Comment by globular-toast
2 years ago
Were the other, dominant car companies actively trying to kill Mercedes by making the roads unusable by Mercedes drivers? No. That's why Linux having a strong and growing market share is important.
2 years ago
Were the other, dominant car companies actively trying to kill Mercedes by making the roads unusable by Mercedes drivers? No. That's why Linux having a strong and growing market share is important.
That may be true, but looking at just one miniscule facet of the computing world is pretty irrelevant. "Desktop usage" is one very tiny and decreasing niche market, in today's world.
If you look at TOTAL Linux usage, the argument is really pointless. I'd venture to guess (and merely a guess, mind you) that Linux usage is about 98%, with the number of Microsoft systems being merely rounding error. The items in my house alone that use Linux in some fashion would be about a dozen.*
There are A LOT of household appliances that use Linux 'under the bonnet' where it is hardly ever seen, and Linux computers are so cheap that anybody can dedicate a Linux computer to doing nothing but one single task. I have a headless Raspberry Pi which silently sits on the end of a cable and does nothing else at all but host a website.
* 'Non-computer stuff' off the top of my head: washing machine, satellite TV box, two smart TVs, fiber-to-the-house internet box and router, fridge, .... and I'm sure there's more. (Anything where a 'reset' takes 10 seconds or more is very probably Linux-based.)
Running Linux on a headless server or a completely custom hardware stack was always possible (for some version of possible). It was the very specific use case of Linux on PC as a PC/workstation that was problematic. It sucked in '04. It sucks a lot less now.
People who aren't interested in computing still aren't interested in computing. But, unlike back then, more people can realistically choose to do it if they want to. That's a good thing.