Linux Losing to Windows

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Any time you post a news item with a headline like “Linux is losing to Windows ” you’d better bust out your flame resistant underwear because you are going to see more flames than California.

A few years ago market share data clearly demonstrated Linux server growth outpacing Windows server growth. Today, Linux server growth has apparently slowed while Windows is picking up, according to IDC. Why? The rate of migration from Unix to Linux has slowed.
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GOOD! I am use Server 2003 and I am glad we do. We are too understaffed to learn Linux even if I wanted to, lol.
 
GOOD! We use Server 2003 and I am glad we do. We are too understaffed to learn Linux even if I wanted to, lol.
 
We use Windows 2003 too on all of our servers. It works, and it's very easy to maintain. Why change?

On these Windows 2003 Server we have Apache Tomcat for Java Application Server, and Citrix Access Essentials for terminal service. RDP is great, but our employees are often behind corporate firewalls, hence Citrix due to their ability to communicate through port 443.
 
Umm, wasn't Linux BORN losing to Windows?

So where's the news.

It's doing pretty good considering how diffcult it is for ordinary computer illiterate people to even know what it is, let alone attempt to use it.

Maybe if the ocmmunity made it trully easily installible and usable by random consumers, it would have a shot at getting out of the niche.
 
Ubuntu is way, way better for the average user than windows. The installation is so easy my grandma could do it, and it already has everything installed for you. Then, of course, if you want to do anything beyond ordinary computing, the learning curve is vertical.
 
xX_Jack_Carver_Xx said:
Umm, wasn't Linux BORN losing to Windows?

So where's the news.

It's doing pretty good considering how diffcult it is for ordinary computer illiterate people to even know what it is, let alone attempt to use it.

Maybe if the ocmmunity made it trully easily installible and usable by random consumers, it would have a shot at getting out of the niche.
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RancidWAnnaRIot said:
yea that's what i thought...

i was always under the impression that linux has always lost to windows lol..
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This article seems to referring to the server market specifically, where Windows doesn't dominate as much as it does in the home / consumer market. Myself, I went back to Windows (in the form of Vista x64) from ~four years of using Fedora as my primary. I still maintain linux fileservers and similar at home, and code on them to keep my linux skills sharp, but fact is, speaking for home market, Windows absolutely destroys Linux in multimedia & gaming.
 
Actually, a lot of servers use Linux; the race is much closer than in the home market.
 
HOCP4ME said:
Actually, a lot of servers use Linux; the race is much closer than in the home market.
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If you read the IDC link in cnet article, Linux has gained 10 points mostly at the expense of Unix and Novell between 2000 and now. Between 2000 and now, Linux went from 10% to 20% share, Unix from 17% to under 10%, Novell from 17% to near 0% and Windows Server from ~50% to 70%.

Those numbers may not look bad, but the problem is that Linux is trending to lose even more marketshare due to a negative growth rate, while Windows is still growing strongly.
 
FLECOM said:
and this article explains why everyone at home runs windows and not linux

http://articles.tlug.jp/Windows_Is_Free
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That's a damn good article and states many things I have believed for a long time but most people don't realize or think about.

I've switched two of my three computers to Linux and when I get the fourth up and running, it will be running Linux also. Has there been a learning curve going from XP to openSUSE? Yes there has. However, the learning curve has more to do with my previous Windows experience in comparison to my previous Linux experience. I've had virtually no Linux experience before whereas I've been using Windows for years. I damn well better be able to get around in Windows better than I can in Linux upon first messing with Linux.

I've never used Win2k3 server or other MS server products so I have no clue how it stacks up to Linux as a server. 2k3 would probably be massive overkill for what I want as a home server and Linux does what I want just fine. I plan on changing some things and messing around with it some more to get some more functionality out of it and the only reason I haven't done that yet is because I haven't been using Linux very long. I still have a lot to learn but it's not that hard. I have a more difficult time concentrating on what I want to change around or configure since I'm always finding more and more software to play with. It may be something that might enhance my experience in either a useful or practically useless way but it's there and I want to play with it.

Windows Home Server would probably fit my needs very well for what I do right now at home. I've never used it but from the description of it, it sounds like one of the best products MS has ever released for the home market. I would love to get my hands on a copy and play with it (if I had a spare machine) but I have no desire to spend the money on it just to play around with it. I'll just continue to modify and change my openSUSE configurations on my little PIII 800 server. It doesn't cost me anything but time to do that and since tinkering with computers is my hobby, it's obviously not a waste of time.

I have a feeling that MS will continue to gain marketshare over Linux for a while yet. There are fewer and fewer people out there that "grew up" on UNIX based servers and things such as that. Therefore, those that are more comfortable with Windows based products are more likely to purchase and implement them in a corporate environment. The added value of MS's support is also a consideration not to be made light of. TCO of a Linux server in a corporate environment can easily be higher than a Windows based server if the people managing the servers don't know the Linux OS that well. However, that is more of a training/experience issue than anything as in most cases. Software and support of software is probably the biggest part of TCO in the corporate world. That is where Linux generally falls short and one of the main reasons why MS is grabbing a larger part of the server market than Linux at this point in time. I don't expect things to stay this way forever, though.

