Desktop Linux Is Dead

digitaldc writes with this quote from PCWorld: "It kills me to say this: The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead. Despite phenomenal security and stability — and amazing strides in usability, performance, and compatibility — Linux simply isn't catching on with desktop users. And if there ever was a chance for desktop Linux to succeed, that ship has long since sunk. ... Ultimately, Linux is doomed on the desktop because of a critical lack of content. And that lack of content owes its existence to two key factors: the fragmentation of the Linux platform, and the fierce ideology of the open-source community at large."

Comments

wrong OS?

[tverbeek]

I thought it was BSD that was dead?

Re:wrong OS?

[Shoeler]

BSD's not dead of course - look only to the Mach kernel in OS X for verification.

If you want to see how a desktop UNIX-based os should do it right, look at OS X. Say what you will about Apple - I don't care, only own a mac and an iPod (I have a Droid X for my phone) - but they did the desktop RIGHT. It's easy to use, fairly intuitive (passes the grandma test, for the most part), and is oh so easy to support.

I remember when I got my first macbook a few years back and I had a sprint wireless broadband card for it. I was thinking "you know, I should be able to make my mac a wifi base station and share my wireless". Preferences, sharing, .... oh, that was easy. And it worked.

Re:wrong OS?

[Pieroxy]

I see in the summary three tags: troll, trolltroll and trolltrolltroll.

Does it mean it's a 6*troll or an average of just a 2*troll?

Re:wrong OS?

[skids]

In the trollish counting system, there are only three numbers.

Troll means "one." Trolltroll means "two." Trolltrolltroll means "definitely two."

Re:wrong OS?

[xtracto]

Wow... indeed the summary and the title of the article is quite trollish. I guess the reason is that that is what sells nowadays.

Nevertheless the author makes several insightful criticisms to the Linux community. (yeah I RTFA so sue me!)

In general the criticisms are the same old we have been hearing since the beginning of the "Linux on the desktop" days. The thing is... people don't *understand* how the Linux community work. They cannot see how Linux has been steadily gaining a share of the desktop in all these years.

Moreover, the term "linux on the desktop" has always been very ambiguous. In general, I believe what people mean is "the day some Linux variant gets 10% share of home PCs".

The *only* way this will happen is when a company gets Linux and tries to achieve such an objective.

The closest we were to that was when Lindows appeared; and it is very well known the backlash from the "open source community".

Re:wrong OS?

[BrokenHalo]

If you want to see how a desktop UNIX-based os should do it right, look at OS X.

I came at it the other way around, since I inherited an older-model Mac laptop from my wife when she upgraded. I've been using Linux since the early SLS (later Slackware) distributions on my desktop and server systems. I like the way Apple has gone to some lengths to make issues like dealing with wireless networks pretty much bombproof, but I still prefer the configurability of my desktop Linux systems. The Mac UI isn't bad, but it makes me a bit cranky that there's no way to configure it to suit the user's way of working. Seems it's good to think outside the box, but only if you think the way Apple damn well tells you to.

Also, even after several years, it still bothers me that closing a window on a Mac doesn't terminate the application. I can understand the philosophical rationale (for what it's worth) behind this, but it seems unnecessary and wasteful.

Re:wrong OS?

[jedidiah]

MacOS is only easy to use if you don't stray from the party line. Otherwise
it can quickly become more difficult to deal with than either Windows or
Linux. It's much like the iPhone except you are more free to employ free
software (ironically enough) in order to smooth over these rough edges.

What Linux is lacking is major studio games. That is really the only area
where "content" is an issue since such games are ultimately as much about
non-programmer content as "code".

For most people, the web is where it's at and Linux is entirely suitable
to take up the slack for mobile devices when the self-inflicted limitations
of those cause you problems.

Re:wrong OS?

[pegdhcp]

BSD's not dead of course - look only to the Mach kernel in OS X for verification. If you want to see how a desktop UNIX-based os should do it right, look at OS X. Say what you will about Apple - I don't care, only own a mac and an iPod (I have a Droid X for my phone) - but they did the desktop RIGHT. It's easy to use, fairly intuitive (passes the grandma test, for the most part), and is oh so easy to support. I remember when I got my first macbook a few years back and I had a sprint wireless broadband card for it. I was thinking "you know, I should be able to make my mac a wifi base station and share my wireless". Preferences, sharing, .... oh, that was easy. And it worked.

Interestingly lots of people (including my wife and a number of fine arts graduates around her) do not realize that they are using a Unix system behind those shiny buttons and sliders. Do they need to know, what is a kernel, what is X and such? No, I do not think so. However if you know _and_ need you can start a terminal and start typing a cryptic series of charactes while people is watching you in amazement. This especially works, if you want to shutdown an ethernet in a _not so_ obvious way :)

More importantly (than interesting), Apple is doing something extremely correct and keeping their GUI intuative and (I do not know how, but) compatible with older OSs they released. Like the event you mentioned, after something like 10 years away from Mac environment, it took 2 or 3 minutes for me to have a secondary monitor connected, up and running with a macbook.

More to the point, related to the TFA, unfortunately I agree with it, on the point that Desktop is not a stronghold for Linux. The solution (if there would be any) will be in the form of a desktop manager, designed really professionally, probably not by geeks, and preferably by people who know users, and do not refer them as lusers, or talking about larting them etc.

Re:wrong OS?

[Intron]

Wow, is it this that time of year again? Another "Linux Desktop is DEAD!" article? Is the writer really in need of something to put in front of his editor?

C'mon. i'm tired of reading these damn articles all saying the same shit. They've been saying the same crap for over 5 years now.

That means we should soon see a headline "2011 will be the year of desktop Linux!"

Re:wrong OS?

[DrgnDancer]

Your sig aside, isn't that what Canonical was supposed to do? Has done really? That's the problem, when you get down to it. Canonical has done everything right. Ubuntu is easy to install, easy to configure, easy to patch, has about as good of driver support as is reasonably possible given manufacturer reluctance, its package management system is extensive and has a nice front end... There's nothing at all that Canonical did *wrong* to make a great Desktop OS, people just aren't interested. People buy a computer, they use what's on it. Manufacturers make computers and use what's easiest (which given the ecosystem of drivers and trained people is Microsoft no matter how easy an individual Ubuntu install is).

Apple has, through multimillion dollar ad campaigns, product differentiation, aiming at the premium space, and tie ins to its iPhone/iPod/iPad ecosystem, managed to get a couple percent more market share than they had 5 years ago. A few percentage points of the market for an ad campaign that no Linux vendor could hope to match, a premium hardware budget that few manufacturers would be willing to risk, and a device ecosystem that is unmatched by anyone. Honestly if Linux ever breaks 1% market penetration on the desktop it will be shocking.

I agree with the author. Linux on the desktop shouldn't be ignored of course. People do use it (including me), and will continue to use it. Continued focus on it as some sort of magical goal is silly though. Linux servers are everywhere, Linux portables are everywhere. Focus on what is working for you. It may well be that in ten years the "desktop" is irrelevant anyway. Whether because of the "cloud", portable devices, both, and/or them + some currently unknown factor the whole discussion is likely to have shifted anyway.

Re:wrong OS?

[skids]

That's orcish. Trolls can't count past two, and as such have no concept of "many."

Re:wrong OS?

[DJRumpy]

Stray from the party line? In what way? An OS does what it does. The fact that you can add 3rd party addons to expand or tweak it goes counter to your first statement. I equate the OS X GUI to Gnome. Minimal configuration for less hastle. Are you going to imply that you can't tweak Gnome because it's not very configurable out of the box?

MacOS is only easy to use if you don't stray from the party line. Otherwise it can quickly become more difficult to deal with than either Windows or Linux.

I support multiple households across 3 families with various flavors of Ubuntu, Windows, and OS X. OS X by far takes literally zero support hours. Linux takes second, and Windows is a weekly call from someone. For the average user, the GUI is perfect for 'the party line' because that's where the mainstream uses it.

Re:wrong OS?

[ConceptJunkie]

Office is even a stronger monopoly than Windows itself, if such a thing is possible. And the worst part is that Office (particularly Word and Access, and any of the apps once you start doing any VBA) is just plain horrible. The only reason anyone uses it is because of one of the two following things: 1. It's all they can use. 2. It's all they know how to use.

I can't imagine there's anyone with any real software experience who actually thinks Office is good. OOo is better, although it's hardly great. Of course, when it comes to word processing, I think the whole paradigm has completely failed. IMO, if you're not doing DTP, you should be using markup. Of course, that will never happen for 99.9% of users, even though it would be several orders easier and more efficient. Just think of all the billions of dollars of productivity going down the sinkhole of using Word. It boggles the mind.

Re:wrong OS?

[bledri]

... Also, even after several years, it still bothers me that closing a window on a Mac doesn't terminate the application. I can understand the philosophical rationale (for what it's worth) behind this, but it seems unnecessary and wasteful.

It's funny, but I actually like the differentiation between closing a window and an application. But I do a lot via the keyboard, not the mouse, so when I want to close a window I use Command-W and know that the application will still be in memory to use Command-O or Command-N rather than having to relaunch the app. If I want to quit then I use Command-Q. I was actually a bit annoyed when they changed "single window/document/view" type applications to exit when their window was closed (though I get the rational.)

I also launch everything from Spotlight rather than spelunking around the Finder. One of the funniest things to me is how people (not saying you) assume that Mac OS X is not for power users and is mouse centric. But if you enable "All Controls" in System Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts, have Spotlight enabled and know the difference between Command-Tab and Command-`, you can do most driving from the keyboard. Add the Automater's Save As Service, the consistent Service interface, applescript and the ability to assign global, application and context sensitive keyboard shortcuts and for me Mac OS X is a power user's dream. All right out of the box. For instance, using the Application's Shortcuts I've bound Command-. to bring up the System Preferences and by creating a "Finder Application.app" in the automator I can use Spotlight to jump right to the finder rather than tabbing through 20 apps or mousing around in expose. Plus Shift-Command-G in virtually any file dialog and Finder and you can type in a path rather than click up and down folder hierarchies.

While I'm in fanboy mode, I'll mention what I love most is the consistency. All (non-MS) application's text edit areas support the basic emacs-like ^a, ^d ^e, and ^k functionality. I'm an old emacs/bash guy, so I'm happy, even if it makes no sense to young-uns. Also, once you know about property lists, you can figure out where prefs are for 99% of applications. And if you can find to the right docs, you can tweak away. It almost sucks that there is no uninstaller, but it rarely matters and if you care - once again the consistency tells you exactly where to look for any left over files. I think that the "application bundle" is a great way to deal with managing all the files related to a program.

Apologies for the fanboyism. I also came from years of Linux experience, which I loved. But for some reason Mac OS X just "clicked" for me.

If you don't have it, I highly recommend TinkerTool which is free "as in beer" to explore some level of system/UI tweaking. Also, Lingon

is a pretty decent open source tool for navigating all the system and user startup services provided by launchd. It's no longer under development, but it's an Apache licensed program and pretty useful so maybe someone will pick it up. I install Lingon via MacPorts (though the git based HomeBrew" is intriguing...)

