

Shuttleworth: "Apple is driving the innovation" - babul
http://derstandard.at/?url=/?id=3413801

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PieSquared
I just gained a whole lot more respect for that man:

 _" I think we don't yet deliver a good enough user experience. I think we
deliver a user experience for people that have a reason to want to be on the
Linux platform, either because of price or because of freedom. If that was
your primary reason, Linux is the right answer.

But if you are somebody who is not too concerned about price, who is not too
concerned about freedom, I don't think we can say the Linux desktop offers the
very best experience."_

~~~
Herring
I'll play devil's advocate for a sec. If some user doesn't care about
freedom/price, why should anyone care about him using linux? Linux is free; I
don't imagine a higher market share will increase profits much. Seems to me
like shuttleworth's doesn't know who his customers are & I wonder how far
he'll get running this as a charity.

~~~
natrius
"If some user doesn't care about freedom/price, why should anyone care about
him using linux?"

Network effects. The more Linux users there are, the greater the incentive for
companies to support their hardware and software on Linux.

~~~
Herring
I see your point. I wonder, though, whether it's worth the trouble. We're
doing really well for <1% market share or whatever it is. Much of the popular
windows games/software runs on wine/cedega & I haven't had any trouble finding
linux-compatible hardware. Maybe it was the case in 2001, but I don't think
unsupported hardware/software is much of an obstacle today.

~~~
PieSquared
I don't think we've reached the point yet where you can buy a laptop or PC and
not wonder about whether it can flawlessly run all your Linux apps, with all
the finger print readers, weird mice and keyboards, webcams, etc, that now
come with computers. That's the point I'd say Linux hardware support should
aim for.

I don't think any more than that would be good. If it gets too mainstream, it
won't be a geek OS anymore... We'll have to find something else :(. And the
possible problem of people writing more viruses for it. (Though I'm not an
expert on security issues)

