Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

theregister.com

33 points·LinuxBender··7 comments

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That's not because suddenly, everyone will realize that the Linux desktop is wonderful. Sorry, folks, if it hasn't happened by now, it never will.

But there's another way the conventional idea of a Linux desktop could become the top PC-based operating system. That's if its competition ceded the field.

And that's exactly what Microsoft has been doing.

For years, I've been watching Microsoft working on moving you from PC Windows to a cloud-based Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) model.

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https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/04/linux_desktop_cloud_d...

I've been listening to Linux enthusiasts say this for 25+ years. Somehow I don't think ChromeOS was what they were envisioning.

It will soon be more accurate to say ChromeOS is not what Google envisioned. They shouldn't feel bad though, building a company specific desktop concept upon POSIX is a sprint that every company can do; maintaining the infrastructure to keep it going against whatever is dominant across companies is a marathon where no one seems to have realized what they signed up for.

Well if Microsoft drops local Windows, it will live on through Wine.

Heck, it may become the "standard" linux target like it already is for the Deck. That would be hilarious.

It is deeply ironic to me that the most stable API target on Linux is the Windows API as implemented by Wine.

Disagree. Some people will run stuff in the cloud, yeah. Apple doesn't care about that topic afaict and it was just name-dropping. After the big fuck up of security quite recently, this will take another hit. And they will fuck it up again, because Microsoft isn't good with security (hi AD). So this won't stick. It also doesn't make any sense with computers getting better and better.

Any day now!

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