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Mark Shuttleworth praises "excellent" Windows 7

Mark Shuttleworth

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

Author: Stuart Turton

User comments

Features for techies

Do you think the Ubuntu bods really care about the desktop space much? Take for example the new features of 9.10 listed on the Ubuntu site - not really a PR persons dream list of features to entice joe bloggs is it?

New features since Ubuntu 9.04
1.Upstart
2.Software Center
3.GNOME
4.Application development with Quickly
5.Kubuntu
6.Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Images
7.Ubuntu One
8.Linux kernel 2.6.31
9.hal deprecation
10.New Intel video driver architecture
11.ext4 by default
12.GRUB 2 by default
13.iSCSI installation
14.AppArmor - New profiles - Libvirt
15.Uncomplicated Firewall
16.Non-eXecutable Emulation
17.Blocking Module Loading
18.Position-Independent Executables

By sipart on 27 Oct 2009

Bit of a veiled compliment to suggest that only now is Windows at the point where they can compete head to head.

If I was recommending an OS for someone who had very limited computing skills, I wouldn't dream of recommending they go near Linux.

By halsteadk on 27 Oct 2009

@ sipart Ah!!! the art of selective quoting!!
You have cunningly left out the text & not informed readers that there is some explanation after these terms.

@halsteadk
You obviously haven't used Ubuntu. If you had you would realize how user friendly it has become.

This is from a person who uses it on a daily basis & I do have 'very limited computing skills'

By IndainArt on 28 Oct 2009

I am reasonably familiar with Ubuntu and agree comparatively speaking it has moved on. But I'm sorry, if you use it on a daily basis your skills are not "very limited" really, and I still could not recommend Ubuntu to someone with a genuine lack of skills.

By halsteadk on 29 Oct 2009

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