Polishlinux.org (referring to the country, not a high level of shine) publishes “Ubuntu Linux vs Windows Vista: The Desktop Battle.”

Author Borys Musielak begins, “It may be a brave opinion but I predict that Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista are going to be the two operating systems that will take over the largest chunk of the desktop OS market during the next couple of years.”

I guess the brave part of the prediction is that Vista will get any significant adoption! (If not for OEM preinstallations, Vista would be gone already.)

Poland is quickly becoming a software powerhouse, and open source is very strong there (it has one of the highest rates of Firefox usage in Europe and the entire world, at over 41% market share), so I am sure Musielak’s prediction is correct for his local market, and many others around the world.

In terms of user interface, Musielak puts the two systems on equal footing, which means that one of Linux’ longstanding shortcomings is gone. In terms of adding software, Ubuntu wins because of its Synaptic Package Manager. The author wonders why there’s no package manager for Windows. As do I.

Hardware support, robustness, flexibility and advanced features were all compared, and in the end, the author prefers Ubuntu by a statistically-significant margin.

Without its special OEM relationships, Windows would be crashing and burning right now, just like IE in Europe. Even with this huge advantage, its dominance is eroding in a process that will accelerate faster and faster.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 1:56 pm and is filed under GNU/Linux, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.