Linux on the desktop 2010, your honest thoughts?

2009 was a break out year for linux on the desktop for the people around me. In my company, linux has begun to bleed into non-technical departments. I convinced my aging parents to dump Windows, my acupuncturist brother in law, my wife etc. etc.

With more of an emphasis on console games as opposed to games on the desktop and with 80% or more of a user's time being spent on the browser on desktops, I only see it getting easier to transition people to Linux in business and at home. At my company, the plan is to transition everyone to Linux with two exceptions, testers so we can test compatibility (though those are run on VMs anyway) and old employees who are MSOffice power users that the learning curve for OpenOffice and the few missing features is too much for them to bear (and it is worth the few hundred bucks of licensing fees not to hear their complaining)...this amounts to two, maybe three people out of over 75...all developers and operations and most product sales consultants and engineers are already on Linux.

I'm going to lean to "no" if for no other reason than this has been said for the past ten years and it has never come true. It's like hearing someone talk about "kids today" or "Duke Nukem Forever", eventually just the phrase turns you off.

In all seriousness, however, I think that MacOS and Windows have come so far both in features and price, they can successfully stop Linux on the desktops' growth. Why would I mess with installing linux if there's so many ways to get Windows 7 on anything I want for not a lot?

This is the year of Linux on the console/set-top box/phone/tablet or other specialty device, perhaps, but not the desktop.

Here are a few thoughts. These thoughts have the mindset of "how do i make linux get some form of mainstream adoption":

- People are comfortable with computing devices that aren't running windows now (netbooks, kindles, iphones, the thought of a tablet, etc.)

- It can't just be a software proposition. A large mass of people will not just say: let me uninstall windows/os x for linux.

- There needs to be a tight integration of Hardware, Software, AND Services/Support.

- I <3 open source. I absolutely think it's the reason most of us are able to do and build what we love on a daily basis. With that said: We need to get past some of the hippy ideals+everyone is tech savvy assumptions of the linux community. You need to bundle the "non-free" codecs and assume that no one will ever want to touch the command line.

The PC industry is complete and utter shit. It infuriates me like you wouldn't believe. All of the desktops are ugly, the service is absolute crap, and every computer comes with bloatware out the ass. Where's the "Apple of Linux PCs"? Why doesn't someone say: I'll build a great distro of linux that has what you need out of the box with amazing effects (cairo dock, compiz,etc.), looks absolutely stunning in a small form factor, AND provides great support+getting started support.

I like PC-BSD myself. But that said, I don't see any real change coming in 2010. There will likely be a small increase in non-Windows, non-Mac desktops in 2010, but nothing out of line with the trend over the past few years.

Edit: The main reason why I think this is that mainstream retailers don't support it (e.g. Best Buy's "Geek Squad"). Non-geek consumers want something that comes with support or at least the appearance of support.

No, I don't think so...

The only company focused on the Linux Desktop is Canonical (for Ubuntu) while all others only care about servers...

Plus, other companies don't see Linux as very important for the end user, so you end up with cameras, printers, scanners, etc that don't work on Linux.

My say is that it will continue to grow with the geek community, but not for the average users.

My honest thoughts? It doesn't matter.

If 2009 has showed us anything, it's that the desktop OS is quickly becoming less and less of a factor, as far as consumers are concerned. Linux's strength has always been in the cloud and on "non-computer" devices; is it a bad thing that "not enough" people are using Ubuntu if they end up using Boxee, JoliCloud, Android, etc?

The reason why OS's don't matter is because, generally speaking, all people want them to do these days is not crash and let them get to their apps of choice. In my opinion, if there's one priority that desktop Linux should have for the coming year to increase its appeal, it's not in the OS itself; it's in working with services to get better support compatibility. How about some GPU accelerated Flash support? Netflix streaming anyone? Granted, a lot of improvement has been going on in this area (I never expected to be able to run Hulu Desktop, for example), but there's still a lot that can be done.

Background: Former OS X user, switched to Ubuntu/Win7 dual boot, spending almost all time in Ubuntu.

Quick thoughts:

Linux on the desktop should be rebranded as Linux on the laptop. I haven't used a desktop for at least 6 years. This relates directly to what my main impression is: For power users, using Linux feels superior in almost every regard, except hardware support.

