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posted by
janrinok
on Sunday April 06 2014, @08:46PM
from the but-not-the-year-of-the-Linux-desktop dept.
from the but-not-the-year-of-the-Linux-desktop dept.
A recent poll by The Inquirer asked, "Which operating system will you use after Windows XP support ends on 8 April?"
Among respondents, 33 percent said they will move to Windows 7, 17 percent will stick with XP, 13 percent will switch to Linux, 11 percent will get Windows 8, and 5 percent said OS X.
So most will switch to Windows 7, but many would rather stay with Win XP without support than switch to Linux.
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Poll: More Will Switch to Linux Than to Win8
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Your goose is cooked.
(Your current chick is burned up too!)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Sunday April 06 2014, @11:08PM
They should be worried about the desktop too. My dev team all use Ubuntu at work, and several other teams are switching over to it as well. There have been no problems except with a poorly written Lotus Notes app (*shiver*) that trys to load a DLL. We can accomplish the functionality through a web interface instead though. There have been no problems using any of the Libre Office replacements for the MS Office functionality we need and maintenance is a breeze.
Yes, these people are mostly developers, but developers are frequently the leading edge of change. Many other people see how easy these desktops are to use (people use Gnome Shell, Unity, and KDE) and how much prettier it is than Windows. They *ask* to have it installed, which we can't do yet, but only for political/maintenance reasons.
Really, once you break free of the MS office stranglehold, the rest is pretty easy.
(Score: 1) by iamjacksusername on Sunday April 06 2014, @11:58PM
I think the challenge on the desktop side a bit more than MS Office. A large company can afford to have admins to put things in Wine environments or to specify "must be a Java app, work under SLED or Ubuntu or whatever". It's the small companies using vendor software. There are 10's of thousands of packages like that in every industry - tanning salons, retail, real estate, etc... The vendor says "needs windows pc" and the company says "ok" because they just spend $50k on new tanning beds (which is almost all of the company's profits for the year and so they had to get financing from the bank on a 5 year loan to afford it) so they don't care what widget makes the beds go. If I had to take a guess that segment will probably take another 20 years to transition.
Going forward, I do not see a tech company using Windows as their platform from day 1. I saw a stat once that any truly complicated piece of software - think kernel or ERM system - takes 10 years to mature. Well, I think the push for apps and the subsequent transition to Mac or Linux as a primary development platform has started. So, maybe in about 6 - 8 years we are going to see a real change.