05.02.07
Apple’s Gain Bodes Well For Linux
As we discussed on La Voz De La Revoluccion, US News & World Report tells us that Apple’s recent gains are partly due to virtualization, saying, “Bottom line: Which one your base machine is won’t matter as much anymore. Software will run well just about everywhere.”
Even before their new version comes out, Apple is having explosive growth with Mac OS X, which is coming at the expense of Microsoft’s new Windows Vista. People are excited by Mac (and Ubuntu Linux / Linux Mint) in a way that a few ersatz “wow” comments pushed by advertising can not match.
Linux and BSD offer many alternatives for emulation and virtualization. They also run on numerous kinds of hardware. In fact, with some of the newer Linux distributions and versions are so good that few people need to buy Windows any more. (A distribution, or distro, is a separate package of the operating system. It is something like XP Home, XP Pro, Server 2003, and so on, except they are generally offered by different organizations instead of a single company the way that Microsoft Windows is distributed.)
This indicates that people will soon buy a computer with its built-in virtualizer and then obtain multiple operating systems to place within virtualized environments. Soon, you will no longer need to consider the OS when you buy equipment to use with your computer, because it will be designed to plug directly into Parallels or VMWare or Linux VServer or UML or Xen or Virtuozzo/OpenVZ or VirtualBox or Qemu or Plex86/Bochs. I believe that some of these will emphasize direct-connections with hardware, while others will figure out how best to plug into the hardware-based solutions.