This is bitter-sweet, because installing/purging apps effortlessly from repositories, keeping a system up to date, and having good usability is fantastic, but the paper cuts are there - brightness adjustment doesn't work, skype video failed suddenly, can't configure touchpad fully (disable tapping, use side-scrolling, etc.). Battery life is noticeably inferior to Win/OS X.

Also, buying PC hardware is a nightmare - way too many models, with terrible nomenclature. Models with entirely different processors, etc. have almost the same name, etc.

I dream of a "Linux Apple" - a company that sells a small but smart range of laptops (even at a premium) with a selection of hardware that guarantees that a major linux distro will run on it without paper cuts. Companies like System76 fail - their machines are too heavy and the battery life sucks (same for others, not singling them out).

I've been dual booting Ubuntu and Win7 for several months now, and I can't find too many reasons why I would choose Ubuntu over Win7 (or Mac OS). I should say, I have converted friends and family to Ubuntu and they do just fine.

Many of the tools I like for Linux are starting to also get ports for Windows. Plus Win7 feels open source compared to my buddy's Mac :P

It's simple: Linux was ported to ARM chips soon after being invented and it's pretty much game over for Windows x86 when you can run X servers on ARM on cheap mobile phones.

I run a Windows install natively, as it's far more reliable than any desktop Linux distribution I have ever used. I then run Ubuntu 9.10 in a virtual machine on one of my monitors or in Unity mode or what have you. This works very well for me; when Ubuntu inevitably breaks, it's trivial to revert to a working snapshot, and it doesn't take down the majority of what I'm doing.

Linux still has a long way to go improving usability and user experience, as well as improving the generally poor quality of Linux desktop software.

I really like Linux. I use it daily, and I would like it to succeed. I hope that the things I've mentioned are improved to bring it up to par with newer versions of OS X and Windows.

tl;dr - No

At this point, I don't think there's any technical reason that Linux on the desktop/laptop/netbook/smartbook wouldn't fly.

End users never see a command line in mainstream Linux distributions, anymore than they do with Windows 7 or Mac OS X (though power user still use them). Applications are available from a nice point and click GUI, very similar to the apps marketplace on smartphones, making software installs a snap.

Linux now has the best hardware support of any OS; hardware that doesn't "just work" is kind of rare these days. There's no driver installs, making the end user process even easier.

Since smartbooks will be the next big push, Linux will have an early advantage, as it did with netbooks.

All that said, unless more vendors start offering and promoting pre-installs, Linux on the desktop will not be mainstream. No one (expect we few) installs an OS. If viruses take over a machine, they take it to Geek Squad and pay $150 for e re-install. That's just the reality, just as most people don't do their own car maintenance anymore.

The single largest failure of Linux (which I use exclusively) is that it has no serious marketing. 99 out of 100 people I encounter have never even heard of it, after all these years. They know Android and Tivo and Google and Sharp and all the other brands that run Linux under the covers, but they have no idea what it is or that it's something they can use on a computer. I understand that the free distribution model doesn't lend itself to paying for marketing, but there isn't even a way to contribute towards advertising. The only thing Linux has is word of mouth.

The best thing about Linux is its rate of improvement. Linux in January 2010 is much nicer than a year ago and barely recognizable from, say, Linux 2003, the year when Windows XP launched. Windows and Mac OS are much slower to innovate. There are several reasons for this.

- Because Linux has many distros, it can't take a big stumble like Vista. If Ubuntu stumbles, RedHat, SUSE, and Debian keep innovating (to name just the biggies).

- There's a constant churn of projects contending for every component of Linux,from media players to Ethernet drivers. The distros continuously select best-of-breed.

- Linux has a huge developer base, comparable to the whole Microsoft development ecosystem. Many of them aren't paid, and those who are paid are distributed across hundreds of companies. This huge developer base isn't subject to Brooks' Law because open source projects release early and often, and because Linux is decomposed into many independent but interoperable pieces.

Unfortunately, I don't think Linux will ever take over as the desktop market leader.

- Windows and MacOS are good enough for most people most of the time.