OK, I'll go away now...

Re:wrong OS?

[rubycodez]

funny slashdotters always talk about gaming when complaining about desktop Linux. most people I know don't even use their PC for games, they have dedicated game appliances. Some of the most popular game appliances in the world don't even run windows, imagine that. A WII, for example, uses customized Linux kernel....

Re:wrong OS?

[Belial6]

I can tell you why the Mac interface drives you nuts. Because compared to Windows and Linux, it sucks. For the most part they are all the same, but Macs have idiosyncrasies that you have to overcome. It is things like using a green + to shrink a window. That is just wrong. Things like the red X sometimes closing the application, and other times only closing the UI to the application leaving the to continue running.

Things like the menu bar being pegged to the top of the primary screen. That made sense when we only had one screen, and resolutions were so low that windows always needed to stack if you had more than one open at a time. Today we have multiple screens, so the 'flick the mouse to the corner' argument no longer applies, and having to figure out what application the menu bar applies to is just annoying and breaks the flow of work.

The list goes on and on, but Apple doesn't seem to want to admit that many parts of their UI are badly designed in the first place, or have become out of date for use on modern hardware, so they just keep repeating the mantra that Apple has an intuitive UI. I can definitely say that the emperor has no clothes.

Re:wrong OS?

[LWATCDR]

I use Linux and OS/X and Windows so I must ask what is hard to do on a Mac?
Really I have had a very small learning curve and I have not been stopped from doing anything yet. So an example would be nice.
And no it isn't just major studio games that are lacking.
A good professional CAD system.
An office package as good as MS Office. Office is still better than OO.org. It is just that OO,org is a better value.
Photoshop. Sorry but Gimp is good and even better than Photoshop Elements but it isn't better than Photoshop for high end use.
A video editor as good as the offerings from Apple, Adobe, and Sony.

And here is the big one. Device drivers! Linux's hardware support is actually very good but it needs a stable binary device driver interface!
Companies want to put a simple to install driver on the CD with the devices you buy! They do not want to force customers to install a compiler and Kernel sources!
Not only that but they do not want to have to wait for the driver to make in to the kernel.

That is is a killer issue for Linux on the desktop right now. If the hardware you buy isn't supported your in a world of hurt.
Oh and "checking before you buy" is not so easy. Take wifi for instance. The list of supported devices is by chipset! Boxes often do not list the chipset and they can even change over time.

Re:wrong OS?

[johnw]

Linux users have less respect the concept of intellectual property than as most computer users

That sentence is so mangled it's hard to be sure what you were trying to say, but it sounds like an assertion that Linux users have less respect for intellectual property than others. If that is indeed what you're saying, then the following part is a total non-sequitur.

IME, Linux users tend to have rather *more* respect for intellectual property than your average computer user, which is why they stick to using open source software rather than stealing commercial software. I've lost track of the number of times when I've had an average Windows-user-in-the-street asking me for a bootleg copy of Office, Photoshop or indeed Windows itself. Most of them are gobsmacked by the idea that there's something wrong with just copying them.

I use Open Source software because I respect the rights of creators of software - including their right to make it freely available.

Re:wrong OS?

[BlueStraggler]

You are just used to the idiosyncrasies of different desktop environments to the point that you don't think about them any more.

It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behaviour when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).

The green zoom button always causes grief to new users because they think it's ought to be a minimize/maximize button, which it isn't. This expectation is entirely a consequence of coming from UIs that treat minimize/maximize as a primary UI operation.

The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debateable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.

I agree that it is inaccurate to describe Apple's UI as intuitive---parts of it are astonishingly sophisticated. Intuitive suggests that it should be easy for new users, but that is the way of Clippy and Start buttons. Apple doesn't design to be intuitive--that's a leftover meme from 1985. Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.

Re:wrong OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.

In other words, Apple designs its products to be productive for people who have never been productive before, but people who are currently productive shouldn't expect to be productive using Apple products?

Re:wrong OS?

[drsmithy]

It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behaviour when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).

In other UIs it's irrelevant, because they're window-centric rather than app-centric. You're *always* just closing the window - whether that quits the application as well doesn't matter, because the UI is focused around windows (or "documents", if you prefer) as standalone elements, rather than elements in a child-parent relationship like MacOS does (except when it doesn't).

The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debateable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.

Everyone I know with a laptop connects it to a larger screen quite regularly to use a dual-screen setup, at which point the problems with the single menu bar become *very* apparent, as dissimilar screens in a multi-monitor setup exacerbates them badly.

Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.

Every since OSX 10.0 in 2000, Apple's primary objective with its UI design has been looking cool in demos. Utility has followed a far second.

Re:wrong OS?

[Belial6]

You are just used to the idiosyncrasies of different desktop environments to the point that you don't think about them any more.

This is what Apple fans like to tell themselves. Sorry, but it isn't true, and sticking your head in the sand doesn't make it so. My computer usage far predates both Windows and Mac.

It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behavior when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).

What are you talking about? One of us is confused about the definition of "Modal". What I can tell you is that the X button on both Linux and Windows is very consistent. It closes the window, and any of the windows children. The only applications I have run across on Windows that do not follow the consistent behavior are bittorrent clients and IM clients. (Inconsistent, but I understand why.) With MacOS, it is all over the board.

The green zoom button always causes grief to new users because they think it's ought to be a minimize/maximize button, which it isn't. This expectation is entirely a consequence of coming from UIs that treat minimize/maximize as a primary UI operation.

You sound ridiculous saying this. The reason that the green + button causes grief is because for as long as any of us have been alive, we have agreed that a + symbol means 'add'. I means you are making something more or bigger. Green means go. So, a green + means go bigger. In fact, if the green + button was minimize/maximize, it would still be wrong. A green plus should never shrink a window.

So, no, it isn't because I am used to other OSes. It is because I am used to being a human who is part of society beyond Mac computers.

The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debatable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.

The placement of the menu was debatable back when single monitors where the only setup. Today, it isn't debatable any more. It is now simply a poor design. So, Apple uses a system that is bad for use at a desk and is neutral for a portable instead of using a UI that would work well for both. Notice I did not say "desktop" because when used at a desk, a laptop will often have two monitors hooked to it. It is funny that you use this argument, yet you claim that the OS is designed to be productive. An OS who chooses to make multiple monitors a second class citizen in it's UI design cannot be claimed as one that is designed to be productive.

I agree that it is inaccurate to describe Apple's UI as intuitive---parts of it are astonishingly sophisticated. Intuitive suggests that it should be easy for new users, but that is the way of Clippy and Start buttons. Apple doesn't design to be intuitive--that's a leftover meme from 1985. Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.

You are the only one claiming this. The mantra of Apple has been that "It just works" (and when it doesn't, it is the users fault) and is "Intuitive". There is nothing inherently more productive about Apples UI. In fact, it is things like the lack of a maximize button, the fact that to increase window size, you can only do it from the lower right corner, and putting the menu for a program on a different screen that the application, that makes the MacOS UI LESS productive.

While Clippy was a failed attempt at a better help system, the Start button is useful, productive AND intuitive. MacOS also has a start button of it's own. It is just split between the 'Appli

Re:wrong OS?

[Belial6]

And there you go. When MacOS does something badly, it must be the users fault. No, green is not used because it is "optimum". If that was the case, it wouldn't be green after you pushed it. It doesn't resize to the document size, Go open iTunes. Click on the green button. (which for some reason is positioned vertically instead of horizontally) One of those screen sizes is not 'optimal'. I would say neither is, but we should all be able to agree that they can't both be the optimal size. Besides, wouldn't you claim that the whole UI is good and optimal? Shouldn't the whole screen be green in that case? Also the plus is NOT intuitive. Plus means Add. It should NEVER shrink the screen. It is the opposite of intuitive.

As for the menu, when you step away from your computer, and have two copies of RDP open. When you come back, how do you know which one the menu applies to? Don't say, you would just remember. Because that could be the next morning. Asking people to remember what the last window they clicked on the night before when there are perfectly good ways for the UI to tell them is bad UI design. (And no, the amount of space taken by a menu does not matter anymore. That is just a poor excuse for bad UI design.)

three million

[xzvf]

A 1-2% usage rate equals ~three million desktop users in the United States.

Re:three million

[cindyann]

If 2% == 3M, which doesn't seem unreasonable, then 98% == 147M.

I know a VC or two. They aren't investing in companies producing software that has a target market of 3M customers when they could be investing in companies who are writing for those other 147M.

Just look at how long it took Apple to gain traction, and they still have what, 10% of the market? At least what Apple had going for it was a superior user experience over the next best thing at the time. Gnome and KDE have come a long way and they're pretty decent now, but they're not "killer app" better experiences than what you get on Mac and Windows these days.

Re:three million

[hvm2hvm]

But it's the percent of the people who actually come to your site that's important. If you make a site that has about 50000 users per day, taking care of the x% which use opera will yield a low number that doesn't seem important. Yes, if you had visitors from virtually all computers every day (e.g. facebook) you might want to think it as "3million lost users" but that's usually not the case. Not that I'm not advocating against standard compliant sites but you have to realise why some site maintainers don't provide compatibility with a browser.

Re:three million

[rtb61]

Just one query about that percentage, where exactly do dual boots end up. Do dual boots just disappear to favour the company paying for the most adds, surely the choice to dual boot should outweigh 'we are a monopoly and we are going to force manufacturers to supply you a cheap version of the OS'. You got the software as an OEM and you use it to play games but does that really count as a desktop or just a game console and the OS you boot to do work, really counts as your desktop of choice.

Why exactly does a dual boot windows and Linux machine only get counted as a windows box. Why does a dual boot Linux and Apple machine only get counted as a Apple machine. I would bet a windows and apple dual boot gets counted twice to fluff up the numbers. Why does a box without an OS get counted as nothing. Why doesn't Android count as it is a fork of Linux and elements of the code base will merge.

Desktop Linux is dead, WTF, yet another journalist that fails grasp open source or real choice, there is only one company who can give real statistics of Linux and that is Google, those privacy invasive buggers can quite readily even count the dual booters out there.

Re:three million

[Yvan256]

If you want a "killer app", Left 4 Dead 2 launched on the Mac a few weeks ago.

Re:three million

[Wyatt Earp]

The poster went for a 2500 dollar PC, so I found a 2500 Mac.

You could do a Nehalem for $800 total? The CPU is $1300 for a retail box CPU

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100008494%2050001157%20600048526&IsNodeId=1&name=Nehalem
Intel Xeon X5560 Nehalem 2.8GHz LGA 1366 95W Quad-Core Server Processor - $1372

Not dead on my desktop

[denshao2]

I have been using Linux for the past 5 years and I have no plans to abandon it.

