Computer hardware is constantly getting  better. Intel and AMD are constantly trying to have the better, faster, cheaper chips. Graphics cards achieve higher benchmarks and lower price points every month. 2GB, or even 4GB, of RAM is becoming commonplace. Everything is getting faster and costing less at the same time and this will probably remain true forever. Microsoft and most Linux distributions view these same hardware improvements differently, though.

When Vista came out, one of the big complaints about it was that is was so resource demanding. Although perhaps not quite as extreme as with Vista, it seems quite reasonable to expect that with each new release of Windows, you will need a slightly, or perhaps not so slightly, better, faster computer than before.

This is not at all true of Linux. Phoronix recently published benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 7.10 (the current version) to Ubuntu 8.04 Beta (the beta of the version that will be out very soon.) What did they find? Ubuntu 8.04 is only very slightly slower than Ubuntu 7.10. Even more impressive, when the did comparisons with even earlier versions, 7.10 had actually improved on former versions.

What all this means is that Windows is becoming more and more resource reliant while Linux essentially maintains its requirements. Microsoft is already seeing the effects of their sloppiness in bad reviews of Vista and having to extend XP’s life, but unless they change soon, they will see it even more, and pay for it too.

In the future, it seems likely that a computer with Windows will cost far more than a computer with Linux, not because of the price of the operating system (since hardware manufacturers are constantly pretending Windows is free, when in reality it is not) but because the hardware required to run Windows is so much more expensive than the hardware required to run Linux.

Returning to the present, Linux is already well on its way to removing all the road blocks to switching. Even when there are no road blocks left, though, Linux will still not win mainstream adoption, until it gets a simple reason to use it: it’s cheaper.

Of course, Linux is cheaper right now. It’s free, while Windows costs hundreds of dollars. Well, as you probably know, most places like Dell get it for much less than that. I don’t think anyone knows for sure (and it almost undoubtedly varies for deal to deal), but a safe guess would be that places like Dell get Windows for around $40 (just a guess). In addition, we repeatedly see cases of an identical Windows and Linux machine costing exactly the same price. It is not fair to give Windows an advantage like that, but it seems to be the reality. No longer will it even matter, though, when a Linux machine costs so much less than a Windows machine, just because of the hardware.

Just by continuing to use minimal resources, Linux is constantly becoming a more and more attractive option, and eventually this may be the single most important factor in winning Linux’s mainstream adoption.

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