The accusation of over-zealous advocacy has been dealt with previously, in 2006 Dominic Humphries stated that the aims of the LinuxĬommunity are not desktop market-share or popularity, but in Linux being the best operating system that can be made for the community. Like many fundamentalists they are totally inflexible – waving a GNU as if it were handed down by God to Richard Stallman". If you think the Apple fanboys are completely barking, they are role models of sanity to the loudmouthed Open Sauce religious loonies who are out there.
Strohmeyer named the "fierce ideology of the open-source community at large" as being responsible, while Farrell stated "The biggest killer of putting penguin software on the desktop was the Linux community. Both laid the blame for this failure on the open source community. Both had praise for distributions, Strohmeyer saying "the best-known distribution, Ubuntu, has received high marks for usability from every major player in the technology press". īoth critics indicated that Linux did not fail on the desktop due to being "too geeky," "too hard to use," or "too obscure". Nick Farrell, writing for TechEye felt that the release of Windows Vista was a missed opportunity to grab significant market share.
PC World Executive Editor Robert Strohmeyer commented that although Linux has exceptional security and stability, as well as great performance and usability, the time for desktop Linux to succeed has been missed. Missed opportunitiesĭesktop Linux was criticized in late 2010 for having missed its opportunity to become a significant force in desktop computing. In his 2003 paper titled Improved Portability of Shared Libraries, he worried about the lack of a Windows Application Compatibility Group equivalent. James Donald from the Princeton University analyzed shared library concepts of several operation systems.
Raymond stated that the lack of usability in many open-source and Linux tools in his essay Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story is not from lack of manuals but from a lack of thought about the users' experience. In May 2009 Preston Gralla, contributing editor to, believed that Linux will never be important to desktop/notebook users, even though he felt it was simple and straightforward to use, but that its low usage is indicative of its low importance in the desktop market.Įric S. Some critics do not believe Linux will ever gain a large share in the desktop market. Linux has been criticized for a number of reasons, including lack of user-friendliness and having a high learning curve, being inadequate for desktop use, lacking support for exotic hardware, having a relatively small games library, lacking native versions of widely used applications and missing standardization in terms of GUI API.
He argues that Android is widely used because it comes pre-installed on new phones, and that Linux distributions would need to be bundled on new computers to gain market share.
Linus Torvalds has expressed that he intended the Linux kernel to be used in desktop operating systems.