| Hang on, what have we got here? TD;LR Linux is not one thing. Various projects are not mutually exclusive We have GNU/Linux with a huge array of applications all licensed in such a way as to allow forking and customisation. We have different groups of users of desktop/laptops; sysadmins; developers; scientific users; people who use administered desktops at work (e.g. French police &c) We have a smallish and very pushy company in the UK (Canonical) who want to build on GNU/Linux to produce an operating system (Ubuntu) that will work on TVs, phones, tablets, fridges &c. Their target audience won't be developing alternatives to X, and probably won't be writing bash scripts or anything. (That isn't to say that some their users won't be doing those things). We have a much larger company in the US (Redhat) who provide a stable conservative desktop as a compliment to their commercially supported server OS (RHEL). They part fund a desktop system that has changed radically recently (Gnome). There is a German based company that make an enterprise desktop OS and server OS and who contribute to the development of a different desktop environment (KDE) We have a not-for-profit foundation type entity who push out a version of GNU/Linux that can run on a huge range of architectures (Debian) There is this thing called 'upstream'. Small projects push out all kinds of applications including alternative desktop environments. So Canonical does its thing, some of the stuff they do may get back into the mainstream GNU/Linux, some may not. Some hardware manufacturer may or may not take up the system. I may be able to dock my phone to a keyboard/mouse/monitor and write documents in LibreOffice and edit podcasts/photos in a couple of years or 5. (bring that on). The others carry on as they do now. You may have to choose the graphics card more carefully in future but I hope not. I suspect workstation class computers with separate monitor/bases will get more expensive and specialised anyway, and I imagine someone will do a 'high end workstation-OS' just for them. |