A nice, short article:
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS8124627492.html
Seriously, I see the list of reasons for ordinary folks to continue using Windows on their desktop getting shorter and shorter and that for dumping it growing. Or at least switching to open source software, such as Firefox, which run very well on Windows.
Off course the current situation is unlikely to change soon. A friend of mine recently told me how a lot of employees in his company, a huge multi-national, switched to Firefox from IE, only to have an official circular sent out banning all “unauthorized” software. This policy was enforced after Microsoft came to know of the prevalence of Firefox and pressured the company into revising their “security procedures”.
I’m still very disappointed in how there isn’t any real change in the way Pakistanis do things. With so much pressure on the country to crack down on piracy and free software being such an attractive option, you would expect migration to it in droves. Quite the contrary. Forget about ordinary desktop users. Even a lot of network/system people I know don’t give it much thought and would prefer to put up with all the troubles Windows brings than to even try out an alternative.
Though Outlook still dominates, a lot of mail I get from other regions is written using a whole variety of mailers (Becky, Thunderbird and Evolution to name a few), whereas virtually everything coming from local senders is written using Outlook or Outlook Express.
Organizations are still hesitant to have anything running Linux, including servers, but not without reason. While everyone knows someone who can fix a Windows problem (even if the solution is simply to reinstall everything), there just aren’t enough Linux guys/gals around. Hell I must have gotten half a dozen good job offers just in the last couple of months (I’m sticking to concentrating on iinix).
Maybe it’s a good thing that high speed broadband connections aren’t very common here (yet). If they were, Pakistan would be one of the biggest virus proliferators in the world.