- Linux requires extra effort to get and install. Microsoft has shown repeatedly that they can keep it that way on PC compatibles.

- The network effect works against Linux on the desktop, just as it favors Linux in servers and embedded systems. Since 90% of the world runs Windows, Windows is the default choice for independent desktop software developers. Even Google, a very Linux-friendly company, released Earth, Chrome (browser), and SketchUp for Windows first. There is still no SketchUp for Linux.

- The highly innovative development process leaves too many loose ends visible to end users. Linux always needs a little tweaking (though this has dropped dramatically in the last decade).

There are some things that could disrupt the current desktop space.

- OLPC or Google Chromium (OS) both have the potential to push Linux into the majority desktop OS. Other platforms could do the same. But those platforms are so different from the traditional Unix/GNOME/KDE userland that they barely count.

- The other potential disruptor is non-x86 CPUs. ARM or another architecture could come from below and replace a significant fraction of the desktop boxes. Windows is pretty tightly wedded to the x86 architecture, so Microsoft does what they can to bolster x86. But Moore's Law is still in effect, so a disruptive CPU is certainly a possibility.

Basic usage answers: I've been using Linux on my desktop and laptops since 1998-99. I use it all the time on my primary and secondary machines. I cautiously recommend it to others. (Cautiously: I don't push Linux. Whenever anyone shows interest, I explain the pros and cons, and make sure they have an Ubuntu LiveCD in their hands when we're done and understand that there's no commitment to trying it.)

Background: I've used Linux a lot for around 4 years.

In the time that I've been using Linux it has come a very long way. When I started it was absolute torture. Hardware compatability was terrible, very few things worked. I had to update drivers by compiling and installing them. No where close to being usable by anyone that wasn't pretty tech savvy.

However, I was able to install SuSE linux on a laptop for my dad and it has been working just fine for him. That being said, there are things that are seriouly lacking. The main one, and the reason I pretty much have switched to Windows 7 is graphics.

The state of graphics in Linux is completely unacceptable. Compositing breaks often, the performance is poor, and if your hardware is even kind of unusual things won't work. Want to get a sweet notebook (http://tr.im/JUuy - amazon.com) with 10 hours of battery life and the ability to switch between a discrete card and integrated graphcis (to save power)? Tough luck, Linux can't do it. Want to have composite with 3 monitors (admittedly just for power users) you're pretty much out of luck.

Beyond that, there needs to be a company promoting and selling linux, a company that has a vested interest in fixing problems like the above. More than that, there needs to be a company that needs to find a way to make money with Linux desktop/laptop computers. Until that happens, I feel that it will always be stuck behind the curve and playing catch up.

For me the desktop Linux year was 2006. I'd been using it on and off since 2000 (Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake), but it wasn't until 2006 (Ubuntu) that it could do all the things that I needed without a great deal of complication and diversions. I've been using Linux almost exclusively since then as my primary OS on multiple desktop and laptop machines. I also feel comfortable recommending Linux to other people now, which wasn't the case even a couple of years ago.

I ran linux on the desktop for close to a decade, and I honestly regret that. The hours I spent futzing with x-windows, apmd, the broken pcmcia support, etc were unproductive periods of my life that I can not get back. It formed a ridiculous "us versus them" mentality that took years to fully get out of my system.

I still remember the day seven years ago that my laptop failed while at a customer site. I jumped onto an imac, the first time I had ever touched an apple product. The next day I went out and bought a macbook pro, and haven't wasted time trying to shoehorn a server OS onto a desktop ever since.

I believe it will continue to grow but not as fast as it needs to be any serious competitor to Windows or MacOS in 2010.

It still lacks a good-enought variety of (proprietary) third-party applications and games.

This is what most of the younger power users care about -- and they are the ones who learn computer usage most easily. But there's no compelling reason for them to try or to switch to Linux.

What blocks the supply of third-party applications is the lack of a default decentral installer on the major Linux distributions. APT just doens't cut it. In a recent review of using a Macbook, former GNOME Quality Control lead, Luis Villa, wrote [1]:

"...installing new software [on a Mac] is insanely nice. Yes, apt and yum are nice, but I don’t find out about software that way. I find out about software by reading something on the web (for me usually a blog post, but for others a news article) and from there installation on mac is a click, download, and drag away. That is it. That is insanely great."

