Linux Not Ready For Main Stream

No Article : This is my opinion

There's been a lot of talk on the linux news sites lately about linux going main stream , Dell making certain promises, then that Dell has done this before and backed out.

Economically , Dell gets a lot of money from Microsoft and various security and office package companies. All those 30 day trials you see on your desk top on a new computer ? Those company's actually pay , hard cash , for that stuff to be loaded there, thus lowering the price of the computer. Since a Linux box would not have such things on it , it would actually cost more, meanwhile people are expecting it to cost less. That means $NOSALE$ for the company providing linux boxes.

Add to the fact that you cannot make money off of Linux, you cannot really sell something to a linux user it violates the copy right, and Linux has put itself in a niche. An important niche, and a niche I think has a good number of useful possibilities, but it's not going to be able to climb out.

Linux is a techies hobby operating system. And will remain so. You can't go main stream with it, there are too many installation problems with hardware. You could use it in an office , type memo's, spread sheets , run the file and mail servers , no problem (Print server is iffy , going to be a hard ware problem). But if you plan on writing software to sell , you gotta put those programmers on windows machines and give them windows compilers. Copyrigth restrictions force it.
Basically , Linux could be your main infrastructure, but it cannot be part of your value added stream. Any value you add to a linux product you can only give away you cannot sell, and thats not acceptable to most managers.
For private use Linux isn't exactly a game box, you will have to maintain either a second machine or a game box of some kind for that. But if you've ever had a hankering to run a server of some kind, either mail , message, chat , or even a game server (Never Winter Nights has a server version that runs on Linux they give away for free, of course if you want to actually PLAY the game , you need the windows client , which is not free...) Linux is the way to go.

For grama who just checks email and surfs a bit, grandson the computer tech has to set it up for her, and that ties you to visiting her once a week , if you're not prepared to do that get her a windows machine.

Linux is great for techies. But I deal with the average user all day long at work. Thats just not going to work out. Maybe... maybe one specific brand of linux, with one specific desk top, on one specific configuration of hardware with very very few options ... and a restore disk for when they mess it all up...maybe ...

but that would be asking a lot of them.