Can Vista hold off the Linux threat?

For a while now Windows has enjoyed pride of place on the PC desktop scene, pushing OSX into a tight (sub 5% share) corner, obliterating OS/2 and has successfully kept Linux at bay for a while now.  Windows XP has been like a monarch since it was launched, towering over all and stepping on the heads of the great pretenders.  Unfortunately, as great as Vista is it sure has been met with a lot of negative publicity and lukewarm praise.  Complaints about its European retail price, its high system requirements and the poor driver support have not helped its cause and may have opened a crack large enough for a rival to take a hold.

Linux

Linux has often been seen as a toy for "nerds" - you know, those guys with the thick glasses and pocket protectors who aren't very successful with women - and for the most part this has been true.  Linux is the coming together of the works of Linus Torvalds who was a student of the University of Helsinki and of Andrew S Tanenbaum who has created an educational operating system called Minix (apparently).  Linux in those days (1991) was largely text based and pretty unfriendly if you didn't know what you were doing, but because of its simplicity (in function, not operation!) it was very stable and very secure.  Linux is an "open source" operating system, which means the source code is freely available to anyone and everyone, allowing people to change whatever they want and compile their own version if they wanted to.  Windows is "closed source" meaning that you're unlikely to ever see the source code behind something like Office or Windows.

Still for nerds?

This is all very fascinating but I bet you're still wondering why it might be a threat aren't you?!  Well, the thing with Linux is that over the years a lot of effort has been put in to making it more friendly for the average user, with fancy graphical interface and a improvements to its accessibility and language support.  There are quite a few variations on the Linux theme and each has its own style and subtle improvements, but by and large they're pretty similar "under the hood".  By far the most friendly variation to date is called Ubuntu and the Ubuntu team has recently put out version 7.04 intriguingly nicknamed Fiesty Fawn and its a pretty good reason for Microsoft to be scared.

Fiesty Fawn?

The latest incarnation of Ubuntu is supposed to be the most complete version yet and will shortly be finding its way onto Dell PC's that you and I can buy.  It'll allow you to do pretty much everything you can do on Windows for a fraction of the cost (umm, free - you can download Ubuntu for free..).  It comes with OpenOffice, which will allow you to do similar things to Microsoft Office, it is pretty secure thanks to its Unix-like design and Linux is so stable it is finding it's way into supercomputers and mission-critical hardware everywhere. 

The threat

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the cards are stacking against it.  Linux has Vista up against the ropes when it comes to price, stability, system requirements and security and even Government departments such as the French National Assembly are catching on and switching to Linux and other open source applications. 

Gaming

PC gaming is the one place where Microsoft are difficult to beat.  Whilst there are games for linux, most of the big and popular games are written for Windows only and getting a game running on Windows is incredibly easy.  ID Software, the company behind the Quake and Doom games have been advocates of open source for a while so linux versions of their games are available. There are programs out there such as WINE that will let you run Windows games on linux though. In theory, the lower resource demands that most linux distributions make on your system could make it an ideal gaming platform - if your system is spending more resources on the game and less keeping the system running it can only be a good thing. 

The reality

When I tried to install Ubuntu 7.04 on my system the installation went surprisingly smooth - you boot into it by using a "live CD" and then click on an icon to install it to your hard disk.  It'll then set your drive up with various partitions and install its own bootloader called GRUB.  Unfortunately, GRUB deleted my Vista bootloader and then failed to find the Ubuntu installation that it had just installed.  Not a good start.  After reinstalling Vista I decided to try it as a "virtual machine" using VMware Server and that was a bit more successful.  This isn't quite as good as a genuine install but its enough to get a feel for the system. 

In use you initially think  - wow, its amazing what you can get for nothing these days as it does look and feel like a strange Windows installation - but after a few hours you start to see the cracks, you get frustrated because things aren't as easy to do on linux as they are in Windows and it just feels a bit too 1998.  Most of the advanced functionality is only available through a command prompt, rather like a command prompt in Vista (yes, its still there) and indeed some of the commands are very similar to the ones people used back when Windows ran as a program on DOS nearly 10 years ago.  It feels a bit like an "in joke" that some people are having that you're not included in - there are lots of commands that you'll have to hunt around the internet for and a select bunch of users who seem to forget that you are new to linux and don't always understand what they're talking about when they say "paste this bunch of text into a text file and make it an executable" Uh? Pardon?  It definitely feels like a work-in-progress.  There are some enterprising developers out there who've come up with a utility called Beryl that'll give you Vista-like graphics on your desktop, but the installation procedure is not for the faint of heart.

Gripes aside, if you manage to learn how to use it, linux could be a perfectly serviceable operating system with a very attractive price (£0.00), a variety of different distributions and low resource demands.  For your average user it isn't "there" yet.  It is still very tricky to use and it won't do everything you want it to without a fight and some bizarre code you've found on the internet, but once they get over that and if the linux community finally joins together to make one great OS rather than hundreds of average ones, Microsoft could be in trouble.

A lesson?

After reading review after review of Vista the main complaints seem to focus around the system requirements and to be honest, they are pretty high in Vista and its sometimes hard to see why.  Despite advances in CPU design and a boatload of cheap RAM, system requirements continue to escalate.  We should have a lightning fast desktop by now thanks to dual and quad core CPU's and RAM that we now measure in gigabytes, yet things are no quicker than they were when the 486 was the premier CPU.  Back then, 4 megabytes of RAM was enough to run Windows 3.1, Word 2, Excel 4 and the original Doom without any real headaches.  I had a 66mhz CPU back then so 2.6ghz should be so quick it should almost be pre-emptive, but in terms of what an OS should do - install, launch and run programs - there is barely any difference.