Informative interview from TechRepublic

[kc1di]

I found this interesting. A good read. I see all the time on the various forums I've been part of, that linux does not have market share because of this or that problem.
We had just such a thread on this forum last week. I think this perspective is off and like the way it's presented here.
Fedora and the Future

 

[captain-sensible]

yeah I think one issue is simply this if vision and management is left to the geek guys then it can be disastrous.

lets take Slackware Mr V is relatively a genius, but the problem is he either never thought of getting management and marketing guys in or he had a bad experience & got ripped off. Well actually i do know he did get ripped off on slackware shop ... but ..

A principle of business is delegation . Basically Mr V is fantastic at nerdy stuff but hopless at business development. Going off tangent a bit but the same problem with Codeigniter ; what one of the lead did is have a site using WordPress to host a web about CodeIgniter. What it screams to the world is " hey even though I'm a lead even I don't think CI4 is right for a simple web blog" . I did put to this the "lead in question" then I had to put my psychologist hat on to hear a lot of justification for doing the wrong thing.

How much do you think this applies to Linux , in that the genius and ∴ near mad , run the asylum instead of none geek managers employing near mad people ?

 

[Condobloke]

That is a Good read.

 

[forester]

Marketing Linux? Getting distro developers together and agreeing on a common course of action? And, why fedora?
First, get the herd of cats together . . .

As far as fedora goes -- I think IBM may be able to see some usefulness to it with regard to their clear OS. If not, it can and probably will be forked by its fans, as devuan was.

I've been hearing a lot about fedora, lately. Is it running scared and hence the publicity? Just curious as to others views on the subject.

I don't think Linux users necessarily want unity. They relish their independence.

 

[kc1di]

I'm not a great fedora fan but He does make some good points one of which is (in my own words) things from a packaging standpoint can not continue as they are now (I speak as a former packager) each distro repackaging thousands (soon to be 100's of thousands for libs for every release . That's why the push for flatpacks , snaps and appimmages is currently being touted by various groups. I suspect it will all come down to the cloud one day. Just my opinion. In any event he makes some good observations.

 

[forester]

I agree on packaging -- it's a mess right now.
Jack has always been an insightful, informative correspondent, no doubt! Not always correct, but who is?

 

[KGIII]

I don't mind Fedora. It's perfectly usable.

And, to add thoughts I've said a number of times:

It doesn't matter that Linux on the desktop isn't huge. I don't care that it doesn't have the same market share that Microsoft or Apple have. I don't need other people to use Linux to feel better about myself and my choices. I use Linux because it Just Works® (for me).

When you stop and look at the numbers, that small market share is some 38m to 44m people (depending on whose numbers you use) happily using Linux. And, we can tell they're happily using Linux by how few/small the relative support sites are.

This site ranks #1 in Google for "Linux". If 44 *million* people had issues with their Linux systems... Well, our infrastructure surely couldn't handle that.

And, beyond the desktop? Ha! Pretty much the only computational market not dominated by Linux is the desktop market. We, and I do mean we, dominate pretty much every other market. As the article indicates, there's Linux in your light bulbs - if you have the fancy ones that are a part of a smart home.

A wild-arse-guess would be: I'd not be surprised to find Linux in billions of devices - counting things like mobile phones. So, when people say that Linux isn't a popular desktop OS, that's just a red herring. It doesn't matter that Linux isn't wildly popular on the desktop. My ego isn't that frail.