Is Windows Vista really driving people to Linux?

By Sam Varghese
Monday, 01 September 2008 22:22

Opinion and Analysis

I earned some flak for the review I wrote but many people also agreed with my experience. Those were early days as far as Vista was concerned - since then there has been tons of criticism, some of it pure vitriol.

With each succeeding month, we hear more and more about the scale of the Vista disaster. It is an acute embarrassment for Microsoft which has been forced to continue telling retailers that they can offer people the choice of Windows XP on new computers.

But does that mean that Vista is pushing the adoption of GNU/Linux along? Every version of Windows has initially been a dog - that has never pushed GNU/Linux along, except at the server level.

My colleague, David M. Williams, recently made this claim. His starting point was a talk given by Pia Waugh, a former president of Linux Australia. Waugh, apparently, made the claim during a talk at a meeting of Williams's local Linux user group - but no evidence was proffered to substantiate this claim.

It's easy to toss out cute statements like this - more so when you come from the open source side of the barracks. What surprises me is that we refuse to apply rigour and scepticism when it comes to claims that paint GNU/Linux in a good light. If the statement was about Windows, I'm sure that we would snigger all the way home.