> Let a non tekkie ask some of you sharp young tekkies a question.
> Is this Linus something that will eventually come on down to
> the average user on a personal computer or is it something that
> is strickly for business purposes? Does it have the potential
> to someday replace Windows on the computer? I know all of this
> may sound dumb, but I am not too familiar with all of the
> different technologies. Thanks in advance
<off-topic>
Howdy dd,
No I doubt that Linux will ever make it to the desktop.
There're way too many applications out there that already run
on Windows. Although the number of apps that run on Linux is
increasing every day, I doubt for example, that Microsoft is
going to port Office to Linux. Also, the user interface in
Linux, although much cooler than it was a few years ago, is
nowhere near as friendly as Windows. This too could change
though, lots of very smart people are working on improving
Linux's UI (among them are the people who brought you the
Mac UI)
I think where it *will* hurt Windows hard, and real soon,
is in the small server area. Lots of people use NT for small
scale file/print servers, and they're starting to use Linux
for it instead. Linux and the various BSD flavors (FreeBSD,
BDSI etc) pretty much own the web server market as well,
so there's no concept of stealing marketshare from a market
where NT is barely present. Among commercial server vendors,
I think Sun has done an awesome job of marketing and selling
their servers to ISPs, but I digress...
Regards,
Sandeep Cariapa |
