|
I agree -- the Linux community, on the whole, has always wanted mainstream adoption. Annual "year of desktop Linux" proclamations going back to the mid-90's attest to it! The challenge, IMO, is that adding polish to a general-use desktop is really really hard -- it requires design talent, cannot easily be done by committee, and takes a long time. Think years of design and constant redesign, lots of tweaking (down to individual pixels!), never-ending usability testing, and iterative writing, discarding, and re-writing of UI code. While some in the Linux community have long had the design know-how and experience necessary to make Linux usable by Aunt Tillie, until very recently no one had the long-term commitment, financial resources, managerial skill, and staying power necessary to pull it off. Canonical brings not just design talent, but also long-term commitment, financial resources, managerial skill, and staying power to the table; they have the best shot at making Linux a mainstream desktop OS. [ ADDENDUM: Google also has an equally good shot with ChromeOS. ] |