Linux going mainstream

-contributed by Ankit

Linux for many years has been trying to eat into the market share of Microsoft windows, the undisputed number one PC operating system. But still, it captures only 1% market share. There are many reasons why, still more than 90% people prefer windows over linux. The most important being the learnability of the linux. The initial versions of Linux were not the typical GUIs and it involved a lot of textual input as in the case of DOS. Now most of the Linux based OS have windows type GUIs and are easy to use. But, still Linux is considered to be difficult to use and even more diffcult to manage, which definitely is not true. But the tag of the "unfriendly" OS has somehow stuck.

I personally am a huge fan of Linux and have used a number of Linux operating systems ranging from Fedora to Ubuntu.Initially it was difficult to find softwares for the linux platform, but in last couple of years, most softwares are available for linux. Linux is supposed to be open source and free to use, and this definitely is its biggest selling point. But still, it never has been able to give serious challenge to Microsoft Windows because of easy availability of Windows' pirated version. Most computer vendors load the pirated version of the windows before selling a system which infact came with pre loaded Linux. But still Linux has a large number of followers and definitely "open source" is the order of the day.

Linux OS in mobiles will surely be a much bigger success story because of a lot of reasons. It will bring down the cost of the mobile phones hugely. Secondly, being an open source platform, developers around the world will be encouraged to add more and more user friendly features and services. These services will also help the Mobile phone operators in increasing the ARPU. In case of mobile phones, unlike the PCs, it is difficult to change the original OS, so there wont be any cases where users change their OS from a preloaded linux to some other platform.

In mobile phone industry, there is no clear leader in the Operating Systems. A lot of R&D is going into developing Linux as the standard platform for all mobile phones. Organisations such as LiMo are making huge efforts to come up with an answer to Nokia's move of making Symbian an open software. And with Google also going aggressive on launching Android, it seems like an open war for control of the Mobile OS market, which for long has been ruled by Symbian.