Mac Geeks Moving to Ubuntu: Should Apple Worry?
I read this interesting article on O’Reilly Radar (via Slashdot) about Apple geeks moving to Ubuntu. I do not find this article surprising because a number of my students thought they were using MacOSX upon seeing Ubuntu on their lab computers on their first day of class. Of course, I simply think that any student who grew up using MS Windows would think everything else is MacOSX.
The article mentions a bunch of names but who are these folks anyway?
- Mark Pilgrim is a popular IBM blogger and a known Mac guru who does a daily blog on open source and Apple technology. He has been an Apple user for quite sometime. He has recently moved to Ubuntu because he feels he should be using an Open Source operating system since he uses Open Source software most of the time anyway.
- Cory Doctorow is science fiction and technology writer who is also editor of Boing Boing. Like Mark he sees that he gets better value (as an open source developer and user) if he switches to an Open Source operating system like Ubuntu.
Should Apple have anything to fear? Probably not for now, most of the migration to Ubuntu is basically from open source developers and geeks. However, the core market for Apple computers is still the “creatively inclined” of society such as graphics artists, desktop publishers and the like. I still believe that this core group of users will still stay loyal to an Apple Computer platform. Besides, commercial graphics and multimedia software packages are still not commonly available on Linux yet. Although there are free and open source alternatives, the “creatively inclined” then to be creature of habit when it comes to the “tools of their trade”. So, they will probably want to use their existing ones.
However, other Linux distributions would probably want to give Ubuntu a more serious look. In the Radar article here are some interesting numbers from Yahoo’s Buzz Market:
Ubuntu garners nearly 30% of Linux searches on Yahoo! vs only about 14% for Red Hat, and only about 2% for Fedora, and the prediction market shows a stock price of $16.15 for Ubuntu, $10.97 for Red Hat, and $8 for Fedora.
Looks like Ubuntu is getting the lion’s share of Linux mind share. This only means that the Ubuntu folks are making good headway in the Linux world, Apple world and all other world’s outside it. So to the Ubuntu folk, keep up the good work!
July 5th, 2006 at 2:32 am
I hope the free and open source graphics and multimedia would mature in a a more faster rate. XaraLX looks promising, but it’s not for production use yet. Scribus is cool, just enough for average DTP (I think). Inkscape feels like Illustrator but it needs a bit finetuning. What I feel really lacking in GNU/Linux is a good CAD app. I heard from somewhere of BRLCad, which can be more powerful than AutoCAD, if one can conquer the steep learning curve. I think there is a future in Graphics and Multimedia in GNU/Linux
July 5th, 2006 at 6:00 am
Nice summary of kwel multimedia tools for Linux. I think a nice project would be to create a custom Linux installer (Ubuntu or Fedora) that is catered to our right brained friends. Blender, Gimp, XaraLX, BRLCad, Imagemagick and others. Takers?