Linux will only ever be niche, says Lenovo analyst

"LINUX IN NETBOOKS and notebooks I don't think is ever going to happen," Lenovo's world-wide competitive analyst, Matt Kohut, has said in an interview, remarking that the open source software would never attain anything more than niche status as an OS.

Kohut told Tech.Blorge that netbooks had failed to make Linux palatable to the mainstream and that disgruntled consumers were shunning the cheap software for easier to set-up, closed source, proprietary Windows instead.

"There were a lot of netbooks loaded with Linux, which saves $50 or $100 or whatever, but from an industry standpoint, there were a lot of returns because people didn't know what to do with it," said Kohurt.

The Lenovo analyst also reckoned people were put off by having to "decompile codes and upload data", claiming "the average person, well, they just want a computer."

Kohurt whined that it was "just too hard" to have to go to a website and download bits of code, adding "Linux needs to get to the point where if you want to plug something in, Linux loads the driver and it just works."

Apparently this is all the Linux community's fault, with Kohurt tutting he'd "not seen the Linux community make a serious effort" to make the software user friendly enough to succeed on netbooks.

He uttered the heresy that some open sourcerers, "even like the fact that it is a little difficult and that it isn't accessible to the average user". How dare he? µ