StarDestroyer.Net BBS

New Distro of one of the commericial linuxes, home edition:30-40$
New Home Edition of Winbloz XP: 100+$

Howcan something thats, less stable, has no bare essintials programs that can't be gotten for the other and costs more stay at the head of the market?

OEM licenses, and user (or user percieved) friendlyness. Not to mention compatibility.

1. Age. Windows has been around for a while.

2. Microsoft took advantage of things real fast.



At least I think that's how it goes.

Critical mass and closed environments.

Think about it: suppose it was illegal for AMD to make i386-compatible chips because all of the instructions had been patented and copyrighted? Would there be competition in the computer CPU market today?

Mostly compatibility. With XP, digital cameras, scanners, printers, gamepads, they're all just plug and play. Linux, you better check the hardware compatibility lists, and know what your doing.

Windows comes preinstalled. And if it didn't, its much easier to install and especially upgrade to if you have a previous version of windows.

Office compatibility. I know there are various office suites available under linux that can read office documents, and I've used Star Office recently (last year) but none of them do it perfectly, and creating files that you know are going to look the same to a windows user remains problematic.

Also, Linux is sort of trapped, in that to take over Windows market, its most efficient to copy what windows and other M$ products do and how they look and behave. But if all you do is make a decent knock off, where is the advantage to switch? And before you say cost, there is very little difference in TCO for a linux *desktop* versus a 2000/XP desktop.

As far as productivity software goes, I don't use enough of the advanced Excel/Word techniques, so that's not really a big factor. The reason I use Windows is for the games. I want to be able to play the games straight out of the box on the day of the release; not having to download a linux conversion a few months later.

After a certain point, market dominance becomes nearly unshakable. Only government action can stop it.. And, well, Bush stopped that.

darthdavid wrote:New Distro of one of the commericial linuxes, home edition:30-40$
New Home Edition of Winbloz XP: 100+$

Howcan something thats, less stable, has no bare essintials programs that can't be gotten for the other and costs more stay at the head of the market?

They're a monopoly. Do the math.

Read this:

http://www.overclockers.com/articles844/

It may shed some light on the subject.

Unfortunately for me, OpenOffice 1.1 is feature-incomplete so I'm forced to shell out for the Academic Edition of Office.

But yes, a monopoly allows Microsoft to do the pricing they do.

Because Apple, Commodore & Atari made some bad marketing errors in
the eighties/early nineties. Add comatibles using their systems and the
computer market would look very differnt today.

Consumer Apathy. As long as it works and it doesn't break the bank, they will buy it.

Pu-239 wrote:OEM licenses, and user (or user percieved) friendlyness. Not to mention compatibility.

Yeah, Linux needs to learn that if they want to kill M$ off on the
desktop market, they are going to have to ape the Windows UI, and
work hard on making emulators for Windows programs that work.

Before you knock me, I tried Linux for some time on my spare computer
and then promptly switched to Windows 2000 when I got the chance. I've
never been happier with W2K. M$ finally got something right.

Alyeska wrote:Consumer Apathy. As long as it works and it doesn't break the bank, they will buy it.

Hooray for laziness... or something...

Uraniun235 wrote:

Alyeska wrote:Consumer Apathy. As long as it works and it doesn't break the bank, they will buy it.

Hooray for laziness... or something...

Microsoft's dominance is a shining beacon of the Power Of Mediocrity©!

Uraniun235 wrote: Hooray for laziness... or something...

I spent a lot of time trying to get all those "free" programs to work for
linux. It just wasn't worth it. People, can we say precompiled binaries?

If it's good enough for microsuck programs, it's good enough for you.

And yes, I installed all of the damned libraries and stuff, and the shit
still wouldn't compile

Hehe, Debian gets precompiled binaries for almost everything... too bad it takes for ever for the initial setup (most of it because I'm a perfectionist and insist on doing things my way, like using devfs and various useless stuff). Once you get that done, very nice. The only stuff I had to compile were drivers, and some obscure software that I don't even use (probably reason why it wasn't debianized was that it wasn't useful). BTW any future reference to Debian includes Xandros, Lindows, Libranix, and Knoppix, and probably more. First two are the so called "grandma distros".

The problem with Linux is that people do not use the lowest reasonable version number of a library when making packages for some reason, so you have binaries compiled with a later library that don't work with people who have earlier libraries- often many, since most distro users have to undergo a laborius upgrade procedure (except Debian of course). Then you have non-standard library naming, meaning dependency handling no longer works. LSB should work out standard library naming conventions, similar to what Debian does. RPM is the spawn of Satan(if he existed, and was actually evil. ).


If only people made stuff like the mozilla package or nVidia drivers- one install file for everyone, then distro specific stuff later, and preferably have a tarball around as well as an executable. Let the user download their own libs. If a package needs an uncommon library, put a download link to the library beside the package, and/or make a package that automatically installs both and removes both.

MKSheppard wrote:

Uraniun235 wrote: Hooray for laziness... or something...

I spent a lot of time trying to get all those "free" programs to work for
linux. It just wasn't worth it. People, can we say precompiled binaries?

That's odd, because almost every program I use on Linux has precompiled binaries. The only ones that don't are a bit obscure (though granted, I compile everything anyways since I use Gentoo Linux).

And yes, I installed all of the damned libraries and stuff, and the shit
still wouldn't compile

The next time you try out Linux, if you use RedHat, use the command "up2date blah.rpm" and it'll automatically hunt down all of the required libraries if they aren't installed. IIRC, Mandrake had something similar.

Debian has "apt-get" which allows you to easily get things. You type, for example, "apt-get gaim" and it'll install Gaim (IM clone a'la Trillian) for you as well as needed libraries. It has also been ported to things like RedHat and Mandrake.