Linux Turns 17, Still Not Ready for the Masses
Yesterday marked Linux’s seventeenth birthday. While the open source OS hasn’t been available in useable form for nearly that long, the anniversary marks the day creator Linus Torvalds’ first announced that he was “working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers.”
As we all know that “minix-lookalike” eventually — with the help of thousands of other contributors — turned into the Linux kernel.
So far, 2008 has been a banner year for Linux. With the growth of the ultraportable PC, or “netbook,” market, Linux is now in the hands of many who would never have otherwise encountered it.
Unfortunately, for many of those people, Linux ends up being a disorienting and very different experience from that of the Windows OS they’re used to. In a recent interview with LapTop Mag, MSI’s Director of U.S. Sales Andy Tung says that return rates for Linux-based versions of MSI’s popular Wind netbook are four times higher than the Windows version.
People would love to pay $299 or $399 [for a netbook] but they don’t know what they get until they open the box. They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to. They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks.
Of course even Linux advocates are well aware of the OS’s shortcomings, so while Tung’s statistics may be some fairly damning evidence, his data isn’t really anything new. And the problem seems to be less of a specific problem with Linux and more a sign that old dogs aren’t the only ones who hate learning new tricks.
For its part, Tung says MSI is “working on some of the issues with the SUSE Linux and even continue to explore other flavors of Linux.” He goes on to add that MSI has also discussed using “Ubuntu with a Mac OS type of look and feel.”
Whatever Linux’s fate is the netbook market, one thing is for sure — seventeen years on and Linux continues to make inroads, even if those roads are still a bit bumpy.
Slashdot has more on Linux’s birthday.
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