shamar's Profile

Hi, I've being working as IT proffesional in Europe for more than a decade. My company offer consultancy, maintenance and support for Windows, Linux and Mac. I just want to highlight some missconceptions about Linux in the Mac community. 1.- Mac is dead outside the USA. Yes, you still can buy a Mac in Europe, and some small industries use it (Graphics arts). But it represent nearly 0.0% in total IT bussiness. If you browse for example Jobserve.com searching for job vacancies related to Apple, Linux and Windows you find a surprissing ratio of 28 for Apple, 1230 for Linux and 3200 for Windows. Right, got it??. Don't trust me, go to Jobserve.com and make your own statistics. 2.- Linux standarized on GNOME time ago. Just forget "small-curious" distros and go to proffesional ones (that's, RedHat, Sun and Novell SuSE are all DEVELOPING and integrating on GNOME). KDE is brain-dead, due to conflicts with QT licences (you are free to use QT for Open source projects, but you have to PAY Trolltech if you want to make propietary apps ). See my post on Linux today (http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2005-06-25-002-26-OP-DT-0018) 3.- Linux is easy to use and install. Just forget exoteric distros and go to RedHat (Fedora) or Ubuntu. Obviously you will have problems if you go to Debian or Slackware, which are not designed for easy of use. 4.- Linux hardware support is extremnly good. Any notebook from HP, or IBM or ACER will work out of the box with Linux. Toshiba will not, since Toshiba is too much Microsoft friendly. Just get informed before making a blind decission. No serious bussiness dare NOT to support Linux those days. The ATI case is the best example. They never had an interest Linux support since the number of Linux desktops was minimal when compared to M$ installed base. They payed really hard and Sony opted for nVidia hardware for its brand new PS3 (Sony plans to support Linux destkop on PS3). ATI learnt the leason and now they are making a big effort to mantain Linux. The case is that Linux is an small percentage in the destkop market but is a dominant player in the embedded one. 5.- You consider Mac OSX a solid and strong system, but the case is that Mac OSX future doesn't depend on Apple but on Adobe. If Adobe decides to leave Mac then Mac is dead. The decision of porting OSX to x86 is due to the Adobe pressure on Apple, that can't bear anymore the small market share OSX represent right now. M$ is making movements to attack Adobe territory and so Adobe is making movements to attack M$ territory (Rumors of an Adobe Linux distro grows day in, day out, now that they buyed Macromedia). 6.- You looks to forget also that technology is leaving the desktop paradigm. Today Internet and Web apps is what matter. 99% of people just want to surf the Net and comunicate, they need a browser, not a desktop. People get used to Yahoo, to Google, to eBay, to blogs, to *Messenger, to its bank portal and suddenly all they just need is an embedded firefox browser on its TV, not a bloated and buggy desktop anymore. It didn't worked time ago since browsers were too inmature (remember Netscape 4.x) and bandwith scarce, but now the browser technology is mature (Firefox, Macromedia, Java 5) and is not abnormal DSL and PCL connections with up to 8Mb of bandwith (compare that with the firsts 14400Kbs (0.001Mb) analog modems). WiMax -hispeed, long distance, wireless Internet- is round the corner as well as DSL2 -20Mbs-!! Services are on the Net, and people is not going to pay for CD software anymore, just for services. That's why RedHat and other Linux distro don't put much attention on the desktop. My company left desktop app development two years ago since it was no demand for it. Bussiness want a e-Portal to unify its workflow and data. That's the reason why Windows 9x is still the first or second most deploy desktop around. Because people use it to exec a Internet browser, and they don't feel any need to upgrade. The desktop/server frontier is blur today and on the server arena Linux is getting the lead. 7.- Curious is too that you "nearly" put Mac against Linux, while there is not technical impediment for Mac to change to a Linux kernel in future releases and share desktop technologies with freedesktop. To be true there is a big cooperation between Apple and Linux in what we could consider destkop oriented technologies (Rendevouz, gimp-print, OpenOffice, samba, Mono, ...) and base technologies (specially gcc, the gnu C compiler tool set and associated software). In a not so far future Mac OSX could even become a new Linux flavour.