Death of Linux Desktops

There is sad news from the USA: 95% of netbooks (ie the likes of the Asus EeePC, the Dell Mini etc) are being now supplied with Windows XP rather than Linux pre-installed. Why?  Cos' the Americans don't like Linux; the number of returns spoke for itself, they hated Linux...or maybe just the variants they were exposed to... so, like the venerable Terminator itself, XP is back*.

Only 12 months ago the majority of netbooks were sporting 'snazzy' Linux OSes and enjoying their price advantage. Better still, Windows Vista simply did not work on anything other than supercomputers and Microsoft had officially deprecated XP, hoping to force punters into upgrading to the most unpopular OS of all time.

The Linux desktop revolution was under way

We now know what happened in the US, it's all over, but wait!..here comes the new smaller, greener, lighter Smartbooks. These use Linux on their teeny ARM-Risc platforms ...the Linux desktop revolution is under way! Or then again, it is until the platform proves to be popular, if so..then hello Windows XP_lite.

The point is, and this has been said before, open source models of development are so effective that herein lays all innovation. But the openness of both the code and the methodology means that every Tom, Dick and Harry proprietarist gets to read and study them.

Moreover, rich clever Tom, Dick and Harrys then create much the same thing with closed patented code plus the all-important feature - good marketing.

If you are Microsoft it does not pay to innovate, in fact, taking risks is senseless which is why they don't do it very often and when they do it goes horribly wrong.

Why not, simply play copy-cat and whichever party it is that you are at, pass yourself off as the host! It works, after all, despite even the best efforts of such erudite authors  as Dan Brown most Americans still believe Bill Gates invented the Internet, such is the power of good marketing.

It follows that logically all desktops of the dystopian future will be Windows XP* unless...

Linux licks its wounds and bides its time

This is where it gets interesting, the very model that prevents Linux from beating Windows also means that the little critters are almost impossible to drive to extinction. They get into all sorts of nooks and crannies. For example, I have in my geeky inventory a new Asus VideoPhone, a Sony E-reader, an Asus EeeBox PC and a TomTom. All four have are supplied with embedded Linux OSes.

It reminds me of the Herpes virus. Chase it down with antivirals and it goes and hides in nerve cells where you can't get to it. It'll be back don't worry! I don't speak from personal experience of course, but in my capacity as a PhD in bio-chemistry:)

So, having flirted with the biological theme it is fun but not frivolous to extend it to explore how the mighty XP desktop can be defeated.

Mass Extinction (of XP)

Mass extinctions occur regularly in nature. This generally happens in three ways - genocide, change of climate, and disease.

Trumping them all of course is an Act of God which embraces all three (eg smiting, floods, and plagues of frogs). Just for the sake of the article I will not invoke apocalypse at the hands of a God that just loves Open Source Software but I suspect if there were one, he/she would.

So which of the three concerns us most?

Genocide can be ruled out. It involves an imbalance of power in which the superior pursues their advantage to eliminate the other completely. I can't see that happening on Linux's side. On the other hand, in the past, in the proprietary software world, Microsoft's genocidal proclivities have led to a few mini-extinctions.

Climate Change, it did for the dinosaurs et al, but unless something dramatic happens to the climate regarding attitudes to software it is not a front runner for XP extinction. Mind you, the public's attitude to bankers and latterly politicians changed pretty suddenly and dramatically so don't rule it out.

Disease. This is my favourite candidate for 'doing for' XP. In Nature, wipe-outs become more likely the more homogeneous is the population. Once the bugs get a genetic key to your make up, whatever it may turn out to be, one disease will wipe out the lot. This is of course why agro-biologists are so jumpy, they know how mono-clonal are the cereal crops, one bug could take out the lot.

So the scene is set; we have a world populated effectively by one OS which changes only very slowly and is already attacked by a plethora of viruses and worms. The game gets more dangerous each month as it becomes easier to create infectious agents and propagate them. Moreover the cracker's knowledge-base of the venerable host code increases steadily. This is too one sided to be a stable situation.

MS know this only too well; a Windows 2000 network is all but a sitting duck and as the crackers fully explore the DNA of XP it will go the same way. This explains the urgency to create Windows 7 (XP 2010), it's nothing to do with features, or even revenue, it's to do with survival. Unfortunately, how do you persuade the legacy XP users to upgrade without giving the game away?

Sometime sooner rather than later the inevitable will happen, a cross between the super-infectious bird-flu and the latent slow burn AIDS will find cyber-form... and that will be the...................................

Post Apocalypse

Scurrying amongst the still-smouldering hulks are the little Linuxes. At last their time has come. Ubuntu staggers into the light scenting a role as top predator, at last all that money has paid off! Together they will change the climate and free, open source software will rule the planet in an explosion of diversity.

The dinosaurs will fade into memory, it will be a long time before the proprietarists come back.

* I say XP because it is dawning even on Microsoft that XP is perceived as THE loved and trusted desktop. Vista bombed because although it was really really necessary to move to a potentially more secure OS they thought that features would sell (Apple have a lot to answer for). From now on I suspect everything from stripped-out OSes on Smartbooks to behemoths will be called XP..something. Windows 7 will be XP 2010.