[Tfug] Hate to say I told you so..

[r-lists at studiosprocket.com]

> On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 7:25 PM, Bexley Hall <bexley401 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> If it does what you need it to do, then it's "right" for you.
>> As soon as it *stops* serving your needs, drop it and move on...
>
> That's true.. to each his own. At least with open source the
> "collective mass" can benefit, and there are some interesting projects
> going on (Haiku, ReactOS, heck, even AmigaOS 4.1 was just released -
> not FOSS but still... wow)

And this is the reason I've gone back to my Mac after a month or so
flirtation with Ubuntu at home.

My Mac plays every DVD I've thrown at it. Ubuntu fails on the first one --
a Disney DVD, of all things. VLC didn't make it to the menu. (I
sympathize: I hate those trailers.) Mplayer doesn't have a UI yet. XBMC
has a cryptic UI, but once you get past that (average: three days) and
play the DVD, you get to the menus, and it locks the entire machine.

For music, I have iTunes on the Mac. On Ubuntu, there's Songbird. Okay, so
I go to rip a CD...

...and you can't.

I'm perfectly capable of running in such adverse conditions. I'd use
mplayer for DVDs. I'd rip CDs elsewhere and import them into Songbird.
Heck, I might even write a script for it. But I don't exist in a vacuum. I
have family to consider. If it's going to work, it has to work for
*everyone*. Mac does, Ubuntu doesn't. Simple as that.

So there's my home angle.

Linux Workstations, on the other hand, are very different animals, and
they're all but invisible to usage metrics based on the browser user
agent, because the browser is 64-bit, so the plugins aren't available, so
people don't use it. They'll use a Windows box running Firefox, or maybe a
VM.

I wonder by how much Linux workstations usage has risen. It might be worth
asking Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical how many support licenses they've
sold this year. Being annual, they'd be an accurate metric. Then ask the
CentOS and OpenSuSE folks about their figures. Estimate Ubuntu's usage in
industry, using means I can't imagine right now.

User agent strings are notoriously suspect metrics -- they only measure
machines that connect to the internet, for one thing. I know for a fact
that many, many seats of RHEL are in use in classified labs across the
globe.

And then, with the entire education system of some countries running on
Linux, you have to wonder at the accuracy of the user agent figures in
question.

To sum up: BS.

R.