Comments on: Throwing out the Windows desktop

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 11:23:38 +0000

@Allen – Firstly, smartphones aren’t PCs that fit in the “desktop” category of this article. Secondly, Blackberry and Symbian are the dominant operating systems on smartphones, so at best BSD/Linux are duking it out for 3rd place.

Symbian’s well past it’s sell-by date, hopefully Nokia move on from that. And as a current Android user, I hope that at least in its current form, Android doesn’t get too much market share, as a smartphone platform it’s pretty second-rate. I wouldn’t blame this on Linux, but rather on the heavy reliance on Java, and then inconsistent and sluggish UI.

I really hope that WinMo7 brings something new to the game, because out of the current smartphone OS contenders, nobody’s got something that I can get excited about, they all have a major achilles heel. The way MS has been putting out winning products recently, I’m cautiously optimistic about WinMo7.

By: Allen Baranov

Allen Baranov — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:39:17 +0000

If you consider Smartphones to be PCs then Microsoft is already losing the battle. The fight is on between BSD (Apple) and Linux (Google/Nokia).

I figure that Microsoft have already resigned themselves to the fact that they have lost the OS battle (or will have in a few years) and are fighting App wars now.

By: Jonathan Groll

Jonathan Groll — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:45:51 +0000

I’m not so sure the driver issue exists any more in 2010 with Linux. Out of the box more common hardware and drivers ship with Linux than for Windows.

If you’ve ever had the occasion to install a Windows box from scratch recently, you’ll find more problems trying to download drivers with a half working machine, something you’ll almost certainly never see with an out of the box Ubuntu install!

By: Charles

Charles — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:52:14 +0000

Thanks for an exceptionally well written and informative article. I’m a huge supporter of Ubuntu for desktops but I concede and agree with you that driver support is the biggest obstacle to what is otherwise a fantastic operating system. Thanks again.