Stormy Peters lands on Gnome Foundation The Gnome Foundation yesterday announced that it has hired former Hewlett-Packard industry analyst Stormy Peters as its new executive director. She will hope to snap up a few more industry members and community contributors to the open source group’s cause. Peters previously headed up HP’s open source strategy, policy and biz …
Until Linux has better out of the box support for the major hardware vendors i.e. NVidia, ATI, Creative-Xfi where you're not being told to download or compile extra kernal bla bla bla boots XP
Ive tried a few (Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandrake, openSuse) and none of them could get the g/c & s/c working (and I'm not going off arsing about with some text file in the bowls of the thing)
Produce a few big budget games titles that are only available on the Linux platform, and bundle a few Linux operating systems with the games.
The game should boot from the DVD, or install to a Linux distro.
Job done.
Yep. That would do it. I just hope it happens in our lifetimes because gaming is the single biggest dealbreaker when it comes to switching users. Gaming on Linux as it stands now is 5-10 years (at least) behind Windows. Linux games are either playable but ugly, totally unplayable, hopelessly out of date or some combination thereof. Before the flames start YES there are some exceptions but so few as to hardly bear mentioning.
As an everyday Linux lu$3r, wannabe Linux geek and casual PC gamer it's quite obvious that gaming under Linux is not the most important factor for Linux to breakthrough in the consumer market. Gaming is a minority of the consumer market and is actually quite well catered for under Linux these days (Ubuntu auto-installing nVidia and ATI drivers, Wine+Cedega allowing many Windoze games to be played, more native Linux versions becoming available, etc.).
To overcome the massive inertia of Windoze (installed base, ready availability of tech support, third party hardware support, etc.) Linux would have to do everything better than Windoze, every time, right out of the box, i.e. a very tall order. What most people want is their printer to work, to sync their phone, dabble with their music and photos, surf their favourite social networking sites, etc.. While most of these work as well under Linux without much geekery (though not printing), and while almost everything is a whole lot better under Linux once tweaked by a nerd, that's not good enough for Joe Schmo and Plain Jane to consider changing yet. Perhaps more to the point it's not enough for the big consumer box shifters to risk plonking Linux on their boxes so that it arrives in front of Joe's & Jane's faces in PC TurdWorld.
That said it's good to see that the likes of the Gnome Foundation, Novell, Canonical, etc. are taking this as a serious problem that needs some serious work to address rather than going crying to mom that that bully Steve Ballmer won't let them play with his football.
From my point of view the main obstacle to linux adoption on the desktops is marketing and availlability of machines preinstalled with linux.
Most users are ready to buy a computer with another OS than Windows: the big market share of apple macs in the consumer space proves that (it's around 30% nowadays).
The problem is that when the average user walks in a store all he sees are windows PCs and maybe a few macs. Most peoples don't even know that an alternative exists, so they can't choose it, much less buy it when it's only availlable at a few specialized online retaillers.
If everyone who enter a shop to buy a PC was told: I can sell you a PC thats good enough for surfing, playing music & videos and edititing office documents without risk of catching viruses for $50 less than the same XP machine, a large amount of them would buy it, but currently they don't because they don't know.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
