Why there should never be a "year of the Linux desktop"

It works for me. It works for a lot of other people. That's all it needs to do.

The "year of the Linux desktop" being a viable choice was about 2006. Today people look forward to the "year of the Linux desktop" in the sense of it gaining massive popularity. But that day will not come without lots of marketing or the price difference actually being meaningful. Windows will never have solid DRM because the day the price conscious are ever forced to choose between free Linux and $200 Windows is the day Microsoft loses a massive chunk of market share. So masses of users comes down solely to marketing, and who would get into an advertising buying war with Apple and Microsoft trying to push something free?

Linux has a critical mass of developers, testers, and users willing to help others. As long as it fulfills their needs, it will continue to improve.

It is not a business where market share matters. It is not a business selling licenses on seats. It is a project that scratches some people's itch, and thats all it is. People derive great value from it, and that drives its growth.

I've used it at home for 4 years, and my company (30 people) has used it for 2.5 years. It does everything I need and my company needs, and costs a lot less in licensing and IT support. It might be different for other companies who came from Windows and have to deal with legacy systems/documents, but starting from scratch it is great. I'm happy to give back some bug fixes and support in exchange for what I perceive to be a better experience. That experience is derived solely from the number of developers and dedicated users, it has nothing to do with how many total users there are. A billion more users that do nothing to help Linux progress wouldn't do a damn thing for me.

So I believe that the "year of the Linux desktop" has long since past, and anyone still writing about it just doesn't get it.

I love desktop Linux (or wanted to) but it hasn't really happened because there's a shortage of application development that suits the needs of early adopters with deadlines. You can use Gimp, for example, but most people want Photoshop. If you're editing audio or video then your options are more constrained, and none of the market leaders have Linux editions. I'm simplifying here, of course, but the reasons have been laid out in more detail time and again.

Round 2000 or so I was sure Linux was going to take over - I was running Gnome with enlightenment as my WM and people would come up and say 'wow, what's that'. And i could run Compiz right now and throw windows around, and people would still be impressed...but once you get past the eye candy, you hit this real functionality gap and have to make a choice between becoming a dedicated Linux hacker who runs experimental software all day, or going with the industry standard and running something industry-standard that you can show to your clients.

There isn't a truly compelling reason to move from Windows or Mac unless you're building your own system for most applications. This isn't a fault of Linux: there just aren't many end-user applications of which you can say 'this is the best, and you can only take part by running Linux', nor any 'holy shit where has this been all my life' for non-programmers.

The linux desktop is mature as far as I've been able to see. The linux laptop, on the other hand, still isn't there and from what I can tell, may never be. They still can't get the power management quite right, last I checked. Suspend and hibernate still give it fits on some hardware. I think the only way that will be solved is if the vendors take responsibility to ensure compliance on their own hardware, and that doesn't seem to be happening.

I just installed Ubuntu on my new Dell laptop the other week, for the sake of running a particular thing that isn't available on Windows, and the difference is eye-popping. Zero configuration for any hardware. (For some reason, it didn't load the ATI drivers by default, having them in a "restricted" category, but it was easy to add them.) Wireless worked out of the box. No package management problems. Totally capable GUI configuration. 90% as usable as Windows 7.

Additionally, I didn't even have to repartition my drive to install it, which blew my mind. It installed into a disk image with a Windows installer, and modified the Windows bootloader to boot from the image. That's sure a big improvement from (to a newbie, extremely scary) disk partitioning and LILO/GRUB adventures.