Comment by krschultz
16 years ago
The "year of the Linux desktop" is no longer relevant.
It works for me. It works for a lot of other people. That's all it needs to do.
The "year of the Linux desktop" being a viable choice was about 2006. Today people look forward to the "year of the Linux desktop" in the sense of it gaining massive popularity. But that day will not come without lots of marketing or the price difference actually being meaningful. Windows will never have solid DRM because the day the price conscious are ever forced to choose between free Linux and $200 Windows is the day Microsoft loses a massive chunk of market share. So masses of users comes down solely to marketing, and who would get into an advertising buying war with Apple and Microsoft trying to push something free?
Linux has a critical mass of developers, testers, and users willing to help others. As long as it fulfills their needs, it will continue to improve.
It is not a business where market share matters. It is not a business selling licenses on seats. It is a project that scratches some people's itch, and thats all it is. People derive great value from it, and that drives its growth.
I've used it at home for 4 years, and my company (30 people) has used it for 2.5 years. It does everything I need and my company needs, and costs a lot less in licensing and IT support. It might be different for other companies who came from Windows and have to deal with legacy systems/documents, but starting from scratch it is great. I'm happy to give back some bug fixes and support in exchange for what I perceive to be a better experience. That experience is derived solely from the number of developers and dedicated users, it has nothing to do with how many total users there are. A billion more users that do nothing to help Linux progress wouldn't do a damn thing for me.
So I believe that the "year of the Linux desktop" has long since past, and anyone still writing about it just doesn't get it.
I think that was sort of the point of the article...
There is no "year of the linux desktop" because Linux and Windows should be looked to to fulfill different roles.
To me, windows isn't a "real" operating system. I don't use windows for anything other than running putty or chrome. It isn't really doing anything.
Linux, on the other hand, is at the absolute core of the business that employs me. ALL of our servers (except one domain controller) run either Linux of OpenBSD.
If I had my way, all of the workstations would be running it as well. This is an okay solution for me, because all of my workstations have identical (or very similar) hardware. An install would be as simple as imaging a disk, running a few scripts to configure things like networking, and powering it on.
Naturally, I can't speak for everyone, but I do have a considerably larger amount of experience with linux as a desktop than most. I also have a lot of experience with support. Supporting linux on a hodge-podge of hardware is definitely not something I would want to undertake.
Guiding my mom through Ubuntu would also not be something I would want to do.
I think a lot of Linux nerds (members of the church mentioned in the article), have a bit of a cognitive bias when it comes to how easy linux is to use. They WANT it to be easy. They overlook the bits of tinkering they have to do to actually get it working correctly.
Like I said, this is all my own experience. YMMV. However, if you are having as easy a time installing and running linux as a desktop OS as you do with windows...please tell me what hardware you're using!
Old thread so hopefully you read this later. We use Dell's bought with Ubuntu pre-installed at work. If we have a problem we call up Dell and they fix it. If you are doing desktop Linux in an office it is the best way to go.