Re:Not dead on my desktop

[bsDaemon]

I started running FreeBSD and Linux at home in the 8th grade. Now I'm 26, and frankly, am more than happy to just let my *BSD and Linux machines sit in a server room and out of my way. I'll interact with them via SSH from my MacBook Pro. It's Unix enough to allow me to do what I want to do, and I have VMWare images of FreeBSD 8-STABLE, OpenBSD 4.7, Fedora 13 with the CERT data forensics tools, and WIndows 7 Professional, if I need to do something on a "real" BSD, Linux or Windows system locally.

But, I can close the lid of my laptop and it goes to sleep, open it and it wakes up. I don't have to write wpa-supplicant files by hand, worry about wireless drivers, or anything else. I can watch my DVDs, I can watch internet videos if I want to (as much as I bitch about youtube culture and whatnot, there are occasionally things worth watching that happen to live inside of an embedded flash player), my battery life doesn't suck and I spend a lot less time beating my head against the wall due to "not quite 100% compatible" issues.

There are enough little idiosyncrasies in OS X to occasionally make me face palm, but I'm about 95% happy with it. I have a supermicro 1u running FreeBSD at home, a CentOS VPS living at the hosting company I used to admin for, and currently work in a BSD shop, where they provided me with a new iMac as a workstation, which is a pretty nice step up from the crummy Dell running Fedora I was stuck with at my last job.

Frankly, I don't think I'm alone in a rather large section of professional Unix people who want at least one personal machine that they don't have to fight with all the time. Apple products aren't that rare of a scene at BSD conferences either, then again, Apple did hire a bunch of BSD people like Jordan Hubbard to help make OS X as kick-ass as it is under the hood.

Re:Not dead on my desktop

[koiransuklaa]

I can close the lid of my laptop and it goes to sleep, open it and it wakes up. I don't have to write wpa-supplicant files by hand, worry about wireless drivers, or anything else. I can watch my DVDs, I can watch internet videos if I want to

Random (and especially cheap) hardware may still have problems, but seriously: buy good hardware and you get all that with linux -- at least that's my experience. My last three X-series Thinkpads have all done the above without any tweaking...

So...?

[ByOhTek]

While everything mentioned is a big detractor, that doesn't mean that Linux on the Desktop is dead. At some point, someone could come up with a way to make it work. Ubuntu was certainly more of a leap than a step in the right direction. It's moving closer every year. Of course, the desktop seems to be moving away every year too, it's a catch-up race with MS and Apple in the lead. Overall, it does seem Linux is gaining ground, just slowly.

Re:So...?

[narrowhouse]

I almost agree with the premise of the article, just based on the fact that I think the DESKTOP is dying. Between phones and tablets I expect typical Desktop OS installations to become the minority in less than 5 years, though the desktop will live on in business, which doesn't leave time for Linux to "catch up", it will just be a player in a new game.

Fuck

[binarylarry]

I upgraded to Ubuntu Maverick Meetkat last week.

It's the best desktop I ever used. And now its dead. :(

Re:Fuck

[abigsmurf]

I upgraded to Maverick Meerkat last week. I was most disappointed when it failed to give me cheap deals on my car insurance.

Too obscure?

Re:Fuck

[muckracer]

> I upgraded to Ubuntu Maverick Meetkat last week.

> It's the best desktop I ever used. And now its dead. :(

Well...if you just look AT your box it's both alive and dead. Whereas if you look inside, it's either/or. Therefore we can conclude with certainty, that the rumours of the death of Linux on the desktop box are between 0 - 100% wrong...depending on your entanglement with the Maverick Meerkat. :-)

Re:Fuck

[xtracto]

It was Dead on Arrival...

Really, each Ubuntu upgrade is shittier than the previous one.

They should extend their "beta" period in 2 months (or call it "gamma" period) so that they have the chance to fix all the bugs they supply in the release CD.

Seriously, for each new upgrade I have to download like 300MB of patches just a month after it is released. WTF

Re:Fuck

[VGPowerlord]

I upgraded to Maverick Meerkat last week. I was most disappointed when it failed to give me cheap deals on my car insurance.

Too obscure?

I didn't know Maverick Meerkat did that. Now, if you'd said Dealing Duck or Gibbering Gecko, then it'd make sense.

Re:Fuck

[L4t3r4lu5]

They're related, but not the same. Maverick Meerkat starred in an adaptation of a feature film about homosexual fighter pilots.

huh... why now?

[someonestolecc]

... i dont get it.. why now? why at all? i've been using it for years so for me it's great ..

Re:huh... why now?

[maztuhblastah]

... i dont get it.. why now? why at all?

Because Mr. Strohmeyer needed an article, and PCWorld needs their advertising revenue.

trolling trolling trolling

[roman_mir]

This entire "story" must be summed up by the following:

Rawhide
I owe you $200 and you boys drank $300 worth of beer

Trolling, trolling, trolling
Trolling, trolling, trolling
Trolling, trolling, trolling
Trolling, trolling, trolling

Rawhide

Trolling, trolling, trolling
Though the streams are swollen
Keep them doggies trolling
Rawhide

Rain and wind and weather
Hell bent for leather
Wishing my gal was by my side

All the things I'm missin'
Good vittels, lovin', kissin'
Are waiting at the end of my ride

Move 'em on, head' em up
Head 'em up, move' em on
Move 'em on, head' em up
Rawhide

Cut 'em out, ride 'em in
Ride 'em in, cut 'em out
Call 'em out, ride 'em in
Rawhide

Keep moving, moving, moving
Though they're disapproving
Keep them doggies moving
Rawhide

Don't try to understand 'em
Just rope, throw and brand 'em
Soon we'll be living high and wide

My heart calculatin'
My true love will be waitin'
Be waiting at the end of my ride
Move 'em on, head' em up
Head 'em up, move' em on
Move 'em on, head' em up
Rawhide

Cut 'em out, ride 'em in
Ride 'em in, cut 'em out
Call 'em out, ride 'em in
Rawhide

Move 'em on, head' em up
Head 'em up, move' em on
Move 'em on, head' em up
Rawhide

Cut 'em out, ride 'em in
Ride 'em in, cut 'em out
Call 'em out, ride 'em in
Rawhide

Trolling, trolling, trolling
Trolling, trolling, trolling
Trolling, trolling, trolling
Trolling, trolling, trolling
Rawhide

Rawhide

Games

[Laz10]

All I need is games.

I need nothing, absolutly nothing exception playable games.
WINE doesn't cut it, and I don't think that it ever will, I try it out regulary and it just sucks for the games I play.

Since 2004 I have been dual-booting between Ubuntu, where I do all serious and not so serious stuff, and Windows where I keep my FPS addiction alive (currently MW2)

Re:Games

[Anonymous Coward]

starcraft 2 works flawlessly with wine out of the box. Been playing it solely on ubuntu over 100 games played and including online games without drops or lag. Seems almost as if they tested it on wine before shipping the game.... just amazing that it works so well.

Re:Games

[imakemusic]

That and decent music creating software. I've said it before but I'll say it again: while it is possible to create music on Linux it is by no means easy or enjoyable. Get me Ableton Live on Linux and I'll be happy.

Oh, and Photoshop.

and a pony.

Re:Games

[imakemusic]

Well version 7 that you link to is Platinum rated but that came out in 2002 and is a little bit dated. There have been 5 major versions released since then. Two of these are rated platinum, the rest are silver. And a lot of them say "does not install" or "installs, with workarounds".

Going by that I am going to assume that you haven't actually tried this yourself, you just went and looked it up as an attempt to counter my argument.

Long live The Desktop Linux!

[rvw]

The Desktop Linux is dead! Long live the Desktop Linux! (You may shout out and dance around.)

Long live Linux on the Desktop

[just_another_sean]

As long as I can download and install a free OS for my computer from any number of sources I consider Linux (on the Desktop) alive and kicking. News of its demise has luckily not reached my Desktop and it is chugging along just fine.

Good timing

[lotec85]

I got on board the Linux bandwagon just as the wheels fell off!

Re:Good timing

[JustOK]

don't worry, they'll reinvent the wheel

Mobilize the mob

[zill]

and the fierce ideology of the open-source community at large

Linux troll! M$ minion! He needs to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

Haven't we heard this before?

[whizbang77045]

Funny, I thought I heard this about the Mac several years ago. I have faith in Microsoft. They could alienate anyone.

I hate to say this but...

[leachim6]

I think a lot of linux fans don't mind it being an "indie os" y'know?

One other thing

[btcoal]

Linux is also the only major OS that cannot advertise. Ubuntu 10.10 has great copy on its website extolling the benefits and showing that you can do pretty much anything on Ubuntu that you can on a Mac or Windows based PC. But...you only see that if you're already on the Ubuntu landing page. Linux also doesnt come pre-installed on the vast majority of new PC's either.

Re:One other thing

[DrXym]

Linux is also the only major OS that cannot advertise.

Yes it can. Novell, IBM, Red Hat et al have sunk millions of dollars into advertising. Unfortunately they're advertising to people who buy servers and such like, not deploying desktops. I expect these companies realise it's kind of futile and high risk to chase the consumer market when Microsoft have it sewn up.

Ubuntu 10.10 has great copy on its website extolling the benefits and showing that you can do pretty much anything on Ubuntu that you can on a Mac or Windows based PC. But...you only see that if you're already on the Ubuntu landing page. Linux also doesnt come pre-installed on the vast majority of new PC's either.

Therein lies the problem. People who have Windows or OS X are not going to be convinced to undergo the trauma of switching operating systems for one which can "do pretty much anything ... that you can do on a Mac or Windows PC". So I switch dist and I'm almost but not quite where I was when I started, what was the point of that?

I believe it would be more productive to deemphasize the OS and promote things like Firefox, OpenOffice etc. that run on top of it. If an OS runs all the apps a user is used then they're far less likely to care what is running underneath the next time they switch.

Mass market games

[asicsolutions]

The only reason I run windows on my computer at home and my kids computer is games. Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, Civ5, Steam. If all of those were available under Linux _At the same time_ as the PC counterparts, I would wipe windows off my PC tonight. I am writing this on my work laptop HP DV8t running opensuse 11.3.

wait...

[polle404]

But I thought this was the year of the linux desktop?

seriously, are we starting the troll posts and flamebaits in the articles now?

TFA written by a Windows magazine editor?

[bl8n8r]

I figured microsoft had more to worry about right now than FUD'ing up the linux arena with Paid-for blogging*, but meh.

Desktop Linux works for me, and has been since 1997. If you don't like it, don't use it. Be thankful you have alternatives. If it weren't for *nix, you probably wouldn't.

[*] - http://www.blogger.com/profile/5530582
            http://www.flickr.com/photos/strohmy/315871552/

no need for Tux to look sad

[yyxx]

Linux is very much alive on the desktop; it is very widely used inside corporations and universities. These "1% market share" figures are meaningless; they are usually based on device sales or web site statistics of popular web sites, neither of which tell you much about "desktop" Linux.

