Jack Whalen, of TechRepublic, blogs 10 reasons why Linux will triumph over Windows. Most of them are pretty good in my humble opinion, but I'm left wondering what the nature of the 'triumph" will be.I ponder that point because more and more I find myself computing in "the cloud". My first choice for word processing and spreadshets is now Google Docs. I use Gmail for all my Internet email. My video comes mainly from YouTube and conventional shows are often via bittorrent rather than wait a year or three (if!) to see them where I live. For work, over the past 18 months, Google has more than proven itself to me through two campaigns involving dispersed teams of volunters. Google Docs doesn't care what your OS is as long as you have an adequate web browser.
My Apple iPod Touch is now my favourite portable computing device. Waaay sub-netbook! It provides ready, easy access to all the most important stuff the Cloud has to offer, either as-delivered or via downloadable applications that extend its function and capability. If it could cut and paste it would be perfect...and even there, there are work-arounds already. I think that soon there will be many such devices running a variety of operating systems: Linux, Android...whatever.
It probably won't matter.
Absolutely there will still be a big market for conventional PCs in roles like gaming and multimedia and as application and data servers, and for systems in environments where poor connectivity renders the Cloud too diffcult to employ for large amounts of data.
But the computing world is steadily creeping toward the kind of system that fits easily in your shirt or hip pocket....and the OS that devices run won't be of much concern to anyone. Most of the OSes will be open platforms in order to build the kind of ecology that will deliver choice, innovation and quality.
In that sense, the Cloud will likely be based on Open Source software of one ind or another....so in that sense, yeah, linux will be kicking kick ass, in spirit, as the greatest forerunner of the re-assertion of community and sharing for the benefit of all people in a given community....like human society usually was (technologically) for millenia prior to the stifling confinement - even ownership - of knowledge in 'closed' sysems of all kinds from single vendors. If your neighbour made a better bone fish hook, he probably showed his family and his neighbours how to make it, too. That is how it should be. Thanks to Open Source.....that is how it is becoming once again - at least in the world of the Cloud.
'Linux beats Windows' is a metaphor for community trumping monopoly.
