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by daxorid 3274 days ago
A little aside, I've been using Linux as primary workstation for seven years now. It works great, so I've never understood this "year of the desktop" meme.

Now, OpenBSD is another matter entirely...

3 comments

On the slashdot back in the late 90s there were breathless articles all the time about how this was going to be the year that the Linux Desktop was going to sweep across the world and surely M$ was doomed.

Two decades later Microsoft is doing quite well and Linux still accounts for a small percent of personal computers.

>small percent of personal computers.

I certainly consider my phone to be a personal computer nowadays.

It has a few orders or magnitude more powerful hardware and can do things my first few PCs could not do.

Linux is certainly doing very well there. ;) GNU/Linux might not be, but that's a different story.

A phone OS marketed by Google that happens to be derived from Linux code is to "GNU/Linux is going to kill Microsoft and big corporations flexing their power in the software industry" what a hypothetical cardless payment technology run by Paypal that uses a blockchain somewhere on the backend is to "Bitcoin is going to kill fiat currency and the banking oligarchy"
It's not that it can't be used as a desktop OS (it obviously can), but that it will be see widespread adoption (like macOS or Windows) outside of the general Linux userbase.
Yes, I threw out the old meme, but I've been using linux as my primary system for 7-8 years. Despite doing so, I still don't think it will ever be mainstream unless you count android - but that isn't a desktop in my opinion. I'll be happy to count android as a linux destop when my phone replaces my laptop!