Linux hasn't grabbed much of the general purpose consumer desktop market, but that market is pretty much stagnant in itself. The new consumer market is tablets, netbooks, and smartphones, and Linux is grabbing a large chunk of that with Android and (in the near future) MeeGo and Chrome.

No need for Tux to look sad.

Re:no need for Tux to look sad

[CdBee]

I run Linux myself - and tel all my friends why its great. Most of them are interested up 'til the point where they ask if they can run out the lates MS Office on it, and Photoshop CS for their camera, and iTunes for their iPod/iPhone, and the official Yahoo and MSN Messenger releases.

When I tell them that some of the above work but buggily under API emulation, and the rest don't, they arent interesting in hearing about other, similar apps that can do the same thing. You can talk 'til you;re blue in the face about OpenOffice and aMSN / Pidgin (not mentioning GIMP, far too silly name) - but at that point you've already lost.

Re:no need for Tux to look sad

[yyxx]

On an Ubuntu 10.4 system, I plug in my iPod Touch and it just shows up in Rhythmbox, allowing music to be transferred both ways. It works both on my laptop and my desktop; I didn't do anything special.

Have you tried starting up Rhythmbox?

Right... okay...

[Sylak]

So, by citing many unrelated facts, and some things which the average user doesn't know enough about to care, he has proved that Desktop Linux is dead. Okay, i buy that.

Linux will continue to fail till the games come.

[Jartan]

Everyone always thinks the point of games is biased but the reality is a large portion of nerds/geeks/hackers/etc are gamers. These people are not in any way large compared to the market as a whole but they make up a huge chunk of the people that can easily switch and might want to switch. Without these people leading the way for others to switch I suspect Linux will always be stuck.

Clearly Microsoft knows what it's doing too. This is probably the main reason they don't just outright 100% abandon their PC game market in favor of the Xbox.

Evil Twin day?

[zwei2stein]

What is going on today on /.?

Linux Destop is Dead, Top 10 Reasons to Work for Micsoroft, Pirated Software Making Anti Teorist Drones Fail, MS Donating Software to Charity, Why We Should Use Dell and Forget Custom Desktops, Earth Shortage...

Did ... did it finally grow up? Sell out? Get brainwashed? Recieved ms-paid escort service? All of it in one hectic night?

I agree with one thing: fragmentation

[fgaliegue]

For goodness' sake, since Qt had gone LGPL (thanks no Nokia, admittedly), why does Gnome still exist at all??

KDE has proven superior for many years, freedesktop.org has started unifying some desktop components, but the progress is SLOW. Why tens of sound APIs? Why tens of imaging APIs? Why tens of video APIs? Why less than ten, but still more than one, packaging format?

Choice is good - until a certain extent. And as far as the desktop is concerned, non open source application developers will want ONE api to work with ALL Linux distros out there. That's a fact. Live with it.

Re:I agree with one thing: fragmentation

[fgaliegue]

I should add: whoever modded parent (mine, OK) as troll should have a reality check. Honestly.

Re:I agree with one thing: fragmentation

[Thumper_SVX]

I wish I had mod points here, and that you hadn't been tagged as a troll. Although your KDE-specific evangelism IS a bit of a problem, your core point is actually very valid and correct. It's the APIs and programming interfaces that make Linux on the desktop almost unusable for the average user. If there weren't 20 different ways of doing everything then we'd have some more traction and a more usable desktop.

I'll relate one of my most recent experiences... just this weekend in fact. I upgraded my Kubuntu 10.04 to Kubuntu 10.10 on Friday. I then spent an hour on Saturday trying to fathom how in hell to control my sound inputs so that I could make Skype use the microphone on my headset instead of the built in one on my laptop. An hour. And you know what the fix was? To install a different mixer for PulseAudio instead of the deafult KDE one so I could select my microphone inputs. Even then it was opaque as hell and took some experimentation using Audacity in monitor mode (which I had installed already but isn't installed by default) to determine which one worked and setting the appropriate input level. I mean WTF? A normal user would have given up at the point of clicking on the KDE Mixer and not finding any functions there to switch inputs. A middling-experience user would maybe have poked around in System Settings (of which there are NONE!) before giving up and installing Windows.

This is a huge problem. I have been working as a systems analyst for years, run Linux since 1993 as a side project, spent several years from 1999 to 2004 running it as my primary OS before switching to Mac. I have only recently returned to trying to use it as my primary OS, and while I'm incredibly impressed with Kubuntu 10.10, the lack of some critical applications and the incredible inconsistency between APIs and interfaces is making me think maybe a new Mac laptop is in my future. I really want to give Linux the shot because I recently got an awesome laptop to run it on and I am definitely on-board with the whole FOSS thing. Even I had trouble and had to resort to some rather opaque Google searches. This is not the way to win users at home OR in the Enterprise. Trust me; enterprise desktop tech support don't have time for this crap either and would rather just install Windows 7 on the hardware.

Re:On the contrary

[jxs2151]

Linux desktop is very much alive...on thinclients :)

However, what is up with the obvious story troll? Are the /. numbers low today?

"...what is up with the obvious story troll?"

This is what the author was referring to when he mentioned "...the fierce ideology of the open-source community...". Dismissing non-believers as heretics/trolls makes you an ideologue and renders the platform unattractive to regular users. Your natural reaction to this will be to dismiss regular users as not worthy of Linux but nobody wants to adopt a platform that gets them trashed by smelly, overbearing, slogan-yelling hippies.

Thanks asshole.

What's still keeping me away

[elrous0]

I'm a pretty geeky guy who has played around with Linux many times over the years (starting back in the late 90's), hoping to get away from Windows. Frankly, I would love nothing better than an OS I could put on my parents' computers and not have to worry about them calling me a month later complaining about all the pop-ups and viruses they have. And, while great strides have been made with Ubuntu, I'm still not convinced that Linux will ever be that OS I'm looking for. I know these will all be poo-pooed by the Linux fans, but here are/were some of the problems that I (as a very technically literate Windows user) have run up against when I've installed Linux in the past*:

1. Confusing distros Just thinking about all the different distros and configurations still gives me a headache. Ubuntu has blunted this somewhat, but even with that you have to get into the Gnome vs. KDE thing, which is damned confusing to a layperson. The worst part of this is trying to download software for Linux off of some website and running into multiple versions with odd notations regarding different distros.
2. Poor documentation Again, Ubuntu helps. But even that is spotty compared to Windows. And the "documentation" website of many distros (and Linux software apps) is little more than a bugfix list.
3. Software, Software, Software this is the biggest problem, and not so easily dismissed as some fans would pretend. My mom, for example, uses special software to interface with her high-end sewing machine. Is it available for Linux? Probably not. Can I just direct her to a clone of equal quality? Probably not.
4. Little support (if not openly hostile) There aren't a lot of places to call for Linux support. And a lot of the places you can go for support on the net are filled with Linuix fanatics who are openly hostile to Windows switchers and newbies. The level of "you don't belong here" attitude towards newbies in Linux circles makes Apple fans look civil.
5. Ways of doing things that are confusing to a Windows user with windows, I can go to a website, download an installer and install my software. with Linux I can install it via the built-in installer. but that only works if said software is in the repository. If not, getting it installed is often a lot more complex than just downloading a file and double clicking on it to install. Which brings me to:
6. Still too much reliance on the command line interface Telling someone to break out a command line and type "sudo apt-get whateverthefuck" is like telling a Windows user to reinstall DOS and learn its syntax.

Those are just some of the reasons Linux still isn't there for me. Ubuntu has come a long way toward this, but it's still just not there.

*maybe some of these issues have been more recently resolved, but I can only go on my fairly recent dealings with Ununtu and Debian.

Re:What's still keeping me away

[js3]

Pretty right on most points. To me linux distros are like wrapping paper. underneath it's still a chaotic mess as soon as you try to install anything not included with the distro you run into install hell. Software is the most annoying thing to me when I deal with linux. So you find this app you want to install.. install it and it requires lib.version.x or whatever. So you go download the said lib and it's version x+5 and it doesn't work and all that bullshit. Why can't they just come as independent packages? Too much reliance on this or that lib.

Re:What's still keeping me away

[Colonel Korn]

Frankly, I would love nothing better than an OS I could put on my parents' computers and not have to worry about them calling me a month later complaining about all the pop-ups and viruses they have.

With my parents, Windows 7 with Firefox/Adblock as a browser finally accomplished this. By default they don't allow root privileges when prompted unless they were planning on installing something or it's on the very short list of annoying but safe autoupdaters they've seen and cleared with me.

Re:What's still keeping me away

[hoggoth]

KDE vs. Gnome: Tell me about it!

I wanted a drop dead simple distro for my wife and my mother to do their email and web browsing with no more virus headaches. I read up and found that Linux Mint was the friendliest experience out of the box.
I went to Linux Mint's website to get it and was offered this choice:

Linux Mint Gnome 32 bit edition
Linux Mint Gnome 64 bit edition
Linux Mint KDE 32 bit edition
Linux Mint KDE 64 bit edition
Linux Mint Xfce 32 bit edition
Linux Mint Xfce 64 bit edition
Linux Mint LDXE edition
Linux Mint Fluxbox edition
Linux Mint Debian edition

WTF. Now maybe I'm out of the loop and haven't been going to my local Linux club meetings, and I certainly don't know the secret handshake, but seeing this choice with absolutely no explanation of what the hell the difference is does not inspire me about a distro famous for being "simple for newcomers".

Perhaps there is ONE MAIN DEFAULT edition with some alternate editions available, but that isn't how it appears on their webpage.

I think I'll get them Macs.

reality check

[Tom]

and amazing strides in usability

Uh, where?

Every time I checked, both KDE and Gnome were pretty much busy copying whatever the latest UI abominations out of Redmond were at the time. Their UI design people completely ignore usability, and the fact that Microsoft can inflict great usability pains on their users simply because they have so many and most of them are locked in.

An alternative OS needs to provide something better, not just a cheap copy.

There are a few innovations and advances, I'll grant that. But the main interfaces are crap, pure and simple. Because usability is expensive. You simply can not create good usability at a programmer's desk. You need user testing, labs, feedback cycles and, most importantly, a clear vision. Some non-programmer understanding of design would also help a lot.

Sad

[zn0k]

It is kind of sad how obvious the whole "flamewars for ad views" thing has become on this site.

Re:seriously? you guys posted this?

[neumayr]

The only thing that keeps businesses running Windows at all is the large volume of industry-specific applications (and even web sites) that only work on Win32 and IE. It certainly isn't lower support costs.

Uh huh. Even if that were true, you're expecting them to reimplement all those application to what, Linux and Firefox?

This story is a troll, yes, but as long as it's here, let's feed it!

Oh come on.

[Dancindan84]

10 years ago before the iPod was released if someone had told me that Apple would have a wildly popular music device, a huge share of the smart phone market, a respectable piece of the desktop market and unbelievable sway over industry direction I'd have been hard pressed to say I thought it would happen. At the time they were fairly niche to graphic work for the most part, similar to how Linux is currently doing it's best in the server niche.

