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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?
That's the thing: everyone thinks their pet project is going to be super-popular for some reason, without considering the stakeholders. If you want the whole world to use it, then the whole world is your stakeholders.
Occasionally you see this mentality leak when people mention end users being too stupid to know what's good for them and so sticking to Windows (check out RMS). You also see people try to factor the stakeholders in with things like Wine, XPDE, Steam for Linux, and even the installers that boot from Windows instead of repartitioning your disk (low-risk). Nobody's trying to get buy-in in general.
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When was YOUR year of the Linux desktop?
Mine was 1998. I installed Redhat 5.2 and Linux has been on my desktop ever since.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I have used Linux as my primary desktop since ~1997. As a software developer it is a power platform. The shell is critical. However, as a conventional desktop it is just not competitive with Windows. And OSX isn't either. Both Linux and OSX are below 4% market share. Vertical integration is very weak. Windows has an identity management system that allows transparent filesharing, advanced group based access control, sophisticated business applications. Getting stuff like that to work on Linux is too difficult or simply not possible. So software venders focus on the Windows platform. And rightly so. I just tried and application that recently released a Beta for Linux and it was a total fail. I occasionally dabble in engineering related stuff and I have to have a Windows machine for all of the various programs for cad, PCB design, simulation. Yeah, programs like that exist for Linux but they're just not good. And I know people agree with me that the GNOME desktop has actually regressed. It used to be much more usable. But they dumbed it down for reasons that where not entirely clear. My guess would be that when new developers come along, they have a tendency to want to re-write everything from scratch. I'm not diametrically opposed to this strategy but you better come up with something that was at least as good as what you're dumping. And that didn't happen. There are other integration related issues as well. For example, for as long as I can recall there has always been a fight between X and the desktop over who should remember the positions of windows. X says applications should save that information and recall it when re-launching an app. Desktop people think it should be handled by lower level facilities. Now, whenever logout and back in, all of my terminal windows have to be re-launced and repositioned (I run 6-8 terms on 4-5 workspaces). That is something that actually used to work somewhat in GNOME. It worked in WindowMaker IIRC. The Linux desktop has been dumbed way down to the point where it's not nearly as useful as it used to be. At least not for people doing more than surfing the web and email. Might as well just get a Chomebook for that.
Android is a horrible example to use of Linux being popular. In fact, it shows the complete opposite: Linux can only become a widely used consumer OS kernel when users and developers have absolutely no idea it's there, and it's thoroughly hidden under many layers of abstraction.
Google could silently replace the Linux kernel with some other kernel, and Android users and developers would have no idea it had even happened. That just goes to show how irrelevant Linux is within the Android ecosystem. Yeah, it's present, but nobody cares that it's present.
We may actually see a kernel replacement along those lines happen, with Google Fuchsia being in the works.
Linux contributes almost nothing to Android's success. Android could have been just as much of a success if they had used the NetBSD kernel or some other kernel instead. The success of Android is in its application framework and its userland apps, which have nothing to do with Linux at all.
Android shows exactly what needs to happen if Linux does want to be successful on desktops and laptops. Almost all of the GNU utilities, X, Wayland, GNOME, GTK+, systemd, PulseAudio, and other open source software will need to be thrown out and replaced with a far more cohesive and sane userland stack.
I used to work with a guy who was in the IT Industry for about 30 years. He used to joke around about reading magazines in the 90's about Linux. He said in the beginning of the year an article would be published with a title like "This is the year of Linux!" and then later on in the year it would be followed up with "What happened to Linux?" and it did that ever year like clockwork to your point.
We'll make great pets
It seemed to improve WIndows quality tremendously though over the past 20 years. Windows 7/10 is not WIndows 98/ME by a longshot in terms of BSOD, security, or crashes.
Linux kind of oddly is degrading with SystemD, gnome3, pulse audio, wayland, and so many dependencies that not everyone knows what they are trying to make Linux be the end all be all.
For servers the idea of running FreeBSD is becoming quite popular for this reason.
http://saveie6.com/
Desktops as we know them are going away. We are seeing a trend toward increased reliance on mobile devices, even at the desk.
There are two main operating systems on those mobile devices, iOS and Android. Android has about an 80-85% share of the mobile market worldwide. iOS is around 12-18%, depending on who's doing the study.
Five times as many mobile devices as PCs are sold each year.
Android has, at its base, a Linux kernel. Sure, the hardware doesn't look anything like a desktop machine; Android doesn't look like a traditional Linux distribution; the update and application management is different; and the applications are different, but it's still Linux.
When Android and ChromeOS devices become the platform of choice, we will have achieved the Year of Linux on the Desktop. Maybe we already have.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Which distro is best for: Developers
Video Editing
Games
etc.
The problem here is that most distros are great for Developers, but there are none that are great for video editing, games, music editing, etc.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yet you present no real argument. You just engage in a lot of unsupported claims and insults. Linux desktops and applications use a lot of the same GUI basic elements. ALL of the desktop platforms use "easy to discover" interfaces.
The biggest problem many people may have is that they are simply used to something in particular.
Ribbon pissed a lot of people off. So did Windows 8. Some of the peculiarities in MacOS alienate Windows users.
This isn't about some strange caricature that exists mainly in your head.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.