Mark Shuttleworth praises "excellent" Windows 7

 

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 27 Oct 2009 at 10:24

Mark Shuttleworth has described Windows 7 as an "excellent release", but he remains confident Microsoft's shortcomings can be exploited by Ubuntu.

Shuttleworth is the chief executive of Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distro, and was speaking on a conference call to announce that Ubuntu 9.10 - codenamed Karmic Koala - will be released on Thursday.

However, Windows 7 soon popped into conversation, and Shuttleworth offered surprising praise for the OS, claiming "it's a substantial improvement on the past. Even on netbooks, it's a credible release."

"I am delighted that Windows 7 is out. Now that Windows 7 is out, we can compete head to head," he added.

At the heart of Canonical's strategy is the fact that "Windows remains a proprietary and relatively expensive piece of technology," which he argued will ultimately serve to limit its reach.

The Linux desktop experience keeps getting better and better, and the Windows experience keeps getting more and more expensive

In comparison, he claims that "by 2010, there will be people developing for Ubuntu on ARM smartbooks as well as deploying it on Intel Xeon servers in the cloud."

"The Linux desktop experience keeps getting better and better, and the Windows experience keeps getting more and more expensive for a set of features. I think we can compete."

And the first release to take on Windows will be Ubuntu 9.10, which comes packed with a number of impressive new features. Boot times have been significantly reduced, and there's now a revamped Software Store application, which presents the wealth of free open-source software for Ubuntu in an app store format - hopefully making it easier for new users of the OS to understand what's on offer.

Ubuntu 9.10 also brings One to the party - Canonical's file synchronisation service, which was quietly slipped into beta in May. The service mimics Live Mesh and Dropbox by allowing people to synchronise files, calenders and contacts between multiple machines.

Read our review of every version of Windows 7 here