Bryan Lunduke Explains Why Linux Sucks in 2020
'Roblimo once called it "a tradition, not just a speech" -- Bryan Lunduke's annual "Linux Sucks" presentations at various Linux conferences. But before you get too upset, in his 2014 interview with Slashdot Lunduke admitted "I love Linux, I have made my whole life around Linux. I work for Linux companies. I write for Linux magazines, but it really blows..."
This year he's releasing a special YouTube version of Linux Sucks 2020, the first time Lunduke has attempted the talk without a live audience, "And it feels really wicked weird." But he's still trying to get a rise out of his audience. "Follow me on this into Journey Into Graphs and Numbers Land," Lunduke says playfully, pulling up one of his 160 x 90 pixel slides showing current market share for Windows, Mac, and then Linux "You might notice that some platforms have a higher market share than Linux does," he says with a laugh, describing one slide showing Linux as "scooping up the bottom of the barrel at 1.6%..."
"But here's the thing. These numbers have been either consistent, or for Linux, slowly dropping." And then he puts up a graph showing the number of searches for Linux. "If you look back at 2004 -- the year 2004, 16 years ago -- that was the high point in interest in searching for the word Linux (or Linux plus other things). 2006 it was about half that -- so about two years later it had dropped down to about half. Here in 2020 it is so low, not only does it not fill up the first bar of pixels there, it's like only three pixels in. That doesn't happen -- that sort of decline does not happen -- unless the platform sucks. That's just the truth of the matter. That's just how it goes, right?"'
-- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/06/07/1941256
Cheers, Peter
On Mon, Jun 08, 2020 at 08:42:00AM +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote:
his 160 x 90 pixel slides showing current market share for Windows, Mac, and then Linux "You might notice that some platforms have a higher market share than Linux does," he says with a laugh, describing one slide showing Linux as "scooping up the bottom of the barrel at 1.6%..."
It amazes me how people are so focussed on the Desktop market, but completely ignore the very much larger embedded devices market and the possibly much smaller, but nevertheless very important, server market, where Linux dominates, when making these pronouncements of why Linux sucks or is doomed.
(It would be interesting to see some numbers for these other markets and I would be extremely surprised if it did not show Linux in a very healthy state.)
Cheers, Michael.
On 6/9/20 9:05 AM, Michael Cree wrote:
On Mon, Jun 08, 2020 at 08:42:00AM +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote:
his 160 x 90 pixel slides showing current market share for Windows, Mac, and then Linux "You might notice that some platforms have a higher market share than Linux does," he says with a laugh, describing one slide showing Linux as "scooping up the bottom of the barrel at 1.6%..."
It amazes me how people are so focussed on the Desktop market, but completely ignore the very much larger embedded devices market and the possibly much smaller, but nevertheless very important, server market, where Linux dominates, when making these pronouncements of why Linux sucks or is doomed.
(It would be interesting to see some numbers for these other markets and I would be extremely surprised if it did not show Linux in a very healthy state.)
Cheers, Michael.
I agree. It surprises me that with the rise of the Raspberry Pi series there hasn't been a spike in "linux" searches since 2012. Also, if you are interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence programming, Linux is really the way to go.
I love this series of talks by Bryan. I think a lot of subjects could use an "X Sucks" talk where issues can be presented in an open and low-stakes manner.
On Mon, 8 Jun 2020 08:42:00 +1200, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'"But here's the thing. These numbers have been either consistent, or for Linux, slowly dropping."'
On the one hand, there are these numbers from sampling agencies of somewhat dubious methodology. On the other hand, look at how a large, powerful corporation like Microsoft is behaving. Remember, Microsoft never does anything out of the goodness of its heart. So why did it introduce WSL? Why work so hard on improving command-line facilities on Windows? Why bother to create a package manager for Windows?
In short, why is it trying so hard to turn Windows into Linux?
participants (4)
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Aaron -
Lawrence D'Oliveiro -
Michael Cree -
Peter Reutemann