If you missed the first part or the second part, here is a quick summary. Otherwise, just skip this part.

In this series of articles, I will discuss broad groups of computer users, the ties they have to existing platforms, and the potential attractions of Linux to them. In the first part, I covered two types of home users and argued that neither type cares much about the advantages and disadvantages of different operating systems and, therefore, home users are not a promising market for Linux. In part two, I covered large and small businesses and creative professionals. In my opinion, large businesses are too tied to a big system based in Windows to switch to Linux, but creative professionals and small businesses have much less of a tie to any particular operating system and if there were applications that did what they need to Linux, they would switch.

In this part I will cover geeks, travelers, and schools (originally universities, but expanded to schools thanks to commenter Robert Pogson).

Geeks

I had to include them, but there is not really much to say. This is one case where Linux has already won for the most part.

Travelers

Example: Someone who travels on business a lot and needs to do e-mail, get on the web, and edit Microsoft Office files without lugging a big computer around.

For anyone that needs to travel, Linux has gotten much more appealing in the past few months, even though they may not even know what Linux is. With products like the Asus Eee PC on the market, Linux is becoming appealing, in the form of small hardware and low costs, to travelers. Although the Eee is still quite new, it has a lot of promise to help Linux become an everyday term and an everyday tool.

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After the EU required Microsoft to share some of their documentation on printer/file sharing in 2004 and losing their appeal in September 2007, Microsoft finally got around to doing it, according to ZDNet. The Samba project gave Microsoft almost $15,000 for the documentation they needed from Microsoft to ensure interoperability with Windows on printer and file sharing, which will be given to them through the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation. Samba is the project that makes file and printer sharing with Windows computers possible.

Although it is frustrating that Microsoft cannot just make the required documentation available, now that the Samba team does have the documentation and is allowed to release the code they write based on it so other projects can use their implementation (the documentation itself will remain confidential), the important thing is that from now on Samba and other open-source projects will be able to create software that is fully compatible with Microsoft software.

Further Reading: Samba News Story, CNET News Story

If you missed the first part, here is a quick summary. Otherwise, just skip this part.

In this series of articles, I discuss broad groups of computer users, the ties they have to existing platforms, and the potential attractions of Linux to them. In the previous part, I covered two types of home users (see the first part) and argued that neither type cares much about the advantages and disadvantages of operating systems and, therefore, these users are not a promising market for Linux.

In this part I will cover small and large businesses as well as creative professionals.

Large Businesses

Example: Big corporations with thousands of employees and a large Windows-tied technology system.

Although getting large businesses to use Linux would make thousands and thousands of people familiar with Linux, most large businesses already have a huge investment in the Windows world in terms of both hardware and software, so it may be almost impossible to convince big businesses to switch to Linux, except for a few specialized applications such as servers.

Small Businesses

Example: Startup/less than 100 employee companies that have a lot less investment in technology and care about saving money on technology

Small businesses may be one of the best markets to push Linux to. Smaller businesses are often very cost sensitive and don’t necessarily have a large existing investment in the Windows world, so they may be easy to convince that Linux is the best choice for them. In addition, if small businesses adopt Linux, more and more home users will start to become familiar with Linux.

Creative Professional

Example: People who work with audio, video, and graphics in smaller businesses

Many creative professionals are currently tied to the Mac and Adobe applications, but very few are tied to a large business system. In addition, they often use expensive hardware and expensive hardware means big profits for the sellers. Previously, this money has been going to Apple, but if creative professionals began to move to Linux, many hardware vendors would be more interested in selling Linux on their machines. All Linux would need to pull creative professionals to Linux is to create some good applications, either open-source or closed-source, to compete with the Adobe applications. This may be another group that Linux should focus on.

After just over 100 posts and about 4.5 months, here a few statistics on Linux Loop.

(Everything is as of the time of writing.)

General

• 133 Days Since Linux Loop was Launched

Content Numbers

Linux Loop News Blog:

• 102 Posts
• 63 Comments
• Average of .77 posts per day for all time
• Average of 1 posts per day for the past month

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While reading today’s news stories for Linux, I noticed the release of LightZone, a commercial program for editing and managing pictures, for Linux. This made me think about Linux’s target audience. While many distros seem to be marketing themselves to the “average” user, it seems to me that the “average” user is not tech savvy enough to care about Linux or anything other than Windows, Microsoft Office, and their work.

In this series of articles, I will cover the following groups of computer users and what ties they have to existing platforms and what potential attractions they have to Linux.

