Why hasn’t the Year of the Linux Desktop happened yet?

- Poor backwards compatibility

- Needlessly complex UI APIs (e.g. X Window System)

- Fragmentation

- Lack of a singular UI vision

- Bad UI design, bad UX

- Lack of accessibility support

- Complex interfaces designed for 1% of users

I could go on...

The only successful UNIX interfaces dropped X Window, dropped most of the community's ideas and APIs, and started afresh. Look at Quartz (Apple), ChromeOS (Google), and Android (Google). They're much simpler at every layer, have a singular vision, and designed for normal users rather than by programmers for programmers.

But no doubt this thread will somehow find a way to blame Microsoft as is the tired song of the Linux community.

I'm sure this might be an unpopular opinion here, but my experience has been that when you do normal business collaboration - WebEx, etc. - in Linux, you spend more time fighting to make things work than you do actually working. Chrome and the proliferation of webapps has helped this somewhat, but it always ends up being something.

Scott Lowe did a pretty interesting series of blog posts [1] on it and ultimately ended up back on a Mac because it just killed his productivity and called it "death by a thousand cuts". This mirrors my experience. I want to be on Linux and there's a lot to love, but it's just not..stable? evolved? polished? (not sure what the right word is) enough to be a daily driver for most non-development oriented people.

[1] https://blog.scottlowe.org/2017/10/25/linux-migration-wrap-u...

It's a tough time for desktops generally. If the question had been "when will be the year of mass market GUI linux?" then it would have happened already with Android.

The author lists all the reasons traditional desktop linux failed and keeps failing, but the short form of the argument can be summed up like this:

Linus Torvalds, who knows a bit about Linux, also makes his own desktop app (perhaps not as famous as the kernel and git), a scuba log app. He would like to release the damn thing built for Mac, Windows and Linux. But can he? Of course not. He releases it compiled for Windows and Mac, and then as source for Linux.

Linux on the desktop might succeed when Linux has a desktop. As in, at the OS level, a developer can make assumptions about how the clipboard, resolution scaling, sound, notifications, application install/uninstall etc works. Until then, no.

This is kind of the "last mile" problem with open-source software. The last few bits of bug fixing and documentation and - most especially - interface polish can be unpleasant. Developers who started a project because of an interest in its core problem domain generally don't want to do those kinds of chores. Sometimes it's because they lack the specific skills to do them well, and don't want to invest lots of time learning how to do something that's still medium reward (at best) for them. Sometimes it's because they just don't want to even if they have the skills, because some other much more interesting problem beckons. They have to be paid to go that last mile.

In the case of web apps, developers get paid to go the last mile - either by an employer or via the market. In the case of Linux server software they also get paid; in this case a Red Hat salary is the most common form. For Linux desktop software, very few get paid. Not nearly enough. OpenOffice/LibreOffice in particular needs and has always needed a ton of work, and almost nobody's paying for it. So it has always been a total tire fire. Random crashes, which then leave a document in a "needs recovery" state permanently no matter how many times it has already been recovered. Formatting and conversion glitches. Features and options that are hard to use even if you can find them among the smoldering dung-pile of other features and options that nobody anywhere has used for years. Staggering memory abuse bogging down the whole system. I'm sure the devs (at least some of them) would love to fix these things, but it's going to be really hard work - often more political than technical in nature - and nobody's paying them enough to go through that misery so they do more rewarding things instead. The result is software that will always lag behind its proprietary competitors in terms of appeal to users - far enough behind that people will actually pay for the difference.

If you want to compete effectively in a market, somebody has to be paid for crossing that last mile, and that means somebody has to do the paying. Nobody is.

From the article:

> Of course what happened here was that Steve Jobs returned to Apple and we suddenly had MacOSX come onto the scene taking at least some air out of the Linux Desktop space.

I really agree with that: if every engineer I know who uses a Mac "because Bash" would use Linux instead, we would have arrived at a decent Linux desktop market-share by now. Kudos Apple.

In saying that, as a desktop Linux user I really don't mind being part of a small user community. I would never switch to MacOSX as it is not (fully) open source, and Windows is nice for running Steam for gaming.

