Why "free" isn't important

In one of the best posts yet from one of my favorite ZDnet bloggers, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes offers Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user. It’s a great primer on the significant difference in mind set between hobbyist and uber-geek computer users and the “average user”.

Here are the five things. Please do read the post and the unbelievably long comment thread (or at least some of it – it does end up getting kind of repetitive).

1. On the whole, users aren’t all that dissatisfied with Windows
2. Too many distros
3. People want certainty that hardware and software will work
4. As far as most people are concerned, the command line has gone the way of the dinosaur
5. Linux is still too geeky

Best quote from the article:

The PC market is extremely cut-throat. It has to be because consumers will go to great lengths to save a few bucks when buying their latest system. But it seems that this thriftiness hasn’t resulted in hordes of users choosing to buy PCs without Windows installed and instead choosing to install Linux instead. In fact, there are plenty of users who would rather break the law and install pirated copies of Windows than go the legal route and install a Linux distro. On the whole, most people would rather spend the money on Windows (or Mac) than take the time to experiment with Linux.

Why?

It seems that a lot of people are wondering this. Since starting to dabble in the world of Linux I’ve seen this question posed on innumerable websites, forums and blogs. Why is it that when consumer satisfaction with Windows is at a low (at least according to many in the pro-Linux community it is) is the Linux market share so low? It’s pretty sad, but beyond a certain small segment of computer users, you can’t give Linux away.

A followup to the post was just published. Point number three is the essence of what Platform Agnostic is all about:

Chill out. It’s just an operating system.

I’m not sure if it’s just a case that there’s a small subset of the Linux community which is both aggressive and vocal or whether the problem is much broader, but this is a major turn off for people considering making the transition to a Linux OS. Even back when Mac communities were considered by many to be pretty hostile and unfriendly places Steve Jobs was clever enough to make sure that this kind of fanatical nonsense didn’t make it onto the Apple site and sales literature (although Apple is perfectly capable of coming up with their own fanatical nonsense, at least it’s not that aggressive). Negative campaigning seems to work for political parties but it doesn’t work for Linux - and the numbers prove this.

Seriously, given the passion behind some of the comments I come across from some Linux users, you’d have thought I was talking about something with life-or-death importance like a heart machine and not an OS.

Brilliant job Adrian!