your first paragraph explaines exactly why the retail stores don't push it and won't push it. I hate to admite it but linux in the home PC world is a thing of the past due to bad markiting and no money backing it. sounds like the simular demise of OS2 warp which was hands down the best OS in the 90's

Linux is nothing more than hacker porn now, even in the comercial world it is being replaced by XP more and more to the point where it is getting hard to find people who realy know linux

Steve

I tried mandrake, redhat and one other.. but I found they were all just as much as a space hog as win 95/98 when you installed the graphical componants. one of my favorite OS's I played with was BeOS5, so realy good ideas and intuitive set up.. to bad they tried to do it as an open source set up as no one takes them seriously enuf for them to make it.

Steve

Uhhh, Steve... you took my post a bit out of context. For the average user (and trust me, the average user is not computer inclined... I've dealt with so many...) a windows xp install, no matter how well secured and setup to begin with can easily be destroyed in months (sometimes weeks, in the case of my inquisitive father).

For the more experience/knowledgable user, XP can run quite stable for sometime. I havent had any problems with my XP install for 8 months now... oh, btw - a new fave site of mine: www.free-av.com

For desktop setups, suse 9.0 personal and redhat 8.0 were/are pretty decent. I didnt like suse personally, because I dislike the packaged browser and installing another browser is a bit of a pain. The average user couldnt handle it. Although, the suse install was quite easy, I am sure a trained monkey could do it :)

As for linux not conquering the desktop world due to bad marketing and lack of funds... well, I think the real killer for linux is that the vast majority of games can not be run on it. This kills the linux desktop market entirely, imho.

Calling linux nothing more then hacker porn is wayyyy off base though. The majority of webservers run some flavour of linux. The majority of universities run linux on their clusters and a large number of businesses utilise linux and mysql for database work.... and so on and so on.

And finding linux people is really easy actually. Just look for your local linux users group. They seem to be quite prolific.

Of course, I am a bit biased... less then 1% of our webservers run windows (just one windows box on my network!) :)

knoppix rocks btw. really like it... much nicer then my redhat 8 setup :)

Linux is replacing Unix, and there will be a user base for that for years into the future I think.

I do agree that it is possible to royally screw up an XP install within a very short period of time, although I'm not sure how relevant to the current discussion this is. I worked with one particular individual, who, without getting into specifics, was by his very nature less computer savvy than the least computer savvy among us, less so that even my mother. From a clean install of XP, it would take him about two or three weeks to get his system to the point that it would take about five minutes to load XP, and then error out. Eventually he managed to kill his net connection somehow. To make matters worse it was an early model E-machine with questionable components, and doing any sort of maintenance on one of those is a nightmare.

Actually I am going to disagree on that again, I rebuild my grandparents computer once a year weather it needs it or not.. and believe me it is a mess when I do it. BUT when they were running 98/me they would screw it up in less than a month. so XP is very lockable and the only people that get virus's are the ones that want them and can't be bothered to protect themselves :rolleyes:

anyways the hacker porn was a joke to get ya going hehe, but when I was installing networks (small ones for small companies) about 4 years ago now.. everyone wanted windows.. also at the same time the market evaluations were something like Microsoft 62% of the commercial server market but that I will admit could change day by day and surveys can easily be manipulated.

but I will restate that marketing and money was the big demise of Linux in the home arena.. here is why. money will let you develop at a faster rate and provide better support for your product, while marketing will show people that it is out there and hype the pros of that product. so once word gets out then software companies will see people are looking at this but looking for software for it.. so a new market opens and software companies get rich porting there software for Linux. as more software comes out the computer stores will start pushing it more and more as it becomes supportable. this was the exact same thing that killed OS2 warp and launched win95 into hystory, but a lot of you are to young to remember that :mrgreen:

Steve

Well, I think Linux is here to stay. I run a small dial-up Internet service and webhosting service with Linux for the past 10 years. But my day job is writing software for Windows. So I work with both OS's daily. However, I don't think Linux will penetrate the home market signifcantly anytime soon and I don't think corporations are willing to use Linux because it is too complex for the average desk worker and doesn't have the same amount of business software.

But Linux will stay because it will always have its niche like the Mac has its niche. The difference between Linux and OS/2 is that Linux is opensource and is a variant of Unix. There will always be people who prefer to use a free Unix than Windows and there will always be people who will contribute their time to write drivers for Linux (Something that OS/2 never had or never had much of). Windows, though has come a long way in the last 10 years as an Internet tool. It would have been extremely difficult to use Windows to run a dial-up Internet service or webserver 10 years ago. Today, it is extremely simple. The main thing stopping me from porting my Internet service over to Windows is the cost. Right now, running it in Linux is practically free for me. To run the same service in Windows would cost me quite a few thousand dollars in licenses. For most companies though, software licenses are not a big deal so Windows will continue to dominate on most desktops for a while there. For the home, I think most users will stay with Windows. I have a choice right now to use either OS for my HTPC but I am going with Windows even though I know Linux pretty well (and use ELM to read my daily Email). If I were to install or buy a new system for the average client of mine or a friend, I would not put Linux on there.

Sam, if you're doing webhosting then you're going to be familiar with PHP and MySQL. Correct me if i'm wrong, but is it not only possible to use these two languages on Apache servers, and if so, would you agree that the popularity of these two languages combined with the relative flexibility of Apache has given Linux a good card to add to its hand in the hosting arena?

One thing I find funny about working with PC's in anyway at all is that the average user suddenly thinks you must know everything about computers and be able to solve all their problems. Because of this, I have built and rebuilt many many many computers... for about six months I went on a RH8 kick, and I must have installed it a dozen times for friends and family since I could clean it up and lock it down to the point where the user couldn't do anything on the machine. And, I was even able to all the stuff people wanted (decent email program, decent browser, IM, openoffice, etc). So I thought it was pretty kickass.

I did have to switch most users back to windows xp cuz their son wanted to play games or they needed to install a stock market tracker program on their pc that was only supported by xp, and so on. I do have a few friends though, who have been running my RH8 setups for ages (god, I think it's almost been two years) and I have never received a phone call for computer help from them. And these are people I used to get calls from all the time (help, my the words on my screen are soo big I cant read a website <resolution changed>, my printer doesn't work <they installed a new one for some reason even though they didnt BUY a new one>, theres a purple monkey flying across my screen and talking to me! <banzai buddy was installed>...)

And I am a bit jealous - my grandma wont touch a pc.

Anyways, we've hijacked scales thread enough I think. :)

Hey Quinn.

I know you asked Sam this, but I also work in hosting and knew the answer...

Both PHP and MySQL can be run on windows.

http://www.php.net/downloads.php

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Wi...tallation.html

Although I have never done so myself.

*edit* you can also run apache on windows.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/windows.html