In the late 90's I was a unix consultant, and for a time ran the operations of a telecom company with a total Linux shop. I know (knew?) linux well and was part of the cheering section when some believed linux would soon overtake windows on the desktop.
It didnt happen. Linux has a single digit percent of the market in desktop or direct end-user devices. I know it has a big part of the web server and embedded system market, but we are talking a single user system. Increasingly the users coming to mach want to run a CNC machine- mostly routers. A surprising number of them know next to nothing about computers. Maybe they know how to read mail, but they can't find a file and don't understand much about windows. But they can get someone local to help, they can buy a machine that comes with windows installed, they can get their grandson to help... I live in a small town and we have 2 or 3 guys that make a business of helping people with windows. The local adult ed teaches courses about windows. Sorry, but windows won the war for the end user. The other points made in this thread are mostly just linux zealot talk. So you think Machs screen colors are silly, or childish, or whatever- so what? Use the screen designer to change it, or pickup one of the dozens of user written sets, some free, some that people even pay for. Or just use it- we know that thousands do just use it. Rumors of mach having trouble with Win7 or Win8 are nonsense, or wishful thinking of linuxCNC users. Mach installs just like any windows application- click the downloaded file, accept the license and in less than a minute its installed and ready to run. Config is just a few windows screens to fill in, or you can get an xml file from another user or a vendor of hardware boxes. The market share of LinuxCNC and Mach are directly related to the market share of windows and linux, and I do not believe there is anything in LinuxCNC you can do to change that. Why fight it- use your linuxCNC system, make it do the best things you can do with it It will be interesting when Mach4 runs on linux and Mac to see how many use that instead of windows. ron ginger ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60134071&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
