What marketing experts will tell you, is that branding, street cred, public perception are herculean issues to overcome for anyone.  Take for example the myth of the hypertechnical German Army during WWII. The leaders of Germany created a gimmick image to scare and impress their opponents. In reality, the Germans seriously lacked in motorized transport and often lugged their stuff on horses.  Their trucks were inferior to American and Soviet ones and they lacked good bombers.  Moreover, before the invention of the Tiger tank, their armor was behind the US, Soviet, British and French. What they had were miracle weapons like the jet fighter or the V rockets which they couldn’t use effectively.

A bad image is almost impossible to shake off – so is sometimes a good reputation. During the time Linux first came about, it boasted professional class features that Windows did not have. The UNIX heritage was more inclined towards security, science and academics, while Windows was a single-user OS with a very poor security design. Advanced features such as protective memory, pre-emptive multitasking and access controls did not come to Windows until NT and for Mac until OS X (actually Apple had other UNIX based projects before, but OS X was the first mainstream one).  People still make stupid blue screen jokes; since most computers run Windows, its problems are more visible to the public.

Linux inherited the image of stability from UNIX. You can often hear claims of impressive uptimes and rock solid stability from many people. When Apple debuted OS X, it also marketed the “rock solid UNIX” monicker.  The claim that Linux runs many supercomputers and servers also fuels the public image of grandeur. Sadly, this image of outstanding reliability can no longer be boasted compared to commercial offerings from Redmond and Cupertino. The reasons for this are multifaceted.

Firstly, the quality of the OS depends on its ecosystem- app developers and hardware manufactures play a huge role in supporting the platform. Without quality support and a large userbase a platform is dead.  Linux suffers from missing and incomplete hardware support (this is more evident on laptops) and a shoddy app library. The quality of the software written is in most cases more buggy and incomplete with many apps in a constant alpha/beta state. The Linux desktop itself is many times more buggier than commercial offerings. Gravely serious errors are left uncorrected because of lack of manpower to test and fix bugs. Only the kernel can boast quality code. The majority of the stack is more buggy, than even Vista or ME ever was. The sound stack, x.org and drivers, window managers, desktop environments like GNOME and KDE, even the freaking bootloader are not ready for consumer usage.

With Linux distributions, the user gets a half-backed, buggy, and poorly supported platform. The level of integration between various parts of the system is abysmal compared to Windows and OS X. There is a serious lack of testing, standardization and integration. Geeks’ darling of reliability had been shipped with a broken Pulseaudio and KDE 4.0 release. Even alpha Windows builds are not as flaky as Fedora and Ubuntu releases. The open source model is not even adequate to allow thousands of individuals to fix the bugs that are reported, let alone catch up in terms of innovation.

So please stop blabbering about uptimes and rock stability. An X-less server is pretty stable. But the Linux desktop is seriously behind in features and reliability. That said, it is 100 times more flexible than Windows- you can choose between dozens of window managers, command shells, text editors, desktop environments, sound systems, file systems and kernel builds.  Linux is useful to millions and I use it at home and work. But it is simply not reliable enough.