"2010 is the year of the Linux desktop!!" isn't realistic, but neither is "Linux on the desktop is dead!!"

Re:Oh come on.

[Combatso]

Apple is a company with a leader, they set clear goals and work towards that... While I see your point, I don't think you can really draw comparisons. I don't think we will ever see the age of "linux on the desktop", however since Android, ChromeOS and all that mature we may see an "age of [linux in disguise]" on the desktop. My point being, a community can't drive the market to linux, but a big player like G certainly can... IF they have the right people with the right vision.

Regarding Flash

[cedars]

"the fragmentation of the Linux platform and the hurdles presented by..."alpha-quality" drivers for audio and video hardware made success elusive for the [Linux] Flash development team."

Okay, fair enough. But how does Adobe/Macromedia then explain the failure to deliver a decent plug-in on the two other major platforms, Mac OS X and Windows?

Re:On the contrary

[Fnkmaster]

Dude, this morning has been one troll story after another. Look at the last 3-4 stories - Microsoft is dead, Linux is dead, now we just need a Mac is dead story and we'll complete the troll trifecta.

Really I would say Linux on the desktop is a safe

[DarkOx]

Look at it this way. The operating system is becoming more and more a commodity. Most of the content "desktop" users want is online, and is going to be accessed via browsers. The other things they want to do are pretty much play video disks (blue-ray is a problem right now) and do pretty basic document editing and e-mail. There are some users that want do basic video work and like as well.

None of these things require a finely tuned OS any more, even Linux with its recent advances in hardware detection and automatic configuration do a good enough job that all this is possible with little technical know how. I don't even have an xorg.conf on the system I am using right now. Android phones are more capable than the PCs most of us were using less than a decade ago. Linux certainly can be the platform on which an end user interface is build and its proven it can host the ever more limited selection of applications.

There is not going to be a market for Operating systems that have licensing costs for home users pretty soon. Look how popular the IPAD is! More and more people are realizing what they want is a smart phone with a word processor and some games, a PIM, and financial package of some type; not a "home PC". Linux devices are perfect for that role; as Droid has already proven. Just wait until some of the tablet manufacturers like Motion Computing marry their existing hardware (tablets with stands and removable keyboards) to a droid like platform and target consumers. My guess is they will have the same success Apple is enjoying.

X is Dead

[jokermatt999]

"(X) is Dead" is just as unrealistic as "(X) is the Year of the Linux Desktop". I think the TFA is right that Linux may never gain a majority share, but that doesn't mean it's *dead*.

Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business

[Culture20]

There aren't any business databases available for either OS. And I mean databases like dBaseIII or Paradox for DOS, and NOT the useless piece of shit Windows versions. No database, no deal. Many are using Access but if you've ever used anything well designed you don't like it.

The PHP/Javascript/MyPostrgressSQL combo is an abortion. We need something that those who know the business rules can use to implement said rules, and do it easily.

If it ever happens, the publisher will make billions overnight. I'm still selling PDoxDOS apps. Hey stupid, they work.

Oh Dr. Pauker, where art thou?

Do they work in DosBox?

Not just the Linux desktop

[bergie]

I'd say, the concept of desktop as it was defined through 80s and 90s is beginning to die. Touch interfaces, actually well-working mobile devices and web services ("the cloud") are taking over more and more of the desktop's traditional role. More than a problem for the Linux desktop, I see this shift as a big opportunity as the importance of the traditional vendors like Microsoft is declining. Here are some ideas on what the "Linux desktop" ought to do: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/the_web_and_the_free_desktop/

Re:Not just the Linux desktop

[Ephemeriis]

I'd say, the concept of desktop as it was defined through 80s and 90s is beginning to die.

Agreed.

Smartphones, iPhones, iPods, and iPads are becoming major players. We've got an assortment of ebook readers and netbooks and whatnot that don't really run a traditional "desktop" OS of any kind. Even conventional Windows machines are shipping with stripped-down non-desktop environments loaded on them. My new Dell latitude came with some kind of Linux-based instant-on environment for surfing the web and reading email. Folks buy televisions and set-top boxes that'll stream content from YouTube or Hulu or Google or Netflix or wherever.

I have no doubt that Windows is going to hang around for a long time. And we're going to have desktop computers running desktop OS'es for a long time. But I think the relevance of the desktop is waning.

Folks are more interested in the content than how they access it. Folks want to pull up Facebook, they don't really care if they're doing it on an iPhone, or an Android phone, or a Mac, or a Windows box, or what. They just want their Facebook.

Re:On the contrary

[Apatharch]

I don't know whether it was an editor* or the author of the article himself (my bet's on the latter), but whoever chose the title "Desktop Linux: The Dream Is Dead" was undoubtedly trolling. (*At PCWorld, I mean, not /.)

Re:So....

[Fnkmaster]

Sure, the stories often suck, but once you filter out the trolls and complete morons, there's actually a great community of bright and interesting people who post comments here. You know, the people who've been around since the earlier era of the internet, the people who know an awful lot about science, technology and computing. That's what keeps me coming back - it's certainly not the brilliant editorial insights of the staff (guffaw).

Backroom deals killed Linux on the Desktop.

[miffo.swe]

Every time Linux has been on its way to success on the desktop Microsoft has stepped in and made its life short. Why did Dell despite pretty decent figures refuse to sell their Linux desktops in the open? Why was it only avaliable in a very limited amount of countries? Why did a computer with Linux cost more than one without an OS or FreeDos, or Windows?

Linux was well enroute to gooble the whole netbook market up when suddenly Asus ditched it overnight after hard pressure from Microsoft. Resellers refused to take it in despite good sales figures.

This has nothing to do with Linux in itself. It could be the best OS in the world but it still dont have a chance until the monopoly is broken. The OEMs are held by the balls by Microsoft and nothing will change until that grip is lessened.

You can't fail what you don't try to do

[CodePwned]

My name is Chad and I hate using linux... however....

Linux has never tried to replace windows for the common user. It's focused on being a useful, security minded, light weight alternative for power users, IT professionals etc...

Linux has never marketed itself as a gaming platform, or multimedia home system etc. There are flavors of linux USED that way, but never advertised like windows. Linux has only recently (past 5 years) reached a point where it is user friendly to new users. Fedora Core or Unbuntu really took off with the whole user experience.

"But there's no content!"... what are you smoking? Sure... your mom can't install "Couponfriend" on a linux machine but that's not what Linux as a whole is focusing on. Linux is a business grade utility. It's a solid alternative to windows that allows you to do almost everything windows can do. The limitations you encounter are what programs you use.

A company I work with recently made the push to move to linux distros instead of windows. Dear lord the users hated it at first until productivity went up, and IT costs went down after 6 months.

There were 567 LESS tickets concerning hacked machines, malware and crashes. The centralized management software they use controls what can be installed on the machine... and pushing installs works just like windows except the machine doesn't have to restart. This solved a lot of issues for the small business as they just couldn't afford the windows equivalents.

The difficulty comes in what programs are being used. Users navigate just like they used to to find files. Hell they even created "My Document" folders... except those are hosted on a SAN, but the user doesn't know.

Linux is NOT dead as a desktop OS. It just might not be at the point of a typical user who thinks Best Buy is a smart place to go for a computer.

Again?

[suso]

Its dead again? Good thing it has a bunch of friends that can cast level 9 resurrection.

Re:Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what's dead? Paper magazines about computers, like PC World.

Can I have those 5 minutes back?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article sites a lack of good DRM and the move toward cloud computing as the primary indicators that Linux is not only dead, but will always be dead, despite having become viable in terms of ease of use and stability, etc. Ugh. So are savings accounts dead now that almost everyone uses credit? Are families dead because people can buy condoms? What about going outside? Is going outside dead?

That was painfully stupid.

XP's end of life will see a jump in Linux adoption

[Robo1icious]

When XP reaches its end of life Linux will see a huge jump in users. Microsoft has done a good job of making sure Vista and Windows 7 are difficult to maintain without a valid license. Once they end support for XP many users will be left with the decision of spending several hundred dollars on a License or learning to love Linux for free.

Re:On the contrary

[Anonymous Coward]

You should look up what "troll" means. It does not mean "lie", it means the article was written to garner attention. Which it was.

While you're at it, look up what "ideologue" means. It doesn't mean fanatic.

Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business

[TheSpoom]

Please elaborate: What features do you feel that MySQL (purely as a database, not counting what language is used to interface with it since it can be interfaced with practically anything) is missing? Same question for PostgreSQL.

Lame and pointless

[after.fallout.34t98e]

Most computer users I come across need 4 applications: an internet browser, a pdf viewer, a program that can open word and a program that can open excel files. I haven't seen a Linux desktop that doesn't provide these out of the box in the past few years.

So, what is missing from getting Linux to the masses?
1. retail distribution channels (walmart, dell, ...)
2. marketing presence
3. easy to use, consolidated app store with a way for users to actually pay for stuff

Google could easily fix all 3 of those issues; why hasn't it yet? ... ChromeOS. Expect a solid windows competitor in the next few years.

I'm posting this from a Linux desktop

[dwheeler]

I'm posting this, from a Linux desktop. It doesn't look dead to me.

Re:On the contrary

[beschra]

Troll Trifecta. I like the sound of that. I don't care about the meaning just the sound. Troll Trifecta. Troll Trifecta. Troll Trifecta.

Yes it's all.. true?

[ElusiveJoe]

I had no problems with playing DVDs on my Ubuntu. Well, of course the highly praised WinXP offers that, too... Wait, it doesn't!

Oh, and no DRM... I surely miss this "switch off features if the user is doing anything suspicious" feature from Vista. I feel so insecure without a Master observing me and telling me what I can and cannot do with my computer. The restrictions are beneficial for users, everyone knows that.

And there is no Flash for linux available or even planned in the near future. Robert Strohmeyer told so and I believe him. Just ignore all these "Install Flash" suggestions in Firefox, it's non-existent in linux.

Let's better talk about iPhones and Steve Jobs. Because Steve Jobs is sooo cool. The only way linux can survive is being cool. Like in high-school, you know. Try to hang out with cool guys and do everything like them. Then everyone will love you. Of course, if you're not an ugly geek.

Re:On the contrary

[etymxris]

No, it's trolling because it'd be like posting a story on a Christian site titled "God is dead". Regardless of whether it's true or not, the story is designed to piss off the primary viewership of the site.

Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business

[xtracto]

There aren't any business databases available for either OS.

Oough...
these guys beg to differ with you.

Re:On the contrary

[Masterofpsi]

Linux desktop is very much alive...on thinclients :)

However, what is up with the obvious story troll? Are the /. numbers low today?

"...what is up with the obvious story troll?"

This is what the author was referring to when he mentioned "...the fierce ideology of the open-source community...". Dismissing non-believers as heretics/trolls makes you an ideologue and renders the platform unattractive to regular users. Your natural reaction to this will be to dismiss regular users as not worthy of Linux but nobody wants to adopt a platform that gets them trashed by smelly, overbearing, slogan-yelling hippies.

