Windows, aside from offering a narrow bug-infested OS, also ushered us into an era of monopoly capital that we haven’t seen the likes of since the days of Ma Bell.
Braudel described the initial emergence of the “market” as being as difficult to manifest and establish as the camel of the scriptures passing through the eye of a needle…but then “the breaches grow wider” and gradually we move toward a fully marketized economy.
Similarly, in the Windows dominated monopoly there are a few voices, very tiny and most almost inaudible. Enter Linux. If anything points in the direction toward competitive capitalism it is in fact enterprises such as Linux. We are, to be sure, quite embryonic at this point while Windows dominates perhaps 90% of the market. But all these updates and upgrades from 10.0 to 10.1 to 10.3 to 11.0 are in fact triumphs along the mountainous trail of the pure competitive nature of capital.
It is early, yes, and perhaps we are on or in the periphery, but each step forward will bring the stone of David hurled at Goliath! Keep moving forward Linux–the future is bright and beaming! Let the spirit of Adam Smith live on! -joe
Personally I think SuSE 11 could be the best OS
out there. Truly it is treading into OSX territory
and as far as performance, reliability and security on comparable
hardware, it destroys Windows. Hardware support is the best it has
ever been. Would be nice to get a few commercial game
publishers on board, like at least on par with the Apple library, but that
may be asking too much. Commercial business application support is
improving as is emulation and virtualization technology. It’s a great time
to be using Linux and it looks to get only better.
Assuming that KDE (or the like) can provide a totally usable DE that runs on Windows, what do you think…would this lessen or increase the likelihood that people would switch to a full Linux system?
OSS is often a gateway to other OSS. Asking people to throw away everything they know about their computer at once is scary. Installing something like Firefox isn’t as scary.
I believe that allowing people to use KDE apps on Windows will open people’s minds towards broader OSS adoption.
Even if those users don’t fully switch to Linux, they broaden the user base of OSS projects. From a broader user base comes more bug reports, more documentation, more translation, more development, etc.
