The great Steve Ballmer once said, “Developers, developers, developers, etc.” For once, the man made sense: in order for a system to work you need to have people developing for it. For years there have been companies living and dying by their commitment to release their software for Windows, OS X, or even both, but you never hear of these companies working on Linux based projects. Why? Because people don’t care about Linux. Granted it has gained popularity in the past couple of years with variations like Ubuntu, but to the mainstream world, it just doesn’t exist.

But Linux is the best operating system.

Now I will not disagree with this. When it comes to the bare bones and the foundation the operating system was built on, it is the most reliable. It gets even better, with a large community contributing its help with making it more reliable it gets better and better each day, but that doesn’t mean its the most functional. Many companies do not release their drivers nor build their hardware to work natively on Linux. Why? Because there is no clear winner in the Linux race. I mean why bother to make drivers for an operating system that can’t decide what is the best way it should be built? I mean you don’t see Microsoft coming out with five different operating systems at one time and saying “Can you please support all of these different codes?” In order for Linux to gain any type of popularity there has to be a concrete design that every variation should follow to make it easy to produce hardware that will be supported by them all.

But Linux has the best software!

I hear that statement all of the time but I cannot simply take it as truth. I own all three: Vista, Ubuntu, and OS X, and I cannot name one piece of software for Ubuntu that makes me stop and go “WOW.” Yes, that was a Vista joke; just about anything you can get on Ubuntu you can get for Windows or OS X. Now with Windows you can buy almost any software you see out there, whether it be Adobe, Microsoft Office, and even the most popular video games you can get! Thats why people buy Windows: they don’t care it’s not he most stable system, as long as they’re able to do what they need to do they will be happy. The same thing with OS X. The reason I bought it was for one software suite and that is iLife . iLife is just plain simple to use and all of the software blends together and makes doing simple tasks even more simple to do. So what about the Linux software I use? Well all of the stuff I use on there, Firefox, OpenOffice, and Gimp I have on both of my other computers running perfectly fine in Windows and OS X.

While I do love Linux and think the world of it, I just don’t think that will ever gain popularity and be able to be a real threat to Microsoft and Apple. One word of advice to the Linux community: Get organized.

[tags]Windows, Apple, Linux, Windows Vista, OS X Leopard, Ubuntu, Firefox[/tags]