These articles tend to focus on the technical reasons Linux has not been adopted, and I think it is worth also exploring the business issues (I think Linux desktops are mature enough technically that most average users can use it just as easily as Windows).

How many computers ship with Linux installed from major distributors (i.e. places where the average consumer or business would buy from)? Dell has one model but you have to look hard to find it. Most consumers and businesses think of the desktop world as having two options: windows or mac, with windows as the default. No one is out there marketing and selling Linux desktop machines. That's why they aren't out there.

The one exception is ChromeOS. It has actually taken off and is widely used in schools (and anecdotally at least becoming a popular option for people to install for their kids or parents). ChromeOS is heavily marketed by Google, and there are lots of Chromebooks marketed and sold by major distributors.

I don't consider it a true "Linux Desktop" because it isn't a full-featured OS, but the adoption nonetheless provides a contrasting case study that demonstrates the importance of marketing and distribution that the full-featured desktops lack.

I've been using a Linux desktop for years (much to my wife's disapproval). I don't believe any of these things are a the biggest reason.

Let's look a Linux success stories

1) Android. Perhaps this single biggest example of Linux success.

2) Internet of Things, Raspberry Pi, micro PCs. Linux runs the generic micro PC appliances fairly well.

3) Chromebooks. Not a big market but a decent alternative to Macs and Windows mini laptops.

In summary I would say its consumer market adoption. As mentioned already the desktop is suffering. It's the appetite of the market that is going to drive adoption. The Linux desktop still hasn't reach a critical mass that it can replace a Windows or Mac with the consumer not noticing. Once you reach that point that an average consumer will not notice a difference then you will see a big push.

I believe Google has a big chance to make this happen. If they can get their Google SaaS office suite seamless and adopted universally than I can see Linux making a big push into laptops and notebook devices.

I feel like Ubuntu had the opportunity to help the Linux desktop gain more traction. However, they got side tracked from helping to polish existing open source projects and started messing about reimplementing low-level wheels all over the place.

I don't think a Linux desktop would have rivalled MS but it could have made more gains than it has.

Obviously, there's polish, which is undeniably lacking in every corner of the linux desktop experience.

But even if it were polished, I think the phantom linux desktop is just another manifestation of a programmer looking at instagram and thinking, "what's the big deal? I could make this"

Sure, I have no doubt, but it's missing the other 90% of the magic that gets a significant slice of the population on board. It's more than checking the appropriate boxes. It requires much more effort, and requires much more of a centralized figure, than checking the boxes.

This is why, among technical people, who _do_ only require that something checks boxes, linux on the server is a smash hit.

As a non-IT professional, I do not see the reasons why I did not switch personally despite being increasing uncomfortable with Windows 10 and thinking that I will need to do that one day.

1. Poor driver support (it is mentioned last but I think it's a major problem). It is a lottery to know if you install linux on a laptop which functionality will work or not. Even on a dell laptop that came with linux pre-installed I ended up with some functionalities not working correctly.

2. Non self-discoverability of the OS. Outside of very basic tasks, you very quickly end up writing command lines, much earlier than on Windows that gives you a UI for quite sophisticated things. People who code every day don't realise how difficult it is for someone who never coded to get into it. It is the same for someone who doesn't use CLI extensively. There is so much to learn before being to do simple things that I can do in a few clicks on windows that this is a heavy investment. An investment I will probably do one day but that I do not have the brain/time budget to make in the short term. I appreciate the power of being able to do everything with command line (and to automate everything). However don't underestimate the friction it creates when you need to do something like 3-10 times a year, not often to learn the command by heart but often to be seriously annoyed every time you do it and spend a disproportionate amount of time. Not a problem for linux sysadmins who do that all day. But if the target is 10% market share, it needs to be usable by more than sysadmins.

I see a lot of people discussing technical shortcomings and problems with user experience, and I think these are all missing the point a bit. Constantly changing APIs, inconsistent GUI paradigms, these are all side effects of the key feature of the Linux desktop experience: freedom. Anyone who wants to can write a window manager / Wayland compositor / GUI toolkit / terminal emulator / command shell that does things completely differently. Maybe a lot of this stuff is terrible, but some of it is brilliant in a way that lines up beautifully with how I want to use my computer.

