Saturday, August 16, 2008

Linux'd (again)


Very few people other than active developers are into linux and use it as their main OS. Even those who do use it occasionally do have the dual boot feature with Windows just so that some features are easier to use in Windows than Linux.

This is aversion to linux is also unfortunately something for which the development dept is to blame as well (atleast partially). One of the biggest things being video rendering related s/w. I did a lot of that during Diwali Night at Rolla, making those presentations for the show but haven't seen anything like Adobe Premiere,After Effects on linux (yet). Not to mention the loss of gaming since then too. Very few games are out there which are fully supported by Linux and those that do run do so on WINE(Win Emulator :P).

Dhake and myself were having a discussion yesterday on s-video capture through linux since that was one of the few things for which he still had a Win dual boot on his system. Finally after some poking around I suppose he got through to it and hopefully will now ditch Win totally :). Later when Alok (handy Linux quick ref guy) and myself were chatting about situations like these and he came up with a situation where one day if a couple of linux guys started a company then they would no doubt use Linux for everything. However the kicker is that today most companies (atleast all the application/service provider ones) do NOT use Linux.

This is mainly due to the fact that Linux is restricted to the techy guys rather than to the mainstream eg. Business Analysts, Sales, Marketing, QA, Conversion, Customer Service Rep, App Analyst, so on and so forth. Also until someone can effectively demonstrate that business can be as usual in Linux as in Windows the scenario will still never change. (and Microsoft will continue to reap their millions).

It may take time and patience to wade a bit through various Linux forums to come up with quick answers to even the most basic things but it definitely is worthwhile in the end. Unfortunately both time and patience is something that very very few people have today and the same translates to the corporate environment as well.

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