Use as a server OS has been one of the major strengths of Linux for a long time and will continue that way for some time yet. But as more and more Linux distros become more user friendly for home use, I believe more mainstream tech geeks (such as myself) will dabble with Linux and begin to learn the OS. If this does happen (and I know it's a bit of a long shot), you could see a shift away from MS servers to Linux servers since more people will be familiar with Linux as an OS and not be as daunted. This can eventually lower TCO. It won't happen overnight and it won't happen without help from major Linux players such as Novell and Redhat but it has a chance.

It's no surprise to me that MS is building marketshare faster than Linux in the corporate server market. MS has been continually making their server products better and has had momentum building for a long time now. To keep the momentum going, MS cannot afford a stumble, though. A stumble could allow an opening for someone else to get in. I believe both MS server offerings and Linux server offerings have been getting substantially better over time and right now, it's a race that will probably go on for some time benefiting everyone in the long run.

 
The author of this article is silently replacing "Apache" with "Linux" and "IIS" with "Windows". There is really no other way to tell what OS's are being run for servers other than that, since web servers don't report their OS, for good reason. If I were to make a layman's assumption, I would assume the rate of home servers is growing right now faster than that of commercial webservers. At the same time I also would say that Apache is competing more fiercely now with other http servers on Linux, such as Lighttpd, TUX, and Java containers. Based on those assumptions, I'd say that the only real change these numbers are reflecting is:

At this point we're seeing more servers in homes, and of course, the vast majority of which are going to be based on Windows.
 
Saist said:
Ran my response to the news story in general here : http://zerias.blogspot.com/2007/10/why-windows-selling-better-than-linux.html

Not going to bother to post it in here due to it's length.
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I'll summarize:

LALALALALALALALALALA I don't hear you LALALALALALALALALA Charlie told me no one wants Vista LALALALALALALALA I didn't read the IDC article LALALALALALA

:p

BTW, in case you still haven't read it, the IDC data was about server OS market share, not desktop market share.
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JViz: In a word: no. :p IDC aggregates vendor sales information, but that could leave off some small segments like bare systems (which could later have *nix or Windows Server installed), some of the smaller players and the tiny fraction of servers (compared to the whole server market) that are self built. This was not a web server survey, it was a server sales survey.
 
pxc: Oh... Sorry, my mistake, I didn't follow the IDC link. I saw an article yesterday talking about how Apache was in decline. Could it be reasonable to believe that many relatively large companies running Linux web servers would buy white boxes without pre-installed OS's which would be installed with their own preferred flavor of Linux upon installation, which would skew these sales numbers? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to look at OS vendor sales numbers instead of server sales? Then again, I can't even see that as being reliably accurate.
 
I agree somewhat, the company I work for ran Windows Server it was easy to manage they employed lads with a little experience for cheap. Untill me that is.

Now we have

7 FreeBSD Servers
2 OpenBSD Servers
4 Gentoo Optimised Servers
3 Ubuntu + Beryl Technical Workstations
45 Windows Wrokstations
4 Windows Servers

Now that I'm leaving though they can;t find anyone to do my job for my money not with necessary skills to manage redundant CARP interfaces and such like.

So now its on the cards to replace them all with Windows before i leave. :eek:
 
You know why microplop are soiling themselves because of GNU/Linux and open sourced in general - its because they cant beat it , for sure they can have marketing drives and gain % in this and that sector but crucially they cant just buy up open sourced software nor can they start to nick the code and incorporate it into their own OSes without totally changing their business model , nor can they make open sourced software go out of business

There is no CEO of Linux corporation because there is no Linux corporation its a world wide community , no ranks just kudos for good code and maybe a side line selling support like redhat , suse , mandrake and cygnus so when microsoft makes gains in X market sector or steve balmer says "Linux is a cancer" no one takes any notice apart from tuts and the occasional cry of "n00b wipe your own anus!"

Linux is just an open sourced kernel - a very good one its true but just a kernel none the less there are other kernels including the win32/64 kernels . When you run a win NT server with apache or a win xp with firefox as the browser your using open sourced software - this worries microsoft , its a spanner in their works so you get laughable things like this http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/default.mspx , if that sort of model were true for microsoft then you'd be using open sourced software and just avoiding the "cancerous" Linux kernel

For me microfail can take 99.999% of every sector - it will change nothing in the long term , delay it perhaps - for its their development model and the money it earns that is now depreciated , it would take many nuclear explosions to kill off open sourced software and they know this only too well hence the xbox/360
 
everyone is entitled to their opinion , that just happens to be mine and correct i might add ;)
 
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