[crdoconnor]

The Linux desktop will come when Microsoft loses its leverage over hardware manufacturers and they start to preinstall linux and stop putting up barriers to adoption (e.g. remove windows -> lose warranty).

It's already better than the windows desktop (xubuntu anyway, not unity, however). The barriers to uptake are no longer technical and haven't been for some years. It's all market + legal now.

[Joeri]

Remember the netbook craze? They put linux on there, but they didn't start to sell in volume until they replaced it with windows.

When people buy something in a PC form factor they expect it to run windows. Linux on the desktop will not happen in a traditional desktop form factor because people don't want it and/or don't see the point. The one possible exception are chromebooks, because a laptop that only runs chrome and is therefore cheaper / lighter is something people see the point of.

Besides, linux as mass market OS has already happened, it's called android.

[crdoconnor]

>Remember the netbook craze? They put linux on there, but they didn't start to sell in volume until they replaced it with windows.

Not exactly how I remember it. They sold like wildfire initially when linux was first put on it. Then MS started giving away windows licenses because they freaked out over linux adoption overtaking them.

Somehow them and intel managed to prevent all the hardware manufacturers from improving their specs (each year they got progressively worse).

Something very fishy went on with that market.

[gcr]

(BTW, congrats on having a post ID of exactly 7000000! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7000000 )

[ZenoArrow]

Yes, if I remember correctly Microsoft or Intel made some sort of requirement that netbooks couldn't be sold with over 1GB RAM. There may have been some other restrictions.

[noinsight]

> Remember the netbook craze? They put linux on there, but they didn't start to sell in volume until they replaced it with windows.

Those were gimp versions (distributions) of Linux though. We haven't seen what happens with a properly supported straight-up Ubuntu or such full-featured desktop.

[Joeri]

They weren't gimped from the perspective of the desktop, just from the perspective of a programmer. They ran all the same apps, in a UI optimized for netbooks, with a simple easy store app to download additional software. A straight-up Ubuntu wouldn't be that much nicer for a "typical" user in my opinion.

[drzaiusapelord]

This is a great point. I remember people losing their shit when netbooks shipped with windows instead of "this linux thing that doesn't work with my work stuff." That's literally a quote from someone in my wife's office when she showed up with a little Windows netbook I bought her.

I think the linux desktop is farther away than ever. For the modern home user, some level of iOS or Android device will take the place of the "family" computer. Gamers and edge cases will exist, but in much smaller numbers. For a gamer, a Win8 OEM license is a trivial cost.

This is also why linux distros are stupid for chasing MS, instead of implementing their own vision and their own added value. Yet another WIMP, Open Office, Chromium box that serves no one but FOSS enthusiasts isn't going to win anyone over, especially when they can't use the Outlook/Exchange/IE/Office/Sharepoint stack they've become accustomed to. They've invented a poorer version of Windows when the demand for a Windows-like OS is at its lowest and people are shifting largely to mobile devices and keeping the big clunky desktop for work stuff that is deeply tied to proprietary MS or Adobe or Intuit software. For pros, Gnucash doesn't replace quickbooks. The gimp doesn't replace photoshop.

I'd love to see the business world standardize on some FOSS desktop solution, but that has so much politics and proprietary stuff attached to it, that its the same story we have today as we did when slashdot was telling us that Mandrake would take over windows in 2002 or 2003.

I guess you could call android a linux desktop, but that's quite a stretch. Its a linux kernel and a lot of mobile stuff Google came up with. That's a face-saving win, but in reality the linux desktop has been a massive fail in terms of adoptability and business penetration.

[macco]

> It's already better than the windows desktop (xubuntu anyway, not unity, however).

Disaggree. Unity is by far superior to the Windows Desktop. It's the most productive DE on a notebook I know (OS X included)

[massysett]

Dell is preinstalling Ubuntu. So is Asus.

[wldlyinaccurate]

Buying a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled is a PITA because you have to purchase it as a business which apparently means you lose all your consumer rights. I found this out the hard way when I was told that returning my XPS 13 would cost me a 15% "restocking fee".

Besides, they're preinstalling 12.04, and upgrading to newer versions (in my experience) requires blacklisting kernel modules and setting kernel params.

[rplnt]

> It's all market + legal now.

And investing in re-schooling people to the new system and applications (Office suite would be probably the most notable one).

[EliRivers]

A bit off-topic, I haven't been able to use a version of Office since they brought that ribbon thing in and moved the "Properties" menu option that used to be under "File". What year was that? 2003?

I recall spending ages trying to figure out where on the hard drive the file actually was without having to go via "Save As" (used to be File->Properties, and there it is). I'm sure it's trivially easy, but that interface change effectively made Office a whole new program to learn for me, with the predictable result that since I now had to relearn how to use it, it was on a level playing field with other tools - one of which I switched to. While I'm only one data point, making me relearn the interface meant Office suddenly had to actually compete again.

I also struggle to use any version of Windows beyond XP. I am a total cluster on Win 8 and it's quicker for me to find someone who can use it and get them to do it for me. The older I get, the more sure I becomes that there is no such thing as an intuitive interface; only convention.

[tankenmate]

Retraining people to use LibreOffice (or OpenOffice) from Office 2007 is cheaper than training them to use Office 2013; the interfaces are almost identical. The municipality of Munich has proved this conclusively with their big roll out.

The only true bugbear is porting Excel spreadsheets with VBA macros.

[crdoconnor]

Office is now easy to use on linux thanks to wine and crossover.

Everything else works pretty much the same anyhow. There's a minor learning curve for learning how to install software. That's about it.