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Raspberry Pi's Linux-Based PIXEL Desktop Now Available For PC and Mac (betanews.com)
From a report on BetaNews: If you own a Raspberry Pi, you're probably familiar with PIXEL. The desktop environment is included in the Raspbian OS. The Raspberry Pi Foundation describes PIXEL as the "GNU/Linux we would want to use" and understandably so. It offers a smart, clean interface, a decent selection of software, the Chromium web browser with plug-ins, and more -- and from today it's available for PC and Mac. The version of Debian+PIXEL for x86 platforms is described as "experimental" but having taken it for a spin, it seems pretty stable to me. To run PIXEL on your PC or Mac, download the image, burn it onto a DVD or flash it onto a USB memory stick, and boot from it. The desktop environment will load ready for use.
Desktop Linux may arrive, indeed may already have arrived in a form nobody expected 15 years ago. Chromebooks have been outselling Windows laptops for years now on Amazon for example.
Just as IBMs computer monopoly was disrupted, but not in a way anyone (at the time) expected. These nuisance "toy" microcomputers came along. They were under IBMs radar because they were not a threat. Just as Linux was under Microsoft's radar for a long time. Before long, a manager could buy, within their own purchasing authority an Apple II with VisiCalc and have it on their desktop -- without involving any of the mainframe people and the attendant hassles of dealing with them. When IBM introduced their PC they thought there was a market for maybe a couple million units. Little did they know that a de-facto standard of clones would unleash a huge software industry that would drive the need for more of these cheap "toy" computers. And you know the rest. Those "toys" now dominate the industry and then formed the basis of large data centers full of hardware derived from these "toy" computers.
Disruption sometimes arrives in forms you don't expect. Microsoft was also quite unprepared for Android and still hasn't found an effective response.
Microsoft stated that the reason for the Linux on Windows subsystem was to attract developers back to Windows. WTF? A direct admission that open source was more attractive to developers? Yet in all the innovative things I've seen developers present in public, they largely seem to be running open source -- even if on Mac hardware.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
>the GPL's viral nature when involved with proprietary source code
What does that have to do with anything? If you're modifying the desktop software itself, or other parts of the OS, then yes, you need to give back your modifications, you can't simply claim 1,000,000 man-hours worth of code as your own because you added another 10 with something clever in it.
But if you want to make an application that runs on the OS, then you have no problem. You can even use most of the platform libraries which are under the LGPL, which explicitly grants the right to link to them from proprietary software.
Any lawyer that simply issues blanket advice of "stay away from the GPL" isn't worth their salt, they've just proven that they can't even be bothered to read to read the license, or lack the software-domain expertise to be able to understand it (in which case you really shouldn't be consulting them about anything software related). Now, if they said "Don't even look at GPLed code", that would be far more understandable - but when you're developing for a proprietary platform you wouldn't even have the option to look at the analogous code in the first place.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Development is exactly why they are releasing it. They want people to be able to build on the platform without having to have the hardware. Very smart move.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
What an incompetently written headline: "desktop now available for PC and Mac" makes one understand that it is just a desktop environment running on top of Windows and macOS, replacing Explorer.exe and the Finder, but still the same operating systems underneath running the same applications. Which is not the case at all.
Circumcision is child abuse.