> Although Windows still dominates the desktop market, a huge share of the laptop market belongs to OS X, which is (partially) based on BSD.

Shouldn't Apple be somewhere in this table, then?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_comput...

I think you're hugely overestimating Apple's market share in laptops.

That table is global market share. The source article for the 2013 data[1] shows Apple in third place for 2013Q4 market share within the United States:

Firm (4Q13 US Market Share) HP (26.5%) Dell (22.8%) Apple (13.7%)

[1] http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2647517

Let's say a huge share of a particular niche then. At least Apple is pretty good at making everybody feel as if they dominate their markets.

Case in point: I don't even own any Apple products.

So while Linux users can feel happy that Android is Linux under the covers, really, the real reason it is so popular is that it's so different from Linux. For an average user, thankfully it doesn't have any traits of Linux. Like, when I install Android on my machine, I don't have to go and manually edit the xorg.conf file so that the machine knows my monitor can take 1280 x 800 resolution and not just 640 by 480, after being clueless for a long time ... or that even in today's time I have to go and make an application 'executable' from the command prompt after downloading it from the internet. There are some solid reasons Linux "as is" is not successful even today.

I do get your point, generally, but your specific example is kind of dated - I have been using GNU/Linux on my desktops for about 14 years now, and I do remember how much editing xorg.conf / xfree86.conf sucked. But it has been years since I have had to do that. The last time I checked was in Ubuntu 10.04, where xorg.conf consists only of a comment that says that xorg can detect the hardware and configure itself, making manual configuration unnecessary nearly all of the time.

Yeah. The xorg.conf file was a little old example. Though I keep coming back to Linux every few years to check, and the 'making executable an executable' problem is still there from my very recent experience (like 3 to 4 months back). Right at the time I was being impressed by how easy it was to isntall Ubuntu from my Windows partition, I couldn't believe when one of the professional products we use in our office had these official installation instructions for Linux: "1) Download the file, 2) go to the command prompt and make it executable by typing <whatever>" ... Now I understand it might be that the product makers haven't updated themselves, but it's definitely a turn of for a lot of people.

So you'd prefer to be able to just double click to run any downloaded "executable"?

But anyway, the problem you described is the fault of your vendor, not "Linux".

Yes, when I and the vendor both know it's supposed to be an executable. What a smart question. Also, an application is only as dumb as the OS allows it to be.

Here's how I installed Chrome/TeamViewer/VirtualBox/SublimeText3/etc:

I went to the website, downloaded a .deb file, double-clicked the downloaded file, clicked the big install button in the Ubuntu Software Center window that it spawned, entered my password, waiting a few seconds aaaaand it's installed. I can now run the application by clicking the big Ubuntu button on my sidebar (or pressing the Windows/symbol key) and typing in the first few letters of its name. I can optionally drag the icon to my sidebar for quicker access.

Here's how I installed the last couple of applications that didn't have a .deb file (mostly development builds of games and developer-targeted applications):

I went to the website, downloaded the .tar.gz/.tar.bz2/.zip file for my platform, double-clicked the downloaded archive to extract it to a new folder in my home folder, opened the folder and located and double-clicked the executable.

Perforce, one of the very famous Source Control Systems tells us to install its software like this (Hint: making the executables 'executables'. On Windows it's a direct executable): http://www.perforce.com/perforce/doc.current/manuals/p4sag/c... . I remember because I did it very recently.

Thousands of other software do the same. Examples (compare the installation instructions for Windows v/s Linux/UNIX for all these pages below):

MOPEX [http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/SPITZER/docs/dataanalysist...]

Multibit [http://multibit.org/en/help/v0.5/help_installing.html ]

Octoshape [https://support.octoshape.com/entries/21488922-Octoshape-App...]

UNetbootin [http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/]

Tuxboot [http://tuxboot.org/installation/]

You listed a few major ones which work the desired way, while there's a sea of applications which make Linux still look archaic.

To be fair, that's because you're buying a phone/tablet with limited, non-replaceable hardware and the software has been customized by the manufacturer to work with that hardware.

> I don't have to go and manually edit the xorg.conf

The 90s called, they want their complaints about Linux back.

As I said, the xorg.conf problem might be old, but the other problem I mentioned is really new. And they are just a few of the problems.

never _had_ to do that on a recent ubuntu btw.

Android's base source is released under Apache 2. Is that not free as in freedom? Cyanogen Mod (among many other distros of Android) would not exist if it wasn't.