I agree most people won’t run a Raspberry Pi as a desktop. That is obviously true. I don’t think they were too far off the mark, though. Would the average person run a $300 ARM Chromebook? Probably. That exists today, too.
> Your premise about the Raspberry PI is like techies on HN pretending that there's no need for x y z product/service, because you can just run your own social network on a machine in your closet at home, you can just run your own file server, you can just run your own mail server. No, consumers are never going to do that en masse.
I used to be absolutely sure this could never, ever happen. It definitely can’t and won’t happen any time soon.
However, it’s clear that the promise of the home server came far too early. I think the sentiment a lot of people have is that even if someone sold the perfect products and software, nobody would ever want it. Sure, it would offer the user more autonomy and control, but it costs money and is a constant responsibility. Nobody is going to ever feel a need to go out and do that when they can just pay a monthly fee for someone else to take care of it.
Except people take that exact trade off all the time; Home ownership. Owning a home is also an expensive ordeal, extremely expensive at that, that comes with many responsibilities, and yet most people still long for the autonomy and control and other life benefits it has to offer. No individual has to own a house in most areas; you could rent, or buy a condominium unit, and have significantly less overall responsibility. I don’t think most people want to rent even if it was cheaper. Home ownership is a north star for many people.
For better or worse, computers and the internet don’t seem to be becoming any less important for society. Mega corps rise and fall, paradigms shift, prices fall, software evolves. There’s a whole lot of growing distrust for corporations and their governments in tech right now, even to the layperson, and definitely to lawmakers.
In the past few decades, people went out and bought expensive modems and big complicated desktop computers often just to experience the magic of the Internet. As far as I’m concerned, anything could still happen.
And after that, the year of the Linux desktop will surely follow.