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Comment by forgottenpaswrd | Hacker News Reader

Please, don't send FUD here.

PCWorld is a magazine witch primary Ad buyer is Microsoft, this kind of magazines live from their ads(I have worked on printing presses), not for their customers paying the magazine.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

No, Linux is not dead, and you make the numbers totally up(1% market share). Linus is not going to be professional in the areas that commercial software makers only support Windows or Mac(games, CAD, CAE, publishing...) until they support Linux, but is the only OS in witch you have total control.

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If you would have read the first sentence in that article, you would've seen the author argues the contrary ... that Linux on the desktops is not dead.

On the other hand your point is totally useless.

     Linus is not going to be professional in the areas that 
     commercial software makers only support 
     Windows or Mac

NO SHIT ... unfortunately it is not going to happen soon. You know why?

Because Linux users don't pay for software, and proprietary software has some kind of stench attached (RMS says so).

E.g. Adobe tried to ship Flex Builder for Linux: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/

And I've been to one internal meeting in Adobe that discussed the viability of Linux. Users not paying for software was problem #1, but they still considered it viable because of recent trends (e.g. Dell / Walmart starting to sell Ubuntu / gOS computers).

Guess they backtracked on that decision based on consumer feedback.

perennial chicken/egg problem, but they 'chickened' out I guess (yeah, bad pun).

Would be interesting to know the final reason for killing it. At that time, I had a need for Flex Builder, and wanted it on Linux, and would have paid for it in a heartbeat. Others I know would have too. But we couldn't because it's not available.

I've paid for other software on Linux in the past (financial software, mostly) and got tired of waiting for the programs I wanted and needed to be available on Linux, so I jumped to a Mac. I'd been a rather late holdout, only jumping in late 2008, after about 8 years of trying to do only Linux on the desktop.

I guess there were never enough of us to make certain software profitable, or insanely profitable, which is perhaps what vendors like Adobe were after.

The problem with Linux is not the urban legend, that Linux users don't pay for software (just ask Varicad or MathWorks), for example).

For Adobe, the problem might be, that Linux users don't pay for subpar software. The Flex Builder is a perfect example - it feels foreign on Linux desktop. Would Mac users pay for software, that feels so foreign on Mac desktop? Of course not, so why do you expect Linux users to do?

> No, Linux is not dead, and you make the numbers totally up(1% market share)

How is the 1% number totally made up?

I don't think this has anything to do with Microsoft, they're simply almost 2 weeks late hopping on that band-wagon. Note: the argument is about Linux on the desktop, not Linux as a whole. Linux as a whole does well with adoption elsewhere(mobile, servers, super computing, routers?). I don't really know much about Linux on the desktop as it was never a dream for many of us who have better things to do and I don't think it was ever alive so I don't know how it can now be dead :)

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