In my previous article I countered some points made by Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal.

Every day I seem to read some article on-line which has some sentiment to the effect of “Linux is behind Windows on the desktop”, or, “Is Linux ready for the desktop?” , or “Linux isn’t ready for the desktop!”.

There are a number of reasons why Linux doesn’t have the desktop penetration which Windows currently enjoys. But let’s start with the main, number one reason;

Microsoft.

You only have to do some research to see why this is the case. For years - decades even - Microsoft was the only company who had its operating system included with a new PC. This made Microsoft absolute truckloads of cash on the one hand, and eventually turned it into a monster-sized monopoly on the other.

Because it was a monopoly, it had the power to bully, pressurise, and basically control what PC makers put on the hard drives of the machines they were making and selling.

This article from the New York Times dated 29th March 1999 gives a great insight into just how much power Microsoft had over the PC makers; here’s some choice quotes from that article, which covered the Microsoft Anti-Trust trial;

The software maker, they say, must be willing to open up its pricing and marketing contracts with the manufacturers in ways that fundamentally alter its relationship with these producers of personal computers. The current relationship too often leaves the manufacturers, a Government official said, in the position of being ”captive distributors for Microsoft software and the high-tech equivalent of indentured servants.”

Indentured servants!

Intel Vice President Steven McGeady testified Monday afternoon against his company’s most important business partner, accusing Microsoft of denying consumers a host of new technologies through iron-fisted control of its PC operating system monopoly.

In the long run, he said, Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) hopes to “embrace, extend and extinguish” competition by substituting the company’s proprietary software for the public-domain, open technologies that have driven the frenetic growth of the Internet.

ZDNet, 9th November 1998 .

Embrace, extend, extinguish. And note that it was “public domain, open technologies” that had driven the frenetic growth of the Internet”, just in case any of you thought that it was Microsoft.

There were many, many methods which Microsoft employed to ensure that its dominant position remained supreme. A good summary of these can be found here.

As you can see, Microsoft makes it very, VERY difficult for any other operating system other than Windows to gain any sort of foothold on the PC ladder. Their attitude is “if it’s not Windows, it’s not allowed. If it’s not Microsoft, it can’t be allowed to progress”, and Linux the kernel, and the distributions and other free and open source software that orbits around Linux (and *BSD, and others) are most certainly NOT Microsoft.

Windows had a head start on Linux on the desktop. Windows version 1.0 was released on November 20th, 1985 - a full 6 years before Linus Torvalds announced Linux to the world in 1991:

Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Local: Mon, Aug 26 1991 5:57 am
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Hello everybody out there using minix -I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things). I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

PS. Yes - it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.

By then, Windows version 3.0 was already released, and was the first version of Windows to be pre-installed in new PC’s bought by consumers. And the Linux kernel was only just being created.

This Wikipedia article provides a good background history of the first Linux Distributions available. Slackware is the oldest Distribution, released in 1993, still under development and available today. And by 1993, Microsoft was already in its dominant, monopoly position.

As you can see, Linux is still a newcomer in terms of the desktop market. The very fact that you can now purchase new Dell PC’s with Ubuntu on it today - despite all the Microsoft shenanigans, despite all the barriers that have been put in its place, despite the SCO nonsense - is, in my mind, an amazing thing.

Comparatively speaking, desktop Linux distributions, because they only started appearing about a decade after the first Windows “distributions” if I may call them that, are automatically “behind” the Windows monopoly and ubiquity.

But with each and every new release of a Linux Distribution - Ubuntu for example - brings enhancements and improvements to the user’s desktop experience. The progress is phenomenal, and all these articles you see about whether or not Linux is good enough for the desktop, that it’s “behind” Windows, etcetera, I simply wish the authors would do a little bit of research into the history of both Linux (the kernel and the distributions) and Windows, and engage brain before putting fingers to keyboard.