share of the desktop anywhere. Many of those were in USA.
Well, the chickens have come home to roost in The Year Of The Linux Desktop. */Linux has ~5% share. Are we there yet? Nope. FLOSS is still going places and growing stronger every year. Classical GNU/Linux grew rapidly until mid-year when Android/Unknown and Chrome OS took up slack. It's all good.
I would have said "He who laughs last laughs best" but, hey, it's his blog.
...and remembering how Chromebooks dominated the sales figures last Christmas, I can't wait to see how the SteamBox sales go this Christmas.
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(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday October 20 2015, @09:44AM
My post wasn't very clear. My point was that RMS's ARGUMENT in favor of GNU/Linux is not logically consistent. His argument is that GNU is an important part of GNU/Linux, therefore it should be called GNU/Linux. Linus wrote an angry rebuttal at one point, but I cannot find it at the moment.
There are two flaws to RMS's argument:
1. Is GNU really an important part of GNU/Linux?
2. Even if GNU is an important part of GNU/Linux, does that justify adding it to the name?
The problem with 1. is firstly the issue of how one goes about objectively measuring "importance", and secondly that by many "objective" measures Linux is significantly more important than the GNU components. For example, by lines of code, modern Linux wins handily. By deployment, Linux also wins handily (on machines running some build of Linux, but for specialized purposes, such as embedded (Busybox is often used when core utilities are needed). By contribution effort, Linux *probably* wins. By corporate sponsorship (of free software), Linux wins. By difficulty of coding, Linux wins [1].
[1]: The reason why RMS/GNU started working on their utilities first before the kernel is because writing a kernel is much, much harder than (re)implementing core utilities. They finished their utilities before starting on the kernel (unconscious procrastination of a difficult task). They never actually "finished" their kernel. However, I'm sure you can argue otherwise.
The problem with 2. is that there are lots of "equally important" (whatever that means) components to a modern GNU/Linux system; shouldn't then we also include them in the name? My computer will not even boot properly without systemd (harr harr no trolling please), Perl, or Python (for various scripts), not to mention all the other stuff necessary for a personal computer OS, such as GUI toolkit, display server, windows manager, and so on. If we accept 2., then we must reject the name GNU/Linux in favor of, e.g., KDE/X/nvidia/Python/Perl/systemd/GNU/Linux lest we be hypocrites.
RMS's argument fails on both points and is thus not a very good argument.
Note that I prefer using GNU/Linux, but that is a personal decision, and there is no strong technical argument for it.
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(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday October 22 2015, @01:43PM
Sometimes I'd argue that X11 is even more important to the work flow of a desktop Linux system than GNU is. In theory, you can replace Bash and Coreutils with BusyBox and glibc with Bionic or uClibc without breaking a lot of software designed for UNIX. I'm not sure whether space-oriented distros such as Puppy do this, but it sounds plausible. But once you replace X11 with something that doesn't implement the X11 protocol, it's no longer "desktop Linux" in the UNIX-clone tradition but something different like Android. So calling it "X11/Linux" is a way to stave off "If you want a Linux laptop, just buy an Android tablet and pair a keyboard" pedants.