The guy writes like he is supremely jealous of Microsoft, not appreciative at all of the OS that he uses himself on a daily basis. Poseur!
His “five ways” are really just one problem, but I’ll split it out into three for heck of it.
1) Lack of Linux vendor support
2) Lack of Linux advertising and marketing
This is the exact same “problem”. Linux, as a desktop OS, has no single company promoting it or selling it. It’s a freebie. The vendors who do sell linux or sell commercial support for linux don’t sell it or market it at the desktop. They market it at the server farm and the IT back office. There is no budget for advertising a desktop linux because there is no company actively pursuing selling a desktop linux. For the vast majority of computer owners, an operating system is something that comes bundled with their hardware and if it isn’t bundled then it doesn’t exist. Apple competes with Microsoft, but Microsoft competes by proxy through hardware partners. Microsoft prices the actual install media for their new OS versions at a price point where the average consumer isn’t going to drop $300 for a new copy of Windows to put on an old computer when a new computer can be had, with a new copy of Windows included, for as little as $300. Microsoft’s pricing, therefore, subsidizes their hardware partners (the hardware vendors who get great price breaks from Microsoft because they commit to buying Windows licenses in 100,000 unit chunks).
The complaint here is therefore misdirected, and should be a complaint of lack of support from HARDWARE vendors.
Linux, therefore, struggles with the commitment to the desktop because vendors of desktop hardware are not committed to support linux. Which leads to the “second” problem…
3) Too much bad techie attitude
Support for linux is decentralized: it is built on the keyboards of an army of tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of “volunteers”. But “volunteer” isn’t the right word for many of the people who actually develop the internal code of linux. A great chunk of coding development (in some sectors, like kernel, it is close to 100%) for linux is performed as the labor of paid professionals, professionals who are on the payroll of thousands of different (and often competing) companies around the world. These companies use linux in-house, and either in lieu of or in addition to paying an outside vendor for support they keep someone (or more than one someone) on payroll with a full-time or part-time duty of coding linux support for something that the company needs or wants or maybe just a pet project of the employee. Sometimes that professional’s time is paid to support an application developed by someone else, but the company benefits due to having a direct line pipe to a highly placed developer of a package that the company considers “critical”. This is how a lot of coding to support specific pieces of hardware gets done, and there is no central corporate office directing this army of programmers: they do that amongst themselves on their own. These programmers are therefore beholden to only two things: their volunteer work ethic, and their employer.
Then there is the army of true blue volunteers, the unpaid masses who support linux as a hobby, some of them programmers and most of them “end users” who fill the ranks of chat rooms, web forums, blogs, and IRC, offering support on their own to anyone who will listen. None of these people are paid to provide customer support, and few of them are trained to provide any level of customer support for anything at all. The fact that there are no “customers” of the linux desktop, as a product, makes the whole concept of providing “customer support” rather moot, but that doesn’t keep people from complaining that they don’t get the “support” they think they deserve. These are all reasonably smart people who have puzzled out the quirks of linux on their own, and people wonder why they all act like they have Aspergers?
4) Too much infighting
5) Not enough developer co-operation
Linux is not one single project. It is the intersection of tens of thousands of independent and sometimes cross-purposed projects each with separate goals, timetables, motivations, and agendas. It IS a group of rational people working together, but these rational people don’t always agree on what to do and instead of spending more time debating ideology the most productive of them just produce more code for whatever project they’re already working on. But it all goes back to the first “complaint” about linux: lack of commercial support. Because there is no one flagship company pushing desktop linux to the world, there is no investment in commercial advertising or any armada of customer support professionals or any single guiding force directing the progress of code development, and therefore little incentive for great steps of cooperation between developers. Its not that there is a lot of outright bad blood or vindictiveness, but just consider Qt versus GTK toolkits. They’re redundant! But will one of them just go away and fold its features into the other? Asking that question on the wrong forum is begging for a flamewar, or a permanent ban. And its not just because some volunteer code monkeys like one, or the other, but because some of those companies that pay for development and a vested corporate interest in one, or the other, have pumped money to support their preferred toolkit (*cough*Nokia*cough*). But it doesn’t stop with GTK-vs-Qt (ignoring Mono), or KDE-vs-Gnome (ignoring Enlightenment, Xfce, Fluxbox, Lxde, etc). Even the companies that pay their own staff to code professional software for linux to compete directly against Microsoft invest more time, more effort, and produce better code for the Windows version of their product than the linux version! Mozilla, I’m looking at you: Windows Firefox runs better in Wine on Linux than does native Linux Firefox on Linux!
Not only does linux lack developer co-operation, we can’t even agree to stand with any of the magnet personalities who have tried to rally support for linux. Stallman is usually quoted only to mock him; Shuttleworth is alternatively either an inspiring visionary leader or an idiot savant on a personal soapbox depending on who you chat with on IRC. Nothing at all like the messianic reverence accorded to Steve Jobs by his turtlenecked proselytizing missionaries of Macintosh. Maybe Shuttleworth needs to adopt a kitchy wardrobe that we can emulate, because I’m not going to grow a Stallman-esque wookie-beard.
Windows desktops have similar components to Linux ones, don't they?