Salocin

A hairline crack in the monopoly

As we all know, and lamented when had enough free time to give a damn, Microsoft Windows completely dominates the desktop computer market. The only company ever to give them the slightest cause for concern was Apple, and now that Microsoft Office is the de facto productivity software of choice on that platform also, the deluge of cash pouring into Redmond seemed set to continue for a few years yet.

For a long time, Linux was mooted to be the challenger waiting in the wings, and - when I had all that time I mentioned earlier - I went through the motions of installing it on some of the earlier computers I owned. Usually when I had just bought a new windows machine and I had little else to do with the old machine.

Installing Linux - in those days - involved some pretty hairy stuff. The comcept of a "distributed binary" was fairly rare, and installing software usually involved compiling it, which invariably resulted in missing libraries, the wrong type of compiler, incompatible software and a version of X-Windows that crashed out on a regular basis, assuming you were able to get it started in the first place.

Not so any more. The latest version of Linux comes on a free CD (which you can order online), is named using a word in a suitably trendy African language (it's called Ubuntu) and works straight out of the box. In fact, if you just want to see what it looks like (or fix your Windows installation when it won't boot) you can load the operating system from CD without installing it and get a feel for how it works.

It also comes with productivity software which, while it's not quite as easy to use as the Microsoft equivalents for those of us who have been weaned, trained and subjected to them for the past few years, is largely interoperable with Microsoft file formats, very similar to the Microsoft interface and very reliable overall.

Of course if being good was what was required to succeed, Windows - with it's constant crashes and endless configuration options - would never have succeeded in the first place. What you need is political clout and the ability to get yourself installed on PCs before they even ship.

Well, this appears to have happened. Linux is now a configuration option when you buy a Dell. I can confirm that this is a good option, I am currently typing this article on a Dell Latitude D410 running Ubuntu, which I picked because, having spent 250 poudns on a computer, I didn't then want to spend as much again on the software that made it useful - everything on Ubuntu has come for free, and it all works like a charm.

It also operates very happily with my home PC, a big iMac, since Macs run on Unix with a desktop overlay, and so the two computers were making like best friends within the day.

In fact, Ubuntu seems to have done away with many of the original problems I experienced with Linux - the software auto-detected my hardware and configured itself very quickly, the wireless card worked with only a little coaxing (although it refuses to work on certain networks, and I cannot for the life of me understand why) and OpenOffice Spreadsheet opened all my old excel files with barely a misformatted column.

For the first time, I find myself believing that - should Ubuntu continue to develop as it has so far - there may be a serious alternative to Microsoft productivity software, with definable advantages and a distinct price level. If I were in Redmond, I'd be smelling a change in the weather.

Posted by nlvp at May 2, 2007 04:39 PM