11.18.09
Gemini version available ♊︎Why GNU/Linux Has Already Won
Edited in response to a similar figure with
inversed shares from Digg (click to enlarge)
Summary: Where technical merits are considered rather than marketing and consumerism, GNU/Linux crushes the competition and continues to gain
OUR constant stream of daily news/links hopefully demonstrates that Linux is taking over the embedded/devices market. Another market where GNU/Linux has great power is one of the most luxurious ones and although it involves proprietary software higher up the layers, it still helps justify heavy development on Linux and accompanying parts, GCC included.
Glyn Moody offers this perspective on the latest numbers from TOP500.
Yes, as this shows, GNU/Linux is just as dominant in the supercomputing world as Windows is on PCs. However, unlike Windows on the desktop, which is slowly losing market share (not much, but a little), GNU/Linux is actually *gaining*: six months ago it had 88.60%. Windows, by contrast, remains stuck at a rather pathetic 1% – that’s just five machines in the top 500.
GNU/Linux also rules the most powerful machine.
Poor Apple and Microsoft are nowhere in sight. How come?
Here is a new article that touches on the subject:
Lack of Innovation a Commonality for Microsoft, Apple
[...]
Where did Windows come from? Put very simply, Bill Gates couldn’t be bothered to write his own operating system for the IBM PC, so he bought the rights to QDOS from Seattle Computer Products instead. Then he got the idea for Windows from Apple, and Microsoft’s latest innovation is, apparently, the 20 year old sudo concept.
[...]
It’s no surprise then that of the world’s most powerful computers included in the latest Top 500 Supercomputing list, just under 90 percent run Linux. The number of Windows and OS X machines in the list can be counted on one hand.
To make matters worse, Apple hardware is once again shown to be inferior to some of the ‘commodity’ options GNU/Linux runs on.
Macs not all that for reliability
[...]
A survey of 30,000 laptops has found one in three machines die within three years and netbooks do even worse, suffering 20 per cent more hardware failures than larger laptop machines.
This agrees with other such studies from 2009.
How about this new survey about Microsoft hardware?
CNET UK’s games console reliability survey: 60 per cent of Xbox 360s have broken
[...]
Sixty per cent of Xbox 360s have kicked the red-ringed bucket, compared to 16 per cent of PS3s and just 6 per cent of Wiis, according to our survey on the reliability of games consoles in the UK.
A recent survey and other such surveys agree with these numbers. Apple and Microsoft just cannot produce decent hardware, let alone an operating system that’s competitive where bare metal — not sugar coating and marketing — truly matters. █
Click image for full-sized version
ᶃ Gemini Space
This post is also available in 
Content is available under CC-BY-SA
stonebit said,
November 18, 2009 at 11:02 pm
I love that Mono is the butt.
Yuhong Bao said,
November 19, 2009 at 1:34 am
[quote]Apple and Microsoft just cannot produce decent hardware[/quote]
Apple can produce decent design, but Microsoft can’t do even that.
Needs Sunlight said,
November 20, 2009 at 3:10 am
The pie chart is a bit misleading. In some universes there might be a place where MS has a small slice of the supercomputing pie, but in this universe ‘other’ includes all systems that are not windows.
You’ll see that with MTAs, Just because Sendmail is down to 65% doesn’t mean that Bill some how scored 35%. Postfix and Exim are the defaults on most server systems…
Also, count services versus hardware units. Go to the server room of an MS shop and count. You’ll find, with only rare exception, that attempts to run services over MS products end up having a worse than 1:1 hardware:service ratio. At 250W and up per box, that’s a lot of money wasted.