• Home User - Tied into work’s system
• Home User - Not tied into work’s system
• Large Business
• Small Business
• Creative Professional
• Geek
• Traveler
• University

In this part I will cover the two types of home users — those tied into their work’s system and those free from their work’s system.

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Dell announced the availability of Ubuntu 7.10 on their consumer Linux desktops and laptops in the US as well as out-of-the-box DVD playback today through their Direct2Dell blog. Although Ubuntu 7.10 has been available since October, Dell was still testing the new release until now. In addition to just putting the existing Ubuntu 7.10 code on their computers, Dell has made a few improvements to make the out-of-the-box experience better. New Dell computers will ship with Flash Player pre-installed and, more importantly, new dell computers will also be able to play DVDs out-of-the-box with LinDVD. Ubuntu 7.10 will also be available on some models in other countries this week.

It is good to see that Dell is not just installing the default Ubuntu distribution, but they are showing significant commitment to open-source software by adding features to improve the user experience, even if they are relatively small changes. Hopefully, the Dell and Ubuntu people will continue to work together and get all of the commercial media codecs installed so that Mossberg and other technology reviewers can’t complain about media playback anymore.

A recent post on the Commercial Open Source Software blog points out a little discussed problem that some businesses and even home users may face: not knowing what software to pick. As the post points out, there are so many open-source applications available to do so many different jobs that sometimes choosing the perfect one can be nearly impossible. While there are websites where you can look through the available applications such as SourceForge, these sites are often more aimed more at developers than at users. Instead, I believe this is a problem that can be best solved with software portals.

Software portals, such as Linspire’s CNR (CNR.com), provide a web-based interface to find programs and install them with one click. Software portals are still quite new so there is no truly cross-distro one and they may not have all the applications people want to install or all the information about those applications, but, as software portals grow, they can become more than just a place to install software, they can be a place to find software.

Note: This is the 100th post on the Linux Loop news blog! Hopefully I will post more statistics here later, but for now here are just a few:

• This blog was started (along with the rest of Linux Loop) about 4.5 months ago. That means an average of about .75 posts per day. Not bad at all, but I still want to get that number up to a solid 1.
• In the month of December, the number of posts exactly equals the number of days so far!
• This site has received over 11,000 visits in just the last month!

The E-Commerce Times posted an interview with Jim Zemlin yesterday. Not surprisingly, he was very optimistic about the future of Linux, but his argument about cloud computing was particularly interesting. As I’ve discussed before here on Linux Loop, the replacement of desktop applications with web applications, sometimes called cloud computing, will put Linux on a level playing field with Windows and other OSs, because users don’t have to learn new applications when they switch operating systems. In short, web applications don’t care what OS you use. Getting back to the interview, Jim Zemlin made an interesting point about the other side of web applications, the server:

“In 2008 we are going to see Linux taking off tremendously in cloud computing. The use of cloud computing will become increasingly important. Running Linux on a virtual machine on a cloud server will be the dominant platform in that arena.“

Linux is already a major player in the server market, and as Jim Zemlin points out, with the rise of cloud computing more and more people will be aware of Linux on the server, which will help to establish Linux on the desktop, too. So, in summary, the rise of cloud computing helps Linux both on the server and on the desktop.

While Linux’s ability to run on minimal hardware has already proven itself to be a major advantage over Microsoft Windows and other operating systems, a recent Lifehacker article that shows how to make your Linux system faster points out that even Linux is not immune to becoming bloated and slow. Although many of the tips shown in the the Lifehacker article are distribution specific and are almost all are minor changes, the article shows that it is important that users and developers are careful that unnecessary slowdowns and resource-eaters are removed before they become too tied in with the system. Although Linux distributions may not yet have encountered the bloat problems that plague Windows, in large part due to the excellent work of many developers, as Linux is adopted more and more is will become even more critical that developers and users watch for bloat and get rid of it as soon as possible.

Recently, the New York Times reported that the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) was switching many of their servers to Linux. The news was instantly picked up and carried all over the web along with quotes from the CIO of the NYSE, such as “it’s polished enough for us.” To me, it seems that the big news here is not that the NYSE is switching their servers to Linux. Linux has already proven itself to be a major competitor in th server market. Even Google runs Linux. It seems to me that, in this case, what the NYSE said is more important than what they did. Many, many people will read the NY Times and other articles. These people, most of whom know very little about Linux, will see prominent people saying that Linux is the best option for their needs. They say actions speak louder than words, but, in this case, words speak louder than actions.