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Comment by yesco

2 years ago

I can only see this trend continuing in the coming years.

I know people love to get cynical about Linux desktops being niche, but the reality is that desktops in general are becoming niche. Really consider the audience here, in broad strokes I'd divide it into three big groups: school, corporate and public.

The public market for desktops is dying, or maybe it's already dead? The average person, especially the ones on the younger side, will just use their phone or tablet for all their general computing needs. If, for whatever reason, they do need to use a desktop, it will be for work or school, and most of their time on that desktop will be spent inside a web browser. For most people's personal life their desktop operating system just doesn't matter. Video games are an exception here, but will they remain that way?

Schools are broadly switching to Chromebooks, these are technically Linux machines, but really they are just terminals to a web browser. The underlying OS exists purely to prevent students from do anything else with them. Even the cases where schools stick to Windows, this reality doesn't change, the platform of schooling is web browsers now.

I'll admit, none of this is particularly new, but I naively assumed that the legendary stubbornness of corporate IT would be what keeps Windows dominant indefinitely, and that's quite a big audience right? Yet despite working at a big boring Fortune 500 company in an industry uniquely entrenched with Windows, they are now officially offering Linux laptops to developers who want them. Apparently Lenovo officially supporting Ubuntu was a big deal, and since all of our development targets embedded & cloud systems anyway, it was kind of a no-brainer decision for management. We still need Outlook, Teams, Office, and such, but we can do so via Office 365, so there isn't much holding back the transition...

Naturally many niches will remain, I'm not saying Windows will go away here, nor am I saying a web dominated world necessarily equals a world dominated by Linux desktops. But rather than Linux Desktops becoming a niche within a niche, I think that Windows will join Linux, and they both will become equally niche together :)

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yesco

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vetinari  2 years ago

I would argue, that the dividing line lies elsewhere: between creation and consumption.

The average person does not create much, so for consumption, mobile devices are fine (though it is amazing, what a teenager can do to the photos with just a phone). For any creation, be it media, engineering, science, or even just plain old bureaucracy, you still need either desktops, or workstation, and it is going to stay that way for a while. But the market will be a lot smaller than in 90's or 2000's, since all just-consumers moved elsewhere.

everforward  2 years ago

When I worked at a F500 a decade or so ago, I asked about a Linux laptop and was basically told they would like to support them and were working on it, but couldn't because vendors we used didn't support Linux.

I wonder if that's why support for Linux laptops is finally landing. All the endpoint protection and license auditing and what not finally supports Linux.

daeros  2 years ago

I'm not going anywhere because I still shudder at the idea of accessing the internet with such a tiny screen.