cross-platform virus

[Peter Garrett]

On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 10:42:10 +1000
Alexander Jacob Tsykin <stsykin at gmail.com> wrote:

> > > Most of Ubuntu's growth is from windows.
> >
> > Really? Do you have any figures on this? I think it's rather doubtful,
> > although if it were true, that would be A Good Thing (tm).
> >
> > Peter

> Very easy to prove. Once a Linux person learns a distro, its not too common to 
> move, 

This is very funny :) 

Reading a few forums and articles would soon
disabuse you of this notion. There are *many* *many* Linux users who
distro-hop constantly. New users *often* try a number of distros, and lots
of experienced Linux people try other distros out of curiosity, or to get
something to "work" that their other distro appears not to support "out of
the box", and so on ...

Linux people may or may not settle on one distro. It really depends on
personality and needs.

> because changing distros means learning how a completely new one works. 

Historically, Linux users have not been afraid to learn the quirks of
different distros. This might be changing somewhat as more converts appear
who are only interested in something that is "easy to use", however.

A few years ago a lot of Linux users would have been just as happy to
learn Slackware or Debian or indeed LFS as to learn Perl or Python or Ruby
- but I agree that the "typical" profile has shifted away from that kind of
user.

> Most of Linux's growth would have to come from Windows. Since Ubuntu is the 
> biggest and fastest growing distribution (pretty sure), it is bound to get 
> most of its growth from Windows too.

Possibly. Not proven though. The Distrowatch figures are inevitably
inconclusive, for example. Most new users would not even know that
Distrowatch exists. One problem here is that evidence from forums, mailing
lists, Distrowatch and IRC etc etc is skewed badly - the probability of
participants being geeks, and having previous experience in Linux, UNIX/
BSDs is too high.

Peter

-- 

Linux User #343161