Thanks asshole.

It's not a troll because it asserts that Linux is dead.

It's a troll because it asserts that Linux is dead ON /.

Come on, now.

Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business

[Guspaz]

Databases? Like, Oracle, DB2, Pervasive, Sybase? There are a lot of modern enterprise DBMS solutions that run on Linux. I'm tempted to say more than Windows, but that's just a hunch. But since you seem to think that DOS is still relevant in a modern enterprise, I can say conclusively that more modern enterprise DBMS solutions run on Linux than DOS.

Mainly because no modern enterprise DBMS solution runs on DOS.

Guess what?

[sirrunsalot]

Here's one thing *nix can do!

sudo echo "127.0.0.1 www.pcworld.com" >> /etc/hosts"

Goodbye.

It's the hardware, stupid

[Baavgai]

The only real thing that holds Linux back on the desktop is hardware. No so much the actual computer as the myriad of junk people plug into them.

A POS printer from Walmart will run fine on Windows, but not any Linux distro. So many of the external toys that people expect to simply buy and use have zero Linux support. Wifi in particular is tragic.

I use Linux and accept I may have to do a little research to get some PlugAndPray toy that will work. Grandma is lucky if she can figure out where the plug goes. If she plugs into windows, it will usually hold her hand, at the very least say something. If she plugs it into a Linux box, it can be ominously silent.

So, am I an ideologue

[Short Circuit]

I love Linux on all my systems at home. I enjoy using Windows 7+Visual Studio at work, and know my registry intimately. I call 'troll' on the PCWorld article. Does that still make me one an ideologue?

By the time I left community college three years ago, encountering non-geeks who use Linux was no longer a surprise. Some time this year, I stopped being surprised at seeing Linux installed on laptops in coffee shops. Does that make me an ideologue?

I've seen support for Linux in commercial games and applications grow to the level Macs were at prior to the iPhone explosion. I've seen the number of non-Linux-compatible websites drop dramatically, thanks to improvements in browser technology. My WoW-playing fiancee was using Linux exclusively before I met her.

I still call 'troll' on the PCWorld article. Does that still make me an ideologue?

Re:So, am I an ideologue

[Short Circuit]

Earlier this year, I started anchoring* a 4-hour social meeting every Saturday for the local LUG. I show up at a coffee shop for a certain time range, and anyone who wants to show up can. No agenda, no rules (except 'don't get us kicked out of the venue'), just socializing among geeks with some common interests. So far, it's been pretty much constructive, and we've had people in the area overhear us and ask us questions. Last week, we chatted about physical computer security, programming, audio encoding, and the passive {VGA|USB|etc}-to-Cat5 media changers one guy built. All in all, a good face for the community.

I highly recommend the format.

* Meaning that even if nobody else shows up, I'll be there, so people won't choose not to go because of a chance that there might not be anyone there.

Accept reality

[Crayon Kid]

Maybe we should start asking what those 1-2% represent.

What kind of people use a Linux desktop full time? Geeks. Developers. Bright minds.

Consider Linux a piece of specialized software. How many computer users run specialized software? A small percentage of the total. Yet those are important for their respective niches.

Apple has 5% but it's the cream of the crop in regard to certain traits: people who favor aestethics and "just works" over everything else and are willing to pay extra for it.

Maybe it's time for Linux to stop aiming for more than 5%, ever, and instead embrace what it is: a professional-grade OS, for professionals.

Why obsess with taking over the desktop of average Joe, against Joe's wishes?

Re:Accept reality

[ADRA]

Professionals want PC's that work just as much as the rest of the world. Without some semblance of market share, you can't get hardware manufacturers to look at you (BSD,*NIX), so you're stuck between a rock and a hard place. In order to get good hardware support, you need market penetration. In order to get market penetration, you need to make the OS attractive outside of your core community. In order to make is appealing to outside audiences, you loose the professional focus of the OS.

Getting Linux in a position to satisfy all three criteria in a relatively seamless way will be a tight walk that may just take another 10 years to get right, but as long as you keep at it, things should always get better.

Re:Accept reality

[Haeleth]

YES! This is spot on.

It is frustrating that currently, every major Linux-based project seems to be working hard to dumb itself down and remove more features and configurability with every new version, in the name of "being easy for Grandma". Then Grandma carries on using Windows, and the developers say "oh dear, it must still be too complicated", and the cycle continues. Linux developers are making the product worse and worse for the people who actually use it, in the name of making it easier for people who do not even want to use it.

Because, really, what would Grandma gain from switching? She knows Windows. It does everything she needs. It's not particularly insecure these days, particularly since her grandson installed that cute Firefox icon for her. And she couldn't care less about the power of the CLI, or the ability to run a different window manager, or multiple X sessions, or any of the other cool things that are easy to do in Linux and difficult or impossible in Windows. Why should Grandma use Linux?

The two things Linux should be concentrating on are being a great Unix-like desktop for power users, and interoperating well with Windows infrastructure such as Microsoft Exchange. (The latter is important in order to allow its use on enterprise desktops -- there are plenty of developers who could make a very good case for using the same platform on their desktop that their code is going to be deployed to, but need to be able to demonstrate that doing so is not going to hinder their ability to use corporate email and collaboration services.)

Re:Accept reality

[Draek]

the number 1 reason that we like Macs is that Mac OS X is unix and the number 2 reason is that Mac OS X is the most flexible, configurable, programmable OS available - bar none.

Most flexible and configurable, really? care, then, to describe the steps required to make OSX' look and feel similar to that of Windows 2K? preferably ones that don't involve VMs in them.

Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business

[fusiongyro]

What they're missing is the built-in idiot-easy form designing.

I'm speaking as a major PostgreSQL believer. One of my best friends was a beltway bandit in the 70's-90's. He calls GUI application development "the programmer's guaranteed employment act." He's definitely a fossil, and he made all his money on dBase and FoxPro. Neither of these tools are particularly amazing, but they do make it easy to write fairly simple databases with fairly simple visual forms (think ncurses).

There is a strong tendency in our profession to break systems down into a set of components and then elaborate those components. I am a web developer with a strong RDBMS background. I find that I can offload a great deal of the work to the database and it's not much effort for me. I find that, on the web, I only need a designer's input for a fraction of the time I would if I were doing a GUI application. This is because we've elaborated these components. FoxPro gives you a pretty stripped down, procedural way of dealing with the database. I haven't seen what its GUI frameworks are like but I'm willing to bet they're also fairly also stripped down and procedural. I have web developer friends who are not conversant in SQL. They are very excited about the "NoSQL" "databases." I think this largely has to do with the fact that when you misuse RDBMSes, they aren't that fast, and the kind of people NoSQL appeals to are already doing that work in their application. For them, it's not taking on a burden they don't already have. To my friend the FoxPro user, NoSQL just looks like even more work he didn't used to have to do.

The people who were brought up in simpler times find simpler tools better because they have to learn less and they can just sort of dive in and start getting shit done. But for me, I already have learned these tools and can use them deftly. To me, using FoxPro is a bunch of tedious manual labor because I can make a complicated SQL statement. Also, to make a nice application now is a lot more work than it was twenty or thirty years ago. It has to look nice and have a good metaphor as well as do its job quickly and well. My friend can certainly bang out a FoxPro application quickly, even quicker than me most of the time, but it won't be the app you want to use, because it also looks like it came out of that era.

As far as I can tell, there will always be a market for every kind of software developer. We've reached a critical mass where pretty much every technology now has an installed base of users for whom that technology is essential. My friend could certainly find work in FoxPro, though most of it seems to be on the east coast. But demand is low enough that he would have to relocate, which isn't the case for me as a web developer. It's the same thing with MUMPS. If you know it, you can get a job working for some hospital or medical company, but you are unlikely to find a company in your zip code that needs it.

To return to your point, MySQL and PostgreSQL aren't missing anything from a database perspective. From a FoxPro perspective they're simply missing simplicity. But simplicity isn't something you can just drop in.

Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business

[Pinball Wizard]

Open Office Base does have a form builder. It's not as slick as MS Access, but it does work. The main issue I had with Base the last time I used it was that the query designer only supported select queries - no inserts, updates, or deletes. So you could use the form builder, but you'd still have to hand code the SQL for most of the work you'd be using forms for. Not particularly a big deal to me, but if you're used to the Microsoft drag and drop sort of programming, I guess it could be an issue.

No. The Desktop is Dead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktop Linux isn't dead. The Desktop is dead.

Everyone is moving to phones, tablets and laptops. Most of the (smart) cell phones sold are running Linux, and quite a few of the other ones are running UNIX. You can buy phones that run Linux at Walmart for like $30. This is probably the time when your mom is most likely to start using *NIX on a daily basis (though she won't know if.)

   

Funny Stuff

[Bob9113]

Six months ago my brother, who is a very stalwart end-user-only, tried Ubuntu for the first time. He now recommends it for everything except for gaming.

But he is pretty smart -- probably not a fair test.

Two weeks ago my neighbor across the street came to me and said she had a problem with her computer. She explained the issue in very primitive terms which boiled down to a broad-spectrum viral infection of Windows. She said a friend of her son had recommended that she "Do something called 'wipe my hard drive' then install Ooo Boo Too on Windows." The conversation continued in this vein for a while. In short, she is neither the sharpest tack in the drawer nor a skilled computer user. She asked for my help with the install. I said, well, maybe I should stay here in case you need help, but you should try to do it all yourself. If you can figure it all out, then you should be OK with using it, but it is pretty different from Windows.

I helped out with a couple confidence things -- "Should I really wipe the whole hard drive?" "Yes.", "Do I really need a password?" "[brief pro/con explanation]" "OK, I'll use a password." -- but she did the rest on her own. Once it was up I showed her where the icons were and how to search for more software, where to put in her password for the local wi-fi she uses, how the system updater works -- but nothing else. I left feeling a little nauseous about the number of "How do I..." questions I would get over the ensuing days.

Two days later I stopped over to ask how it was going. "It's great -- works a lot better than Windows did." (which I ascribed to cruft and viruses having made her Windows install slow) I asked if she had any questions. "Nope, everything is working just fine."

Non-free software

[tepples]

Seriously, compile the piece of software you want to use against the library versions you actually have!

End users don't compile non-free software.

If you don't understand these things, don't use software from outside your package system!

Package systems tend not to contain non-free software. The article mentions this ideological point.

And if you claim all software should be free, how do you expect to fund the development of a major video game if you plan to release it as free software from day one as opposed to five years later like Id?

Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business

[CarpetShark]

"Paradox for DOS works quite well. I still use it on a regular basis for various tasks. I can concentrate on working with my data"

Such as which floppy disk contains which PCX file? ;)

Computing History

[Roger_Wilco]

Consider not the fraction of the market, but the size of the market. How many people have GNU/Linux on their desktop?

