Ask Slashdot: Whatever Happened To the 'Year of Linux on Desktop'?

An anonymous reader writes: Investors, enthusiasts, and Linux distro makers have for more than a decade projected that the upcoming year will be the year of Linux on the desktop platform. But we just can't seem to get to that year for some reason. Windows continues to dominate the consumer market. Apple's macOS X is quickly gaining ground among business customers and designers, and is already ahead of Linux. Do you see Linux getting a significant boost in the desktop market in the coming years?

Comments

Re: D'oh!

[SeriousTube]

It can be easy until you want to do anything remotely out of the ordinary. I wanted to play my java scrabble game. First the sound wouldn't work because no usb sound worked. Then I fixed it and the sound from java didn't work. It always is like that with linux. There's a million things to hunt down and fix the minute you aren't just using a browser to view the web.

eternal dim bulb coronation allure

[epine]

I was there the first time the "year of Linux on the desktop" was run up a jury-rigged flag pole.

It puts me in mind of Olbermann's fifty phrases of Trump "becoming" presidential.

Never believed it the first time, nor any of the times thereafter.

Olbermann shtick is to become so repetitive as to render himself completely unlistenable to anyone with access to a supplemental news source. I think he regards this grinding hatchet job as a form of insistent emphasis. It's perhaps also why the sound bite on his media channel features a heavy drum. Case in point, I didn't even finish the above clip. But the passage I quoted is excellent, which is why I keep going back, for the brief moments when Olbermann punches through this endless brow beating.

Olbermann is right about this. Trump successfully reads off a teleprompter for an entire thirty minutes, and five minutes later many in the media proclaim a shotgun marriage to an elf princess, and the reclamation of Elendil's throne consummated. True, Aragorn did put his hand on the same Saudi orb, but then again he also killed some living, breathing Uruk-hai. Advantage, Aragorn.

The year of Linux on the desktop is a turtle race with Trump becoming presidential. Always has been, always will be.

Same media dunce caps, to a mortal certainty.

"The race of Minix is failing. The blood of Numenor is all but spent, its pride and dignity forgotten. It is only because of Tmux and Docker that Ring 0 survives. I was there Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago ..."

Indeed, Elrond, we've now had megapixel screen buffers for an age of men.

The original Let's Pretend MegaPixel Display was a monochrome 17" monitor displaying 4 brightness levels (black, dark gray, light gray and white) in a fixed resolution of 1120 x 832 at 92 DPI (931,840 total pixels) at 68 Hz.

It integrated a mono microphone, mono speaker, stereo RCA sockets, a 3.5 mm headphone socket and a socket for the keyboard/mouse. A unique feature was that the monitor was connected to the computer by a single ultra-proprietary 6-foot cable which provided power, video signals, and all the rest.

A severe problem with this setup was that the monitor could not be switched off completely while the computer was powered on. The screen could be switched to black but the cathode heater always remained on. This led to extreme screen dimming after some years of use, especially when the computer was not turned off overnight as in a server setup or in a busy software lab.

Man, can't imagine what mystic wandering in the wilderness might have invented that bodge. Yes, and he was also subject to an endless litany of premature coronation (one suspects trigger-happy journalism interns vying for first post), until finally breaking through with the iPhone.

2007: official year of Apple finally kicking everyone's ass, after thirty years of overblown self-aggrandizement.

There's the rub: once in a long while, a princess finally does kiss the right frog.

Re: No std GUI - a commercial minefield

[simula]

Qt is licensed under the LGPL.

If you dynamically link to the Qt libraries, you can sell your closed-source proprietary products without having to pay for a commercial license or share your source.

If you statically link to the Qt libraries, then you are required to either pay for a commercial license or share your source.

Re: D'oh!

[jedidiah]

I've had the same kinds of problems with "strange USB devices" on Windows. I've actually gotten spoiled by how well Linux works with USB devices and dealing with Windows is often a jarring reality check.

Don't pretend Windows doesn't have it's problems.