I'm joking but secretly hoping it happens.
Graphic designers, digital art types, and musicians are all fringe and mostly on Mac anyway. PC gamers are a fringe crowd. Practically all productivity software has migrated to the cloud. Desktop Linux usability seemed to meet the standard of Windows XP and Windows 7 years ago.
Is the problem really that you still have to grapple with graphics drivers on the CLI? Or is it just that Best Buy and CostCo still don't have motivation to put shiny Linux machines on the shelves?
and yeah I know all about the various shady Gates/Ballmer-era OEM deals… I just can't believe that not one OEM has snapped by now.
That does not bother me or probably most of us on HN much, but for most people it’s like periodically needing to muck around under the hood of their car. It’s too much, they just want to drive and take the vehicle in to get oil and brake changes every once in a fairly long while. Anything more is tedious overhead.
The situation with proprietary drivers still kinda stinks too. The distros I’ve seen handle it best are Ubuntu with the proprietary drivers control panel and pop!_OS which just sidesteps the issue altogether for Nvidia hardware by shipping an ISO with non-free Nvidia drivers included, but the rest just leave you with a package manager, terminal, and whatever you can scrounge up on the internet. Yeah it’s technically the responsibility of Nvidia, etc to fix that, but it’s negatively impacting adoption nonetheless.
This is ridiculous. Not only does Ubuntu LTS work just fine for my incredibly non-technical wife and children, but my wife prefers it to Mac OS.
Linux with a basic Gnome desktop has been perfectly usable for well over a DECADE now for non-technical users.
This particular bit of FUD has been wildly inaccurate at least since Fedora Core 3.
I've setup Linux on all machines I own or maintain, for all users including my wife. The frequency of hickups is not higher than it was with Windows and It's easy to roll back to a known good configuration, much easier than with Windows. I never looked back.
Edited to add: The last machine I bought was a Purism laptop. The first machine which did not have Windows pre-installed.
Bullshit on distros like Solus OS.
Sure, if 1.5 Billion people are a "fringe crowd"
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/314009-3-billion-people-w...
“The year of the Linux desktop” always feels like just a couple of bad big tech decisions (and an absence of good decisions) away.
It's why everything is so fragmented to begin with. "Oh, I don't like what X is doing, so I'll fork it and make Y."
If I were in a position where I managed several distros... I could say we could just suck it up and universally use XFCE, but then there's always someone who won't like that and they'll respin a distro to have some other DE instead.
It seems with every decision we end up with another fork.
As far as Linux on ________, Let's look at where we're at now.
Supercomputer. Linux runs the entire Top 500.
https://itsfoss.com/linux-runs-top-supercomputers/
Severs/Websites. 75% are Linux or variants.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system
Mobile. 72% is Android alone, which counts for Linux IMNSHO.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide
ChromeOS now exceeds MacOS market share. Apple had already been making (painful) attempts to move away from the Desktop.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-worlds-second-mo...
And, of course, there's the Linux Subsystem for Windows.
Linux won. It's over. Windows might be holding onto a majority if you only count desktops, but given even Microsoft has moved towards supporting Linux directly on their own OS... and moving towards Cloud As a Service and hosting, yep, Linux on Azure... Even Microsoft knows that Windows has found itself facing the once unthinkable: support Linux or find yourself increasingly irrelevant. Windows on ARM failed. Twice. Windows Mobile in all of its variants are dead now. Microsoft released an Android device. So given everything that we use today, something that ISN'T running a *ix type kernel is, in fact, the minority.
Microsoft is grasping harder with Windows 11... and in their shortsightedness, they ended up excluding huge chunks of systems that were still being sold even as recently as 3 years ago. It's quite unthinkable to me because the one and ONLY one major killing feature of Windows in general was that you could install it on decade-old hardware. Win10 ran pretty decently on my Phenom II x4 desktop which had 16GB Ram. Why shouldn't it?
And now Win11 is looking to exclude first gen Ryzen.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/324157-windows-11-may-...
The tighter the grip, the more that will slip in between their fingers...
At this point, it's becoming easier and easier to support Linux... thanks to Proton on Steam, more native binaries (BlackMagic, for example, with DaVinci Resolve), more apps becoming webapps and only needing a web browser. At this point, I think what we're waiting for is for legacy companies like Adobe to shit the bed and render themselves irrelevant. (And boy have they gotten close.)
Yeah. The year of Linux on the Desktop is a meme... but should it actually happen... the concept of 'desktop' won't matter anymore, IMHO.
Due to heat and therefore power constraints an ipad shaped device will remain sub par compared to a PC shaped device.
Also, laptops.
People have been able to do without full-fledged desktops quite well for a while now.
>Who needs a big machine with a monitor when you can do just about everything on a Chromebook or iPad
You did say we didn't need laptops or monitors.
People having been able to do without full fledged desktops doesn't imply the format is either dead or without merit.
It remains the best tool for the job for many many tasks especially if you have a merely average amount of funds or need above average performance.