Compare the size of the market to the size of the market for various other systems. There were 17 million Commodore 64 machines sold. I suspect there are easily this many people with open source desktops in the world; there are around 10 million users of Ubuntu alone. Does the author mean to say that the Commodore 64 was unsuccessful, was itself dead on the desktop, for having a mere 17 million users? It seems unlikely.

Being the sole desktop option is a hazardous place to be. If you believe in capitalism, you should prefer a mix, you should prefer that users (at some level, potentially corporate) decide which system to use.

I use GNU/Linux: Ubuntu on the desktop, Debian on servers and sufficiently high-end embedded systems. That's not about to change. I'm glad others are concerned about converting people, but only so far as it causes them to make better the software I use.

At least put some though in your trolling!

[Seth Kriticos]

I really don't mind some well written trolling, but this is just pathetic.

Linux on the desktop is fine and better than ever. No, it's not mainstream (and I actually hope it stays so, I don't think more than 20% market share is healthy for any OS). It's fine in a way that there is an increasing user base. Also technically it's quite mature, and exceeds most of the competition in many ways (I'd list them, but it gets repetitive).

Now granted, apps on Linux, especially commercial ones need some more work. And it's being done, slowly. Just from the distribution I see (Ubuntu), there are big strides to include this into the Software Center (yes, we have that already). It's still in test mode for the next half a year, but I think with a high probability that it will attract a lot of commercial interest.

I also run a site with international audience (mostly the U.S. and China, + 67 other countries with 2k+ visitors a day, mostly private users) and the Linux share is at 2.88% there. This is much better than one or two years ago.

So anyone telling me that the OS I currently write from is not existent or does not evolve is full of BS IMO. And the troll article was not even written in a way that would be fun to read (and we Linux folks have humor if you hit some valid points). Bad editor, grow some spine!

MS Paid Trolling

[Anonymous Coward]

I've worked with Microsoft employees before. They have *admitted* to me that Microsoft pays people to troll boards, people inside tech magazines/sites/etc to write troll stories, etc. All to keep the *idea* of their barely functional, buggy, bloated desktop on top by making it "the" desktop in a majority of computer users' minds. This is the ONLY reason Microsoft is on top and alternatives such as OSX and GNU/Linux cannot get a foothold, not by any other reason.

It should be illegal for a company to do such negative viral marketing, and is yet another example of how our social and economic system is fundamentally flawed and tilted to people who can lie and cheat and steal their way to the top and keep themselves there by throwing money at everything that threatens them.

I keep a Windows partition on my computer to play games, but have considered taking it off many times before because I want to play games. No game is worth supporting a lying, cheating, scamming company that uses underhanded methods like this to keep themselves on top.

My Windows dies today, if only to prove this trollish Microsoft-funded "article" false. Desktop GNU/Linux is alive and well on mine and many, many other desktops, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. And as we continue to push against Microsoft's lies and make people see what Microsoft really is, we WILL dominate the desktop.

Count on it.

It's not the OS alone...

[headLITE]

Most users don't *want* to stray from the party line or even realize that there is such a thing. They just want something that works. For normal people, Mac OS X gets that right most of the time, but not necessarily only because the UI is easy to use.

For example, my mother needs a web browser and something that gets her photos off her camera. She does use e-mail, but as far as I know, she only uses some web mail system. She has a Mac because she can go to a store, pick one up, and it just works and does everything she wants to do without her having to call her son about it. It's not so much that she thinks this wouldn't be possible with Linux, it's more that she doesn't even care and/or have a good idea of what Linux even is. She's not buying an operating system, she's buying a magical box that lets her access the web and that stores her photos. Even Windows would beat Linux if new Windows systems didn't come pre-loaded with so much crapware...

Re:It's not the OS alone...

[C10H14N2]

Baloney...

I run at least five flavors of Windows and hafter as many Linux distros, am pretty solidly in the Ubuntu camp. I have a Mac and an iPhone and am going to be buying more for a laundry list of reasons.

HOWEVER, the first thing that struck me about the Mac and the iPhone was how much they did NOT "just work." I was ready to be converted. Oh, please, let me for once just buy a !@#$ing box and be able to plug it in and start working. It was NO different to me than setting up a Windows or Ubuntu box. The OS wasn't fully configured or even current. I had to install everything myself only to find it wanted to automatically run 2.9GBs of patches, rebooting about six times in the process. I didn't have a working computer until the next day.

The difference is that Apple has an army of well trained baby sitters who will, for a fee, put up with this crap for you and coddle your ego telling you what a special, pretty smart and interesting person you are and then hand your shiny box back.

I refuse to pay for that sort of saccharine bullshit, so I'm left with a computer that is just as much a pain in my ass as any other.

Re:It's not the OS alone...

[jo_ham]

2.9GB of patches and 6 reboots on a brand new machine from Apple? Bullshit.

I'll take a single, or perhaps two reboots if there has been a firmware update for the machine in question (some of the firmware updates for the iMac require two reboots) but normal software updates really don't require 6 reboots. If you get way behind on updates, the software updater goes for the combo pack, which rolls them together precisely so you don't have to reboot multiple times. The updater also doesn't "surprise" you by hiding updates that have dependencies on ones you have installed previously - it puts them alongside those updates (and will grey them out if you deselect a dependency) and installs them all at the same time (if you choose) when you click "install".

Six reboots? PEBKAC error I think.

Or hyperbole.

The only thing not "fully configured" about OS X on a new box is your name, address and username. Do you expect that all to be set up for you by Apple before the machine ships? The only thing you need to do is tell it who you are (optional) set up an admin account (mandatory) and click "ok" (and just tell them you're *sure* you don;t want to try Mobile.Me for free, since it asks you again if you skip over it). That is the sum total of the setup required. Perhaps you're talking about pairing the BT keyboard and mouse if you have them. It prompts you as soon as it boots for the first time if it doesn't detect a USB kb and/or mouse.

I have set up more than enough Macs in my time, since the dawn of 10.0 beta (and before) to know that setting them up for people is a question of asking "what username and password do you want, and what is the password for your wireless network (again, Apple does not know this information in advance - you do have to provide it yourself, so I guess more evidence of 'not configured').

Re:It's not the OS alone...

[evil_aar0n]

This strikes me in the same way as the rabid OS X fanboi that said that any OS X failure was _my_ fault, because OS X _never_ failed. Baloney. Why do they need patches, then?

I've set up close to a dozen Mac OS X machines, over the years, and have never had any experience close to what you mention. The worst one was when a MBP of mine died and I had to set up my replacement from the dead unit's HDD. I was shocked at how easy that was. I connected the HDD to the new laptop, which recognized that it had an OS X installation on it, and it proceeded to ask if I wanted to initialize my new MBP from that drive. After some time to copy files, it was ready to go, configured almost exactly as my previous unit. There were some things I had to handle manually - HP scanner shit, which is buggy, anyway - but it was automatic, for the most part.

I don't know how you ended up in your situation, but yours is definitely an outlier case.

bah

[Charliemopps]

2 things keep Windows in the lead - Office and Games. Office is quickly becoming a non-issue. Gaming is another issue entirely. But PC gaming has been on the decline for a while. If the gaming markets moves away from PC's to consoles in a major way we could see a real shift away from windows. I build PC's for people all the time, and usually the cost of windows exceeds the amount I spent building the entire computer. At the very least THAT has to change. In the past there was no way I could have gotten anyone to try out Linux, but recently I've had 2 different people say "Sure, I'll try it out!" and no requests to switch back. Especially if the users only use for the computer is surfing the net and email, there really isn't any reason to waste money on Apple of M$FT.

Damn, I just installed Ubuntu 10.10

[KarmaRundi]

Really, like two weeks ago I bought a new laptop and installed Ubuntu over Window 7 and love it. Now you're telling me it's dead? S*!t.

It's not dead! Or is it?...

[dacarr]

OK. So if desktop Linux is dead, it's moving pretty well on my computer, which tells me that it's undead. So I, for one, welcome our new zombie penguin overlords.

In a related story

[lushmore]

Trolling articles are still alive and well.

Desktop OS in general is dead

[snowwrestler]

Does the desktop OS really matter that much any more? At least in the consumer space, I contend no:

- File format interoperability has improved dramatically. Numerous apps on several platforms can now open MS and Adobe formats, for instance.
- More and more functionality is delivered through the browser by servers.
- As a result, after-market boxed software is less and less important. Core consumer functionality comes built into computers when you buy them (word processing, photos, music, video, etc). Aside from games, consumers simply don't go to stores anymore to buy the hottest new software.

Mobile OS is still very app-oriented though. And Linux is doing very well there, in the form of Android.

Desktop OS still matters a lot in the corporate setting because of custom business applications that have been developed on the MS platform for years. They would be a huge pain to port, and businesses will ride them for as long as they can. But even in those cases, when they develop new apps, there's a good chance they'll be developing server-based software running on Linux (even if the desktop OS is still Windows).

So even though Linux adoption on the desktop might have slowed, that matters less and less in the big picture. The big problem with MS's domination of the desktop was that it was their chokepoint of control because it was the default environment for all developers. For consumers at least, that chokepoint is largely gone. The default environment for developers now is the server.

Re:wrong OS? NO! Wrong QUESTION!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

The Desktop OS is dead.

Apple will wind down OS X over the decade - the PC era is over.

For users, this was heralded by the advent of the iPad, which will usher in 10,000 copies. For data centers, this came with large-scale, production virtualization.

Your beloved PC? Now a "content creator's" workstation. Everything from word processing to simple photo-editing goes on line - or into an "app".

Re:wrong OS? NO! Wrong QUESTION!

[bytesex]

Because ever more CPU-demanding app-development, and ever more screen-real estate (photo/film/games/tv) demanding apps are suddenly gone ? People don't need to type anymore ? I don't get it. I've heard 'photoshop through the web is going to be here in five to ten years' for the last fifteen years now. It hasn't happened.

The cult of UNIX

[couch_warrior]

I have been a devotee of Linux for nearly 15 years. I have faithfully followed first redhat, and now the fedora releases. All my PCs at least dual-boot, if not run native Linux all the time. I even TAUGHT Linux for a major computer company for a while. In my informally gathered experience, there are three things holding Linux back- 1) The cult of UNIX mentality - this is a belief, deeply held by many OSS fans, that it is morally wrong to make software easy to use. If it was hard to code, it should require effort from the user to make use of it, otherwise how will they appreciate your hard work? Microsoft on the other hand got it a loooong time ago. Ease of use isn't just nice to have, it is the one overiding factor that outweighs all others in software design. Flexibility just confuses most users. security is a sick sad joke that only security wonks care about. Until the Linux community embraces the overwhelming truth that ease of use is ALL that matters, they will be doomed to be a hobby OS for out-of-touch tech weenies. 2) Endlessly re-inventing the wheel. I think Redhat/ Fedora is now on their third version of the X-windows package, and there is talk of scrapping the whole thing for a new windowing paradigm. Every six months I do a version upgrade, and my desktop breaks, my icons disappear, my scripts stop working because the directories have changed. For the love of sanity PLEASE knock it off. If it ain't broke, DON"T FIX IT!!! If you want people to really use Linux, focus on a consistent user experience, keep the magic behind the curtain, and stop screwing up the user interface. 3) Fear of licenses. Every time I upgrade fedora, I have to spend hours getting my Xine video player, web browser, and games to work again. Give up the insanity guys. The world is not going to change to suit your whiny childish prejudices. There's all kinds of industry standard free software out there that EVERYONE uses. You are just marginalizing Linux by not supporting it in your distros. 'Nuff said.

