Lee Gomes over at the Wall Street Journal has written a piece entitled “How Far Behind Is Linux?”

Nice title, but, how far behind what, precisely?

Let’s have a look at what he says.

He starts off with;

If some of Linus Torvalds’s own family members back in Finland don’t use Linux, what hope is there for the rest of us?

To which my retort would be “They don’t? So what? That’s their choice. And if I were you I’d not worry about the rest of us too much either, you’re liable to go to an early grave if you worry that much!”

Even though Linux is easier than ever to use, the dream of many Linux buffs of it replacing Windows as the desktop mainstay is, at best, stalled, and at worst, fading.

While exact numbers are hard to come by, one survey has desktop Linux users barely scraping a single percentage point of the market share.

How can you assert the first sentence then say that exact numbers are difficult to come by? Was the survey he referred to this one by any chance? It is, in fact quite difficult to ascertain just how many people do use Linux as their main desktop. I know for sure that I do, and my wife does as well. Even my 5 year old son uses Linux (and he’s extremely computer literate even at that young age - amazes me every time I see him operate the laptop). A survey will only produce a fraction of the real numbers anyway - that’s the nature of surveys - you only get the answers from those willing to participate in the survey, then you have to extrapolate what you think are likely figures from those results. This happens every time when there’s an election, for example, and it’s no different with that survey either. To assert that the dream of many Linux buffs as he calls them of Linux replacing Windows is stalling or fading, based on that survey, suggests to me that he hasn’t entirely thought his reasoning through. By the way, that survey states that the number of people who participated in the survey has more than doubled since the same date last year. Remember, there will be more people who did not participate in that survey than those who did.

Onwards we bravely go…

Dell started installing Linux earlier in the year after a suggestion box on its Web site drew a deluge of requests for the system. Dell doesn’t say how many Linux PCs it ships, but one survey puts it at a tiny fraction of total units.

Yes again, of course one survey would put it at a fraction of total units… Dell only recently began to sell machines with Ubuntu pre-installed on a small subset of their machines! The rest of course are already established as being sold with Windows on them.

Ubuntu’s claim to fame is that its developers have bundled not just Linux, but a shelf full of other important programs, such as Web browsers and word processors, into a single easy-to-install package.

This is not a “claim to fame”. This, Mr Gomes, is what is commonly known as a “distribution of Linux”, or a “Linux Distribution”, and this is typical of many, many other Distributions (Red Hat, Fedora, SuSe, Debian [Ubuntu is based from Debian, incidentally], to name but a few). Ubuntu and all these other companies and groups merely package - bundle, if you like - other software along with the core Linux kernel and associated functional utilities - for the convenience of the user of that distribution. The user has the choice to install or not install any of the software available to them on that distribution.

Once on your computer, it looks and acts much as Windows does. What’s more, Ubuntu updates itself every six months and notifies you if security updates are needed in the interim.

My emphasis added. If by “looks and acts much as Windows does” you mean there’s a graphical user interface, complete with mouse pointer, menus, and programs running in a windowed environment, then yes that’s very true. The same could be said for a Macintosh desktop, or a Solaris desktop. Oh, and your Ubuntu installation doesn’t “update itself every six months” either. The company, Ubuntu, updates its distribution every six months, and the user of the distribution has the choice of updating that on their machine or not.

As for “notifies you if security updates are needed in the interim”, isn’t that a good thing? Let’s see…

That last feature, incidentally, should disabuse an actual Ubuntu user of the notion that a non-Windows operating systems is security utopia, where hackers are powerless and children are all above average. I recently installed the April version of Ubuntu on my home machine and promptly was informed that more than 50 security patches to problems discovered in the interim awaited my downloading. Who does Ubuntu think it is? Windows?

If you think a Linux distribution doesn’t have any security issues involved with it then you are very, very naive and your argument is also a straw man, considering what you said above that paragraph. Here’s a newsflash : Software written by human beings will more than likely have flaws in it, seeing that human beings aren’t perfect. If humans aren’t perfect then the software written by humans won’t be perfect either. The difference between a Linux distribution and Windows is that when security bugs are discovered in software running under the Linux kernel - or even for that matter in the Linux kernel itself - the time taken for a patch to be written and made available to solve that software bug can be as little as a few hours. Compare that with Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesday” - and that’s with bugs that they are prepared to disclose. Who knows just how many more security issues there are in Microsoft’s closed, secret sauce (or source), world?

And isn’t it rather nice to know that security issues are not only being discovered but are also being dealt with? Would you rather have no fixes to the security issues? What you’re writing, Mr Gomes, just plain doesn’t make any sense.

Developers have created a mode that lets you experiment with the software without permanently installing it on your PC. You also can load Ubuntu into its own hard-disk partition using a built-in, dual-boot program — although if you have to ask what that means, you probably shouldn’t try it.

This “mode” is merely that you boot into an Ubuntu “Live System” using the Ubuntu DVD. This presents you with an Ubuntu desktop running on your PC which you can try out before deciding to install it permanently on your hard disk or not. “You also can load Ubuntu into its own hard-disk partition using a built-in, dual-boot program” simply means “after you install Ubuntu on your PC you get a boot menu with which you can choose whether to boot into Windows or into Ubuntu” - the act of installing Ubuntu (or a lot of other Linux distributions) doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to lose your Windows installation. Both can co-exist on the same machine.

As for

although if you have to ask what that means, you probably shouldn’t try it.

- I might say “if you have to ask, perhaps you should read up on what that means then try it”.

Oh, and lastly, did you actually write anything which answered the title of your article, “How far behind is Linux?” ?