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It is that time of the year again, along with the beginning of the spring, yet another release of Ubuntu 9.04 codenamed Jaunty Jackalope is coming shortly to a server near you. As the beta version was released couple of weeks ago, I decided to have a quick look and see what can be expected from this coming release. To give things a little bit of twist though, I decided to go with the KDE flavour, and downloaded Kubuntu. I have to admit I didn’t have a particularly positive encounter with Kubuntu 8.10. It was rather short and disappointing, after I played a bit with the live CD I decided to give it a try and install in on my laptop, unfortunately Kubuntu wasn’t in a cooperative mood, and despite few attempts, it wouldn’t install on my HP Pavilion dv6238ea. This was particularly strange as Ubuntu 8.10 installed flawlessly, it puzzled me a bit, but then I decided not to hold a grudge against Kubuntu and give it another try when a new release became available. I decided to use exactly the same laptop, just to see if the things have improved, and I’m pleased to report that they did although not everything went as smooth as I hoped, but let’s start from the beginning.

Installation And Booting For the First Time

This was fairly easy and flawless experience, it took me less than 20 minutes to have the system installed. A simple and straightforward guide takes you through all the installation stages and unless you are determined to get things broken, you should not experience any trouble with it even if you are a complete novice to the subject. After rebooting I was welcome by grub menu, I have to say I’m not particular fond of the Spartan style of it, developers could really come up with something visually more pleasing but the bottom line is – it does the job. One of the more advertised features of the new release was the quick booting time, and I’m pleased to report that Kubuntu indeed boots up very quickly – about thirty few seconds I was presented with a brand new KDE desktop. Kubuntu 9.04 ships with KDE 4.2.1 as the default desktop, and my first impression was very positive, everything looks very slick and well arranged. After few moments of visual appreciation I decided to dive in to the system to see it working.

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The World Won’t End

First of all, its obvious that the world wouldn’t collapse in this case. Yes, there are plenty of software, either home and business dedicated, that relies 100% on Windows. Microsoft has a large market around its operating system, a market commonly driven by “sell plenty and earn even more” attitude. Such a single-crop area.

But life always would find some way. Something would have to happen – so let’s look at the possibilities, shall we?

Would diversity work ?

Not so long ago, a home computer was usually 8 bit machine, followed by 16 bit over time. I mean such traditional “consoles” like Atari, ZX Spectrum, Commodore/Amiga, and so on. Software developers, releasing a new game for instance, would prepare different versions for different hardware platforms. So it was possible back then! Well, actually, it still is – just look at game consoles like PlayStation, GameCube, DreamCast and so on – it is often possible for a game to be released for different platforms. Of course, not always and not all titles, but it happens.

The traditional model of software development (dated before Microsoft time) assumed the hardware to be a starting point, where this hardware creators were putting the operating system into and were selling applications. Look at IBM and Sun for example – still selling mainframe and server platforms. A tight ship, allowing everybody to earn decent money on each component. The only common things were OS standards (like POSIX) or communication protocols. Single crop area ? Yes, and also repeated over and over again.

In reality, PC class computers are currently the majority of hardware out there. One could say that this is Microsoft hardware, for which the named company creates its software (Windows, Office, more predominant amongst others). Microsoft Hardware ? Say, which hardware box doesn’t bear the ‘Designed for Microsoft Windows’ logo ? Only the less-known producers’ ones. As you can see, everything depends on the right attitude to customers (generating demand) and hardware developers (trade deals, certificate schemes). One must develop its market niche, create his own ‘typical approach’. This is the only way to guarantee biggest income to yourself.

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Most of the reasons that Linux has only a tiny slice of the desktop market pie has little to do with Linux, but the Linux distributors are also partly to blame.

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