The market for freedom on the desktop isn't huge. Freedom is challenging and it's not worth the effort for most users. They have better things to do than to fight with bad network drivers. For them, the cost of buying new hardware every other year when planned obsolescence hits is worth not having to fight it. But for some of us, freedom is worth the effort. I bought a netbook in 2011 that I love and still use. If it weren't for Linux, I would have had to replace it in 2013 when Windows bogged down to the point of uselessness.

Why does Linux have to take over the world to succeed? It's a success if it's there for those of us who want it.

This might be implicitly covered under "In the first 10 years of Desktop linux there was no doubt that Microsoft was working hard to try to nip any sign of Desktop Linux gaining any kind of foothold or momentum," but I think the biggest answer is path dependence: https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/paths.html and network effects. Once most people used MS DOS and then Windows, it was easiest for most other people to do so too. Activation energy in switching is hard, and a strong ecosystem begets a stronger ecosystem.

In many domains, there's an early period of fermentation and experimentation. Famously, there were hundreds of American car companies around the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Today there are three and prior to Tesla the the last successful one was founded decades ago. And it remains to be seen if Tesla is in it for the long term.

In phones, we have Apple and Android and that's likely it. Path dependence.

Lots of people are excited about AR/VR because those fields seem relatively open. But if they turn out to be important, they too are likely to have two big players.

For me it's pretty simple; as a front-end developer who needs to run Photoshop, the latest, and in a stable way (Wine is not stable nor does it run the latest Photoshop on Linux) I had two choices, none of which were Linux. Windows and MacOS, now since I don't really do any gaming, but I do need Bash and Windows design decisions are questionable at best, the fact that you can't turn off updates without command-line hacking or other absurd stuff (and that updates often break drivers) I decided to go with a Mac. It's not perfect, of course, nothing is, but I'm happy and I don't see myself ever going on Linux because

- Poor app ecosystem

- You tell me "Use GIMP", but with virtually no PSD support I say no and tell that to all the designers that hand me out PSD-s to cut and they will tell you that's never happening

- Poor design decisions

- Poor driver support

- I don't want to hack in the command-line a full day to set up the thing, like I've so far had to do when trying to use Linux

Of course, this is all subjective and I by no means am talking for everyone else, but I'm quite sure my issues with Linux align with someone else's here as well.

What is missing is that on the Linux desktop it does not simply “just work”. You may not feel it anymore after you used Linux for a while. But if you leave Linux for a year or two and come back you will see tons of small things that are outright broken or where you need to fiddle with them to get them to work.

The best (most productive, least off-the-wall) I can do year after year seems to be to run an XFCE desktop. But its not polished (although the icon set got refreshed recently which is nice.)

Poor UX for me seems to boil down to off-the-wall or geek fad UX decisions the major desktop managers make with every new version that drive me back to XFCE. Linux vendors, please focus on productivity and less on glitz/chasing the unified mobile & desktop UX dragon. Please?!

Also, I can't pin exactly why I think this is, but linux desktop managers always feel bolted on rather than integral to the experience - it doesn't strike me as valued by the operating system vendor as much as the underlying kernel. Maybe its an inconsistent frame rate thing or trackpad funkiness on my underpowered HP laptop that has me so negative on the Linux feel.

It's Office, silly. LibreOffice is, in a vacuum, a fine collection of software, but stacked up against the juggernaut of the MS Office suite, it can't compare. They're continually playing catch-up, since their mandate is to be compatible with Office, with a fraction of the resources, and always having to react to maintain compatibility. Likewise, businesses run on Outlook and Exchange, to an overwhelming degree; most of the serious competitors have faded away at this point - even five years ago, there were still a lot of Domino shops, but IBM has divested their software divisions, and essentially made that stack abandonware, and so everyone under the sun is moving to Office 365.

For me its lack of desktop applications that may or may not work on the linux distro I decide to use. I the lack of "it just works" is a huge problem. I own a mac, and if I see an application supports apple I can be fairly certain it works with my machine (hopefully my OS version) and it will be easy to install and run.

Its fragmentation (so many distos...) that makes the app sales market quite small so businesses can't (won't) make a go of making desktop apps.

