Pic Of The Day: Installfest Benchmarking
Post categories: opensource, pic_of_the_day
| 10:26 AM, Friday, 4 April 2008
I expect some of you are wondering when Ashley is going to share his experiences with Ubuntu (see this previous Pic of the Day and post from George Wright).
Rest assured that he tells me he has started writing a post.
In the meantime, to whet your appetite this photo shows him, in his words: "benchmarking four operating systems simultaneously! (five if you include my Blackberry)".
Nick Reynolds is editor, BBC Internet Blog.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~14~RS~)
Comments
I'd be even more impressed if Ashley Highfield had a couple of tellies - one showing Ceefax BBC One and another Ceefax BBC Two!
But Ceefax is elsewhere, I know.
Ewww, Ubuntu!!!
Guys, this is the 21st Century, everyone knows FreeBSD is the wave of the past, present, future, and all penguins shall bow down before it ...
*ahem*
Sorry. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Windows love-fest.
Interesting!
I own and run an online business and we use; Mac, Windows and Linux based machines. If our experience is anything to go by, there is a real surge in the number of people using non-windows based computers.
Our experience is interesting, because visitors to http://www.jimconnolly.com are exclusively from small businesses who want free marketing advice. Over the past 12 months, more and more of these small businesses are using either Linux or Mac OSX to access the site.
Has anyone done any reliable projections as to how long it will be, before Windows is overtaken as the primary operating system?
I would really like to hear other reader’s comments on this.
Jim @ 3
A lot will depend on whether or not Micro$queak actually gets Vista turned into a semi-reliable OS.
Despite the number of users "downgrading" back to XP, they're determined to continue their plans to try to force people into using Vista, terminating sales of XP licenses as of June 30th 2008 for all but low-end boxen ( http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2008/apr08/04-03xpeos.mspx/ )
People will have a choice - have to buy a higher-end box, with an OS that's unsuitable for purpose (Vista), try to get XP on the resale-market, or give up and switch to *IX, which has progressed to the stage where it's "easy" for end-users to install/use now.
Vista is Micro$queak's albatross. As long as they keep trotting out upgrades that break people's choices for third-party software as consistently as they have to date, all it does is drive more people to look for stable and reliable alternatives - *IX.
We've been seeing the knock-on effects with people asking us about hosting. All the requests we've had this year have been for our *IX (Linux and FreeBSD) packages, not a single one for the Windows hosting we can (grudgingly) do.
It seems less to be about the actual tech differences, and more about the perceptual ones.
Small businesses especially are becoming very leery of entrusting their web presence to IIS because they're losing faith in Micro$queak itself, especially when they're becoming far more conservative about costs - they're less willing to "risk" having their web presence be "vulnerable" in their minds.
I'd love to try freebsd but all the distros will not allow me to boot from an external drive. Fedora is the best Linux distro I have tried. Ubuntu is ugly and too up itself.
Vista....my first go with windows and my last. I never knew it was this bad.
Mac OS X is still my system of choice. But those cheap screens are starting to annoy me.
Gorilla - I think, and recent sales figures are proving this out, more people and businesses will switch to Mac over Linux.
Ryan @ 6
To be honest, being one of the "The only good Mac is a big one" brigade, I've not kept up on the news of them, but I wouldn't dispute they're a popular alternative for people who're fed up with Windows.
*I* think Micro$queak knows it's got a PR nightmare on its hands with Vista, and it's likely scrabbling to find ways to cement its dominance.
The mess with OOXML/ISO is one way, the Yahoo issue is another.
The question is, can the alternatives exploit the backlash against Vista fast enough and long enough to break the stranglehold?
It's kind of ironic that this discussion is taking place here, given Ashley's views of the popularity of alternate OS' not so long ago :)
I would be very surprised if linux or any other o\s ever gets near the to windows in terms of sales.
I worked in the public sector as an I.T. Engineer for 3 years and now work for a company that provides I.T support to the education sector.
Whilst working for the public sector (in a small County) I supported in the region of 2,000 servers,pc's and laptops across numerous sites and would estimate that at least 95% of them were running a microsoft o\s of some kind.(there was 14 of us, you do the math).
I now support 13 sites all running windows server 2k3 and I would estimate around 500 pc's and laptops all running a microsoft o\s.(this also in a small county).
In my opinion whilst the government and councils are promoting I.T in education and also using it in their everyday work environment microsoft sales will still be very large.
Having spent 12 years in I.T, I for one am glad that microsoft is as common place as it is, I havn't spent a lot of time with other operating systems, but have found them to not be paticularly user friendly when I have.
As for mac's, well is it a mac anymore ????, it uses intel cpu's and various pc based hardware, really it's just a 100% IBM compatible pc running it's own o\s and in a custom case, with a serious support issue (return to base to fix!!!) thats no good for my users.
If Apple sales really did get big it would be a big headache for them, as they don't have the ability to support big sales as there is a serious lack of qualified support for their hardware and software.(watch the mcse's eyes light up!!!).
If you want proof of the above comment, 3 years ago you could buy a Dell pc (only from Dell) and the support was spot on, now you can buy Dell pc's from various outlets and their support isn't a patch on what it was. In my opinion they may have outgrown themselves, therefore using other outlets to sell their hardware and when it comes to support the end user has to do about an hours worth of fault finding before they will send an engineer out.
These are only my observations and may not apply to many others.
Open source and alternative operating systems will probably be trailing Microsoft's for many years to come. Why is this? Well for one companies (maybe more of the bulkier medium-large types) want the security of purchasing from a brand them with well defined support paths. Furthermore they want the least pain when it comes to upgrading systems and ensuring existing investments still work.
Also, as a professional developer of 10 years, I can say that Microsoft's API's and documentation are normally very, very good. The same cannot always be said about, in particular, open source software in general. However, saying all this, I am a big fan of the open source development method and see real value in community based software. OpenOffice.Org is a prime example of what open source can produce.
Jim (3), personally I don't want to see Windoze overtaken as the biggest OS, so much as I want to see an even distribution of all the various systems out there - much the same as when you stand on a motorway bridge and see a wide variety of different cars flash by. Yes, maybe there are more of some than there are of others, but there's a genuine mix, a genuine choice for consumers and a genuine incentive to innovate whilst also getting things right first time.