As I’ve posted before, I run Ubuntu Linux on my aging laptop. It’s fast, stable, looks cool, and has a lot of good, free open-source software applications available. Furthermore, for an OS that’s supposedly for geeks (guilty), I spend remarkably little time “under the hood” tinkering with settings or tweaking it to run better. As Mac-fans are fond of saying about OSX, “it just works.”
There are downsides to running Linux on one’s primary machine, of course. This biggest downside is that very little commercial software runs natively on Linux. Gamers use Windows, and drive purchases of high-end processors and graphics cards. Offices run Windows for the almighty Microsoft Office suite. Creative types are often loyal to Macs, but most popular graphics, recording and video editing software is available for Windows as well as OSX.
Since people buy computers based on the software they need, very few people are buying computers with Linux installed from the get-go. Because nobody’s buying computers with Linux installed, companies aren’t spending time to port their programs over. And the cycle continues.
When netbooks began to rise in popularity, I thought Linux might actually start to pick-up some market share, since it makes sense to package a fast, lightweight OS with small laptops primarily intended for surfing the Web. Asus, Dell and HP all offer some flavor of Linux with their netbooks, but sales of Linux netbooks get crushed by sales of their more expensive Windows-packing siblings. The fact is, people are reluctant to use an unfamiliar OS, let alone one that won’t run their existing programs.
While Linux might be a bit of a bust on the desktop, there’s one area where it’s experiencing phenomenal growth and has the opportunity to become the dominant OS around the world: mobile phones.
The advances in power and user interface among mobile phones in the past five years has been astounding. Better hardware has made browsing the Web from a mobile device both useful and downright pleasant, a fact that isn’t lost outside the United States. Already 155 million Chinese are accessing the Web from their phones, and the number is rising.
While much of the mobile Web revolution was sparked by high-end smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone that run proprietary operating systems, heavy hitters in the mobile world are pinning their hopes and futures on Linux. Much of this is due to Google’s open source, Linux-based Android platform, which is being embraced by HTC, Motorola, Dell and Lenovo among others. Palm built their WebOS platform on Linux. Word came out today that even Nokia, who have traditionally included their Symbian OS on their phones, will now be building high-end smartphones running the Maemo platform, which as you might guess, is built on Linux.
For the foreseeable future, Apple and BlackBerry will continue to sell zillions of phones with proprietary operating systems. Every other manufacturer will have to decide whether they’ll devote the time and money to develop their own proprietary OS, shell out money to Microsoft and license Windows Mobile, build a platform based on Linux, or embrace a ready-made open source Linux-based mobile platform like Android.
For most hardware manufacturers, the latter two options will increasingly make more sense and enable them to produce advanced smartphones that compete with anything on the market.
In the next few years I bet that I’ll still have a difficult time finding someone who runs Linux on their home PC, but will routinely sit next to someone on the train browsing the Web from their Linux-based phone.
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