Use linux servers everyday, its the desktop experience which was never really polished.

I do want my next notebook to be a linux box though..

I know this is controversial and you can call me crazy but, Microsoft is doing a pretty damn good job at bringing Linux to the desktop.

Here me out for a second. Let's ignore how Windows 10 spies on you and other side topics.

The real situation is this:

You're a developer who wants to run various Unix / Linux tools. This could be anything from simple tools like grep, to entire development stacks (ruby, python, postgresql, etc.). It could even be graphical tools like Sublime Text.

For that, you could just install any flavor of Linux but it's never that simple.

Often times with web development you're also dealing with images, so now you need a nice image editor. Sure GIMP exists, but it's not in the same league as Photoshop, sorry. Sure, you could run a Windows VM inside of Linux but it's also not as simple as that too.

A lot of us do other things with our computer besides web development. This varies from person to person. Personally I like to play games on occasion and a lot of games won't run on Linux, don't work with Wine and run terribly bad inside of a VM. Dual booting is also an awful user experience.

Perhaps you're interested in creating videos too, or record podcasts, etc.. The audio and video tools on Linux are just no where near tools like Camtasia and Screenflow. Unlike GIMP, there really isn't even a suitable audio or video solution on Linux, and audio requires extremely low latency so you can't run Camtasia in a VM. Dual booting also isn't an option because what if you want to record Linux based web development videos?

Anyways, all of this is solved by Windows right now with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I can happily play games, record videos, process audio, run Photoshop and do full time Linux based web development (with Docker too) all from a single computer running Windows 10. No VMs or dual booting required, and it's really fast.

If anyone is curious, here's how you can set all of that up: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-wsl-and-mobaxterm-to-cr...

Why do we even expect Linux to have a dominant share of the desktop market? Most computers are sold with Windows and most people don't care about what OS they run. Not all people need a decent command line, the ability to easily install and update software, a rich set of easily accessible language interpreters and compilers, and an environment that is similar to the servers most the internet runs on. Among those who would have an advantage from having that, Linux and macOS are already the dominant OSs.

> Canonical business model not working out

Well, failing to deliver a good product didn't really help neither their business model, nor the Year of the Linux Desktop.

Polishing and repackaging existing software seems like a successful strategy, but it can never make the Linux Desktop happen. On the other hand throwing it all away and starting from scratch can, but needs exceptionally right people to achieve. As far as I know no company like this exists today.

Well, GNOME 3's lack of consistency and complete disregard for established UX practices didn't help. Client side decorations are annoying and hurt discoverability. Just give me a normal menubar and toolbar without fancy animations and buttons that aren't the size of a postage stamps. GNOME 2 and Windows XP/7 were the pinnacle of usable interfaces. It's all been downhill from there.

I switched from Linux (KDE) to Mac about 5 years ago, with some attempts to switch back.

I recently got a laptop with Windows for some gaming for the kids, and I feel Windows is actually less polished than Linux with KDE. Restarts, weird issues with multiple users, sudden switches between Modern UI and something that looks the same as the Windows 2000 I last used.

I really wonder when Windows will be usable enough for home users...

Because Linux is a kernel? It's just one piece in an ecosystem.

It would make more sense to ask why the Year of Gnome Desktop hasn't happened. And the answer is easy if you compare the budget that Apple or Microsoft has to create an integrated environment. Even with free helping hands, I bet that RedHat is nowhere near the number of bodies that big corp can throw at it.

The experience is dismal, even basic crap still doesn't work. I installed mint a couple of months ago (clean install), right after booting, the mouse doesn't work. THE PS2 MOUSE DOESN'T WORK!!!

It's fine for servers, but for a desktop, you have to be masochistic to want to use it, unless the only thing you use it for is to build software.

In my 20s and 30s I loved an OS I could hack around in and play with. Now I just want my freaking email to work and the computer not to blow up every time there is an upgrade. Most people are like that. Linux on desktop is neat and all but not compelling as an alternative to “works well enough” for non-tech obsessives.

Terrible UX.

- Ubuntu's approach was too fragmented + insular.

- Microsoft is pushing hard in the consumer space.