Then desktop Linux appears to need stores

[tepples]

What the repositories don't contain much of is payware

As I understand the article, the lack of a reliable way to deploy payware on desktop Linux is contributing to the death of desktop Linux because not all genres of application are conducive to relying on donated labor.

it's not a store.

Three major game consoles (Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360) have a store. Three major handheld game platforms (iPod touch, PSP, and DSi) have a store. Two major smartphone platforms (iPhone and Android) have a store. Windows has several stores, including Steam, Impulse, and GOG. Not to mention brick-and-mortar stores that sell copies of software on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. So if the repositories aren't stores, what is?

Re:wrong OS? NO! Wrong QUESTION!

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

Everything from word processing to simple photo-editing goes on line - or into an "app."

People have been claiming this (at least the on-line part) for a long time, though. I seem to remember software company executives in the 90's drooling over the thought that you'd pay them a monthly fee to access their word processor and photo editor apps from your thin client at home.

Desktop Linux is just kicking

[kokoko1]

Well I am using Linux on my desktop work and home from last couple of years. Here is a good news last month we got new HP laptops at our work and 4 of my co-workers ask me to install Linux on there new shiny laptops. Guess what, now they are using Linux as there primary OS and running M$ as guest under Virtualbox. They wouldn't be using M$ if our company were not having the mail on Exchange and one of company portal which only works in IE.

Its all my pleasure to see those folks using Linux on daily bases, installing Linux updates and learning commands. I feel proud coz they watched me using Linux over the years and when they were struggling with there OS infected with viri, malwares etc and my system never piss on me. And finally here we go now they are using the rock solid OS.

For me Linux is just penetrating in our companies desktop :)
Long live Linux.

Re:On the contrary

[imric]

Yup because being reasonable means agreeing with obvious trolls (and here is what a troll is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet) It doesn't mean 'to disagree', btw).

What you are calling for is 'fair and balanced' meaning that you must give equal weight to opponents even if their position is untenable - IOW, if you don't agree with the validity of the obvious troll's point, that means by disagreeing you (the "smelly, overbearing, slogan-yelling hippies" - your words) are 'trashing' the poor victim, the troll. Right?

And as a real treat, your ending statements are a 'strawman' ("Your natural reaction to this will be to dismiss regular users as not worthy of Linux"), of course hoping to demolish your strawman later and cry victory. (what, you don't know what a strawman is either? Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman_argument )

So why should anyone listen to your gems of wisdom, again?

Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business

[colinrichardday]

There aren't any business databases available for either OS

Oracle?

Re:wrong OS? NO! Wrong QUESTION!

[Vancorps]

As someone that is current in the process of deploying virtual desktops I beg to differ.

Client terminals had to become powerful enough to connect modern peripherals and device pass-through means that a virtual desktop has no need to compromise. I can plugin my USB camera to my thin client and it'll appear in the VM. I can watch full-screen flash inside the VM on the thin-client with no jittering playback. Hell, even Autocad and Photoshop work marvelously especially through desktop streaming. With remote desktop applications you're usually limited by the precision of your mouse, compression makes detailed work almost impossible, a virtual desktop does not have these limitations.

I don't think workstations are going anywhere anytime soon though. I do however think that Apple is screwing themselves royally by not allowing OS X to be in a virtual environment as many of my Mac users are getting sick of hardware failures leading to their downtime when their Windows and Linux coworkers can just swap machines and reconnect to their VM and be up and running in as long as it takes to plugin the new hardware. Apple has always been weak in the enterprise market. I'm finally seeing pushback much to my delight as a few of my Photoshop jockies are switching to Windows so they can enjoy all the benefits including SSL VPN driven access from offsite without compromising performance.

In short, latency is no longer a problem for 99% of cases. Server virtualization isn't so cut and dry, but desktop virtualization is definitely going to take over as it solves many common corporate problems such as data leaving the building, ensuring regular backups, maintaining a consistent work environment, storage consolidation, and many other problems are non-issues with a virtual desktop. If a particular user needs more disk space I don't need to replace a hard drive, I just allocate more storage to them. With thin-provisioning I don't even have to care if they're using it provided I don't overprovision and run out of disk space but adding another shelf to my tier 1 NetApp storage is easy and takes all of ten minutes to do.

Do pretty much everything except run (app list)

[judeancodersfront]

Netflix, iTunes, MS Office, random work program, random school program, random games, etc.

Some say this is just because of market share but there is more to it. The open source ideology has made the small marketshare of Linux even more unappealing. You can't expect much support from proprietary companies when you denounce them as morally inferior.

Stallman was wrong in his expectation that hobbyists could compete with commercial companies. Sorry but I do not consider Tux Racer to be a competitor to Gran Turismo. Stallman went too far, it's time for everyone to admit it. It is ok to prefer open source but there is nothing wrong with proprietary software.

Re:wrong OS? NO! Wrong QUESTION!

[Mongoose Disciple]

The Desktop OS is dead.

Apple will wind down OS X over the decade - the PC era is over.

Wrong!

In people's homes, certainly desktops will continue to lose some marketshare to alternatives.

In offices? Not so much. Sure, you have (and will continue to have) some office workers who continue to use laptops in docking stations as essentially desktops, and some that just use laptops as such period. I don't see much if any of that market moving to tablets anytime soon, and the migration of the things those people do to web-based solutions is just not happening very fast, where it's happening at all. At this point, most of what's going to internal web apps or virtualized workstations in the next decade already has.

Re:wrong OS? NO! Wrong QUESTION!

[jc42]

I seem to remember software company executives in the 90's drooling over the thought that you'd pay them a monthly fee to access their word processor and photo editor apps from your thin client at home.

Heh. I know quite a lot of people who've tried this, and quickly learned the downside of any sort of centralized or "cloud" computing model: If you miss a payment, all your stuff disappears. Sometimes permanently.

And most of the ISPs who provided the early online storage to customers turned out to have contracts saying that putting a file on their server automatically transfers the copyright to the ISP. I know several friends in bands who tried this and learned the hard way that they had assigned the copyrights to all their work to their ISP, who found things that they liked and used in ads. Other people stored pictures of their kids, pets, etc. on "their" web site, and found the ISP using their photos in ads. Remember the fuss when msn.com was caught doing this, and MSN's reps quoted that passage in their contract?

I also have a couple of friends who lost a parent who had been keeping personal info (pics, diaries, etc.) on a hosted site. They were a bit upset to find that after the parent's death, they had no legal access to anything on the site, because the parent hadn't thought to will it to them. And after a few months, the parent's "site" was purged and lost forever.

Going back a bit, one of the original reasons for the rapid adoption of "personal computers" in work environments back in the 1980s was the growing problem of corporate data centers that more and more controlled what employees were permitted to do on the mainframe. Departments learned that if they wanted the computing capability that they needed, the easiest way was with a little computer that the department owned, and which the data center had no control over. This is a continuing battle in corporations everywhere, with no end in sight.

It's an old story. If you don't own the machine(s) that hold your data, you don't own the data, and you have no say in how it may be used. If this means anything to you, you'd be an idiot to trust your data to an organization that views you as a source of income. You need, and will always need, a computer system that you completely control. (And you need it backed up - on your own hardware, not on someone else's. ;-)

Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business

[jc42]

In all fairness, try finding -anything- specific at ibm.com.

Ain't that the truth. Though, again in all fairness, it's hardly anything unique to IBM. Commercial web sites are often annoyingly short of detailed information about their products. They go for the flash, but you and I are too dumb to be given details.

Recently, I've been looking around at high-quality DSLR cameras. I've gotten tired of my old one whose manual focus is so complex that by the time I've got it to work, the cute critter I'm trying to photograph has moved on or flown off. If I use the automatic focus, most of the time it's the twigs in front of the critter or the grass in the background that's in focus, not the critter. So I want to know how the manual focus works. This in formation is incredibly difficult to find in the companies' sales info, even the so-called specs. They merely say that they have a manual focus setting, and then go into a flowery description of the marvels of their multi-point automagic focus system.

With one camera, I finally hunted down the details, and it turned out that the camera didn't have the claimed manual focus at all. It had a list of 7 "preset" focal lengths that you could choose from. I wasted a lot of hours hunting down the info that made me cross that one off my list. A lot of cameras' lenses have what looks like focus rings, but if I can find one in a store to test, I find that it's a dummy that doesn't turn; it's just a sort of grip and shock absorber, not a focus mechanism.

The same sort of approach is used with all sorts of products. You and I don't need the details; we just need to buy their product. Even if it turns out not to be what we were looking for, and won't work for our intended applications.

rderoko

[rderoko]

Well I guess the Redmond Washington PR department must have gotten a new influx of cash so they can spread their message of joy throughout the world. I have often wondered how to get on that gravy train, I have an opinion on just about everything !

i actually LIKE Ubuntu

[oakbox]

I prefer Linux to Windows and OS X. Everything I plug into my computer just works or the software to make it work is just a few clicks away. The interface is pretty and both my new laptop and older desktop are still snappy and reactive after years of service (Windows just tends to get slower and slower, even with a reinstall). The whole mac needs to be replaced seemingly every 6 months because Apple came out with a new whiz-bang piece of hardeware. I need to reboot the windows computers in my office often because they are constantly losing the thread and locking up or forgetting where the USB mouse is or flipping the keyboard layout setting to 'UK' for no apparent reason whenever a user's back is turned. The Macs do strange and mysterious things with files and are (I'll say it out loud) NOT intuitive at all.
In the last month in a relatively hertergenous environment, I have spent roughly 95% of my user support time on windows and mac issues. It's not because my users don't know what they are doing, it's just that the os they are using is failing them.
Even esoteric and weird things I plug into my laptop are recognized by Ubuntu. This isn't 'It just works'. This is 'It works really well and intuitively'.
The prospect of programming on an Ipad is laughable and while toting a netbook to a user convention is more reasonable that lugging around a laptop, I would go blind in a week and develop severe spinal injuries if I was forced to do actual work on one of them.
Laptops and desktops will go away when computers can read our minds. Until that happens, I will keep using and recommending Ubuntu, because it works really well and intuitively.

- oakbox

Good news for fans of Linux on the desktop!

[mr_mischief]

There are trends that have gone on for years in the magazine publishing industry. One is that if Newsweek puts a bear on the cover, the stock market is going to go up. The other is that if PC World pans your technology, it's about to take off.