On Wed, Apr 11, 2001 at 08:41:09AM -0400, Kevin Stokes wrote: > I don't think it is. How many copies of Redhat, Suse and the others were > sold in the last two years? How many copies of Debian were downloaded by > newbies in the last two years? Total those up and call it N. > > Of those N, how many are running Linux today? I'll bet it is less than > N/10, and could be as low as N/100.
Or it could be as high as N * 10. Don't forget that linux fanatics tend to be just that: fanatics. In the last month, I've downloaded one Debian CD image, installed it on 4 boxes, kept one for myself, set up one as a server, and passed the other two on to people who know nothing about linux. By the end of the year (although the end of next year is more realistic), I intend to have used that same CD to set up somewhere around 100 more Debian boxes and place them in the hands of people who know little-to-nothing about computers. Those users who already have linux boxes have very little difficulty with them. IMO, part of the problem you're encountering is that _using_ linux isn't really any tougher than using windows, but you're looking for user-level documentation on admin-level tasks. I'll readily admit that it doesn't really exist - and I'm not sure that it should. Another message has commented on how useless the windows help system is for anything outside the average user experience. In other words, all that user-level documentation sucks if you try to get admin-level information out of it. This is essentially a manifestation of the rule I discovered when I first encountered Visual Basic: The vast majority of the time, putting effort into making a tool easy to use for a specific task makes it correspondingly more difficult to use for anything the designer didn't foresee. (I suppose the converse comes into play here also: A general-purpose tool (such as most *nix commands) tends to be more difficult to use.) > 1.) I assume most of the Linux community would like to see Linux be the > dominant OS in the world, and think it deserves this. Personally, I'm mainly concerned about being able to use linux (or something else unixy) myself. From there, it follows that I don't really care what the rest of the world uses. If I want others to let me choose my own OS, I should let them choose theirs also. -- That's not gibberish... It's Linux. - Byers, The Lone Gunmen Geek Code 3.1: GCS d? s+: a- C++ UL++$ P++>+++ L+++>++++ E- W--(++) N+ o+ !K w---$ O M- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t 5++ X+ R++ tv b+ DI++++ D G e* h+ r y+
