The next few years will be interesting for Linux and Windows

May 25, 2015 12:49 GMT  ·  By

The "battle" between Windows and Linux is more of a fictional one, and it has been raging on for the past couple of decades. It wasn't really a battle, despite what each side was saying, but that will undoubtedly change when Linux clearly becomes a force to be reckoned with.

Linux has made a reputation for itself by being secure, stable, and generally trustworthy, but its market share for desktops has remained pretty flat. It's at 2% in a best case scenario, which might seem weird since most of the Linux distributions are free. The server market share is a different beat all together, and Linux dominates without any real competition.

Linux also comes with baggage that is hard to get rid of. Many potential users still think that Linux is a cumbersome system to install and to use, not knowing that it has become a lot more user-friendly in the past few years. Many of the regular apps that you would use on a Windows PC are also available on Linux, oftentimes with the feature parity, so there shouldn't be a reason it's more spread out.

The problem is more of a PR issue, more than anything else. Windows is pushed forward by Microsoft, a company that has showed just how capable it is at lobbying and promoting its product, and you can't really blame them. They are doing what they have to to make money. It's as simple as that. On the other hand, their real problems are just starting, and it will be painfully apparent in the next couple of years.

The Linux and Windows battle is about to get much more real

Microsoft never actually considered Linux a threat to the desktop market and Linux never really wanted to do anything about it. Linux is not a company, and open source has no lobby. Everyone is doing their own thing and everyone is continually improving upon what everyone else is doing by using the mighty hammer that is GPL.

Linux is slowly getting out of a great slumber, and it's starting to move, albeit it's a very slow evolution. Already, the Linux kernel is the biggest cooperative software effort on the planet, and the open source world is getting bigger each day. New apps are launched on Linux all the time for a task that were usually reserved to Windows or Mac OS X, like non-linear video editing or 3D modelling. Granted, things could be better, but applications are improved all the time.

Soon, very soon, enough Windows and Mac OS X users will switch over to Linux because it's free, powerful, and it comes with no strings attached. The fact that Linux is easy to install and use, even by beginners, will slowly sink into the collective consciousness, and the Windows domination of the market will start to fade.

Even if Windows were free, which it is not, it wouldn't really matter

I wrote a while ago that, even if Windows were free, it wouldn't matter. It's about the entire ecosystem, not just about a small little part. The idea is that Linux will soon start to trespass on Windows' territory, and the conflict that used to be the subject of jokes that you could imprint on t-shirts and coffee cups will become real.

In two or three years, gamers won't have a real reason to get Windows to play games. People who are looking for a regular desktop experience will find that installing Linux is much safer than Windows and that things work pretty much in the same manner.

The conflict between Linux and Windows is now like a sleeping volcano, but it will soon erupt. It will be spectacular to watch, but you can't expect for Microsoft to win. It's just a company working against the current of tens of thousands of open source developers who are doing the same things, but only for free and just to improve what's already done.

This status quo between Microsoft and Linux won't last very long, especially not after Linux begins to cannibalize the Windows user share. It's not happening tomorrow and not next year, but it's happening, and odds are that Microsoft will eventually fade away.