Thanks to Bob Lewis of the Felton LUG mail list for the link to “Battle of the OS Titans” on Forbes.com written by John Dragoon, Novell‘s chief marketing officer. Novell is the sponsor of community-supported openSUSE. I think the article gives a nice summary, emphasizing that the dominance of Microsoft has loosened compared to a few years ago.
The Operating System release calendar this month is amazing: Microsoft Windows 7 general retail availability was October 22nd, Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala releases Thursday, October 29th, openSUSE 11.2 Fitche releases Thursday, November 12 and Fedora 12 Constantine is released Tuesday, Nov 17th. Apple beat everyone to a release by about a month: Apple’s OS X 10.6.1 was Sept 10th after the late August Snow Leopard release.
One point I would have liked to see John emphasize more is the impact of Google’s Chrome OS entry. This isn’t just any old Linux distribution. Google has significant mind share in the public at large and I am looking forward to seeing how the Linux and mainstream computing landscapes shift with it’s availability in the second half of 2010.
The telephone targeted Android was a good warm up. I use it daily on my phone. Yet the netbook & desktop targeted Chrome OS has some tricks (like a new security architecture) that should prove interesting. Mike Belshe has blogged about the Chrome browser development story giving some more background on this. I believe Google has achieved improved security, speed, and stability with their browser and I am looking forward to seeing how this approach translates into their Chrome OS (Linux) distribution next year.
For now I’m getting ready to celebrate the new releases.