Ubuntu is really moving ahead now. It is a far superiour system compared to osx. osx has packaged up 2 year old stuff, and ubuntu is within 0 months to 6 month old wares.
Apple missed out on netbooks -- where ubuntu is ahead again. Looks like they'll hop onto cloud computing before Apple too.
Ubuntu is just much more agile, compared to Apple... which seems to be a bit stagnant.
Apple's not really targetting netbooks - I mean, they might release one of their own, but they really aren't interested in calling up Dell and saying "Hey, let's cut a deal to install OSX on your next-gen netbook." So it's not strictly a fair comparison.
That said, yeah, it seems like Ubuntu is moving really swiftly these days. Swifter than Apple even, but let's not forget that only a year ago, people were complimenting Apple for being so swift-moving when compared to Microsoft.
I think the point of that comment was to say: "Netbooks are really popular. Apple is ignoring this while Ubuntu is embracing it. This is making Ubuntu popular, while Apple has pretty much maxed out its popularity."
Where's the proof that their popularity is maxed out? Their market share's grown steadily every quarter, they own the hottest phone on the planet, and their advertising's everywhere.
I don't have numbers on this and I haven't researched this, but I'd rather bet that Apple's increasing at a faster pace than Ubuntu. Or am I missing something?
Apple was well aware of the netbook segment -- they chose to ignore it. Their "competitor" to the netbooks, the iPod/iPhone line, has been doing extremely well. Ubuntu hasn't succeeded in gaining traction in the portable device market, but you don't consider that a failure.
People like taking potshots at Apple by ignoring what Apple actually does, and perhaps that's deserved because Apple has a reputation for unflagging arrogance. It bugs me, though, when people make statements like the OP, because Apple and Ubuntu aren't doing the same thing whatsoever. Ubuntu has its goals, which include netbooks. Apple has said again and again: they understand it's an open market, but they don't want to release a product until they're certain they can make something of their accepted quality level. Meanwhile, they've made the iPhone into a miniature netbook with the App Store, and a lot of people are using it as such.
In the end, it's all very silly. The people who think that Ubuntu is cutting edge conflict with the Apple users who think the same, because we two camps use different definitions of "cutting edge". Can we stop bickering about it now? There's room enough for us all to hold hands, kiss, make up, and go back to tormenting the Windows users. (Joke! Don't shoot me.)
They are making a push there. On Amazon EC2 for instance if you want a premade AMI with Django and mysql, you'll get Ubuntu AMIs. Same with lots of other platforms. You dont' see lots of Windows and no mac servers...
Totally agreed, that is why *nix and Ubuntu it seems will own in cloud computing. Others that are big are debian, fedora, SUSE, Redhat, Gentoo etc. Cloud computing seems like it will be owned by free os's for the most part on default options, thus they will win. The other surprise is that there is only one free postgres AMI yet 10 or so oracle and 20+ mysql. Granted many people make their own private AMIs but at least public AMIs on Amazon EC2 are slanted that way.
> Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the API's of Amazon EC2
cold.
> The Eucalyptus project, from UCSB, enables you to create an EC2-style cloud in your own data center, on your own hardware.
warm
> The desktop will have a designer's fingerprints all over it - we're now beginning the serious push to a new look. Brown has served us well but the Koala is considering other options.
Apple missed out on netbooks -- where ubuntu is ahead again. Looks like they'll hop onto cloud computing before Apple too.
Ubuntu is just much more agile, compared to Apple... which seems to be a bit stagnant.