Robert Pogson

I stumbled upon Mike Ermel’s blog and found this:

“What most North Amer­i­cans do not know is that this is the only geo­graphic loca­tion where it is still dif­fi­cult to find a Linux PC on a retailer’s shelves.  Dell has been sell­ing GNU/Linux PCs in over 1,000 retail stores in India and China.  Visit a Wal­Mart in Brazil and you will find Pos­i­tivo, a Brazilian-based com­pany, is sell­ing 21 dif­fer­ent PCs with Linux.  Dell is fac­ing the fact that they are going to have to start offer­ing GNU/Linux PCs, in order to take back some of the shelf space other com­puter man­u­fac­tur­ers have been tak­ing for them­selves.  As gov­ern­ments and schools around the world con­tinue to embrace Linux, Dell has to decide to either pro­vide Linux-based PCs and lap­tops, or to give that mar­ket share to their competitors.”

I agree. The future of IT clients is bright. People are loving small cheap computers, x86/amd64 PCs running GNU/Linux and, of course more servers than ever running GNU/Linux. I don’t see much possibility of this trend slowing in the near future, because fast and efficient is the right way to do IT. Any way you measure efficiency, GNU/Linux, Android/Linux and FLOSS are superior to that other OS. The world can make its own software and does not need to rely on a monopoly. The Wintel monopoly will have to change or die. A few units on ARM or smart phones won’t cut it when a better OS costs ~$0 per unit.

Mike has a lot of good posts but I have a little comment about one thing he wrote:“when I see Linux users talking about how Linux is going to end up at the top of the operating system heap, I have to chuckle. The incredible choice and flexibility of various Linux distros is exactly what will prevent Linux from ever becoming the number one operating system.”

The thing is */Linux is already the number one operating system on clients. Almost as many smart phones (237 million) than x86 PCs (360 million) shipped with Android/Linux in 2011. It’s no contest in 2012. In tablets, iOS still is doing well but that other OS is nowhere. Android/Linux takes up the slack. Then on x86/amd64, */Linux ships ~10%. The diversity of */Linux OS is an advantage in a clearly diversifying world of personal IT.

See Linux Future Is Getting Brighter.