14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, has downplayed Microsoft's Windows Vista. With Linux accounting for 0.37% of the operating system market, and Windows Vista already at 0.16% in just the first month of availability, Torvalds considers Microsoft's latest operating system an over-hyped product.
While Microsoft is applauding Vista as a revolutionary operating system, Torvalds commented that nothing has really changed. According to Torvalds, Vista's fundamentals fail to be innovative. In this context, the only improvement he sees in Vista is at a superficial, visual level.
"I don't actually think that something like Vista will change how people work that much," Torvalds stated to LinuxWorld. "I think it, to some degree, has been over-hyped as being something completely new and I don't actually think it is. One of the things we will probably notice is the hardware requirements for Vista are obviously much higher, and that could end up helping Linux just because people notice that you can run Linux on machines and have it work very well even if that same machine couldn't run Vista at all."
As yet, Vista has failed to help the adoption rate of Linux. In a similar manner, there have been voices that argued that the similarities between Vista and Mac OS would benefit the sales of Apple. That was not the case.
"A lot of the things we have done over the last few years is supporting, gracefully, something as simple as plugging in a camera into the computer," Torvalds added. "You want the user experience to be that the computer not only knows the camera is there but also brings up all the applications automatically and all these different things have to talk to each other. That's one of the things we have done a lot of work on and now it's largely out of the kernel's hands and the vendors end up supporting the desktop experience a lot more."