Courtesy of OSWeekly.com

(Column) - The sheer ignorance regarding casual Linux users astounds me to no end. While I'm not interested in pointing fingers, there is a lot of misinformation about the Linux community, and we will help to dispel some of these myths, once and for all.

1. Linux Users Are Cheap. Ah, this is one of my favorites. It seems that Linux users have long since been seen as cheap, despite the fact that so many of them in the States earn up to six figures. First, define cheap? Are we cheap because we choose not to buy brand new everything with every release of our selected OS? It certainly shines some light on why hardware manufactures have been less than excited to provide better driver support, doesn't it?

The fact is that we choose not to buy because our OS does not require it. Obviously, like with any platform, if you are rendering video or something intensive like this, it helps to have the fastest hardware possible. But to simply purchase a new PC so you can zoom in and out of a 3D window a little faster seems rather silly to me. OS gloss in Linux can happen with extremely old hardware; unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Vista. So are we cheap or simply choosing to invest our money into something that will not be obsolete next year?

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2. Wireless Vendors Do Not Bother with Driver Support Due to the Lack of Linux User Numbers. It's at this point that I could point out that a sale is a sale, but I won't. So let's examine these numbers, shall we? All over the world, entire governments are making the switch. Tired of paying Microsoft tax, they are ignoring Microsoft's tired rant about how Linux is violating patents left and right, and realize that these threats have never been backed up with public data. Smoke and mirrors, it's not just for magicians anymore.

So considering the large number of international interest being generated daily, totally ignoring the thousands of Windows power users who are playing with Linux as well, does it not seem a little strange that these hardware vendors are not more interested in pursuing these sales even if they do not match that of the Windows crowd?

It comes down to a couple of simple choices, which the smaller vendors ought to wake up and consider: would you like to be a tiny fish in a pond filled with fish just like you or a huge fish in a smaller pond where there are no other fish to compete against, despite the fact that there are thousands of users interested in what you are selling? Seems fairly obvious to me.

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