I do find new software like that, too, but APT wasn't made for this use case. As a result, I stopped reading reviews of Linux applications. Most of the time, it's a hassle to get the dicussed software installed, for they are often not available in Ubuntu's repositories or it's an old version.

I also stopped buying or reading Linux magazines or journals for this reason.

So, even if there are new great applications out there, the word spreads slowly. As a result, Linux appears to be boring and to lack behind the other two OSes. It's simply more fun to use Windows or MacOS for a power user.

And if the majority of power users don't switch, the less literate users are not going to be convinenced to switch, either. Neither more advertising nor having Linux pre-installed will change that, in my opinion.

[1]: http://tieguy.org/blog/2009/12/23/continued-notes-on-the-mac...

I don't run linux on my desktop because windows XP really does just work for me.

I know the evangelists really hate to hear this, but I'm currently sitting in my conference room watching a DVD on our projector (I didn't even have to screw with xorg.conf to get the second monitor that windows treats the projector as working!), with a couple of sessions of putty running into linux boxes.

I wouldn't run linux on my desktop for the same reason I wouldn't run windows on my DNS server: it's just the wrong tool for the job.

(I wrote a blog about this here: http://newslily.com/blog/permalink.cgi?blog_id=77 if anyone is interested)

I think the mainstream desktop battle is long over and no longer relevant. Apple and Microsoft have defined exactly what a traditional personal computer is supposed to be. Desktop Linux can only hope to replicate the experience which puts it in a perpetual state of catch up. That's OK though -- traditional PCs are old news. They'll be extinct for the mainstream in 5-10 years anyway. Linux and OSS software is positioned to be the dominant player in the next generation of devices: mobile handsets, set top boxes and a variety of other new platforms we haven't considered yet. That being said I don't think the desktop Linux projects should just pack it up and stop because there is a small highly devoted audience for Linux on the desktop today and there will always be a sizable market for traditional PC workstations. As time goes on and the mainstream moves to mobiles & set tops for the bulk of their computing the remaining market for PCs will slant heavily towards hackers, developers, power users where Linux is a fantastic choice. So I guess after the first "decade of Linux" in the mainstream we should be cautiously optimistic. The huge usage numbers aren't there (on the desktop) but there's no doubt the existence of Linux and other OSS projects have completely changed how we use technology as a whole in the last decade. That's not a bad start.

I've switched back and forth between Windows and Linux. Right now I'm favoring Windows.

The main problem with Linux from a developer standpoint is that you have to be doing strictly Linux-oriented development to have a good experience - which, commercially, mainly means server stuff. As soon as you want to target end-user anything, then you have to think cross-platform, and when you try for cross-platform you start running into basic platform compatibility problems and you start wanting to use the proprietary tools and APIs of the target platform because they "just work" on that platform and the universal whatever you're trying to use doesn't.

Linux also tends to have trouble with even slightly non-mainstream hardware configurations(multiple sound cards, multiple monitors, etc.) because of driver/architecture design that doesn't really account for those situations. It's very all-or-nothing. When it gets things right the hardware works great, but when it doesn't there is usually no real recourse.

That said, I still want to use Linux if I can find a good reason to. It is pretty awesome having 10GB+ worth of software sitting in repositories for convenient download. Just paging through listings in Synaptic is food for thought by itself.

I've used Linux as my main desktop OS for 12 years and I'm 100% happy with it. I feel horribly restricted when I try to use Windows for anything other than web browsing.

No it will not compete with Window 7 in market share, but that is because of the distribution channel. Linux has always been more succesfull than OS X, except the us (http://www.osnews.com/story/21035/Ballmer_Linux_Bigger_Compe...).

Would you recommend it? Yes, especially if you never used a computer or you need cheap software.

By the way, are you from germany?

After shunning Linux desktops for years, I find myself surprisingly positive about Ubuntu.

I'm trying Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix, on a Lenovo S10. There were a few bumps getting it started, but all in all I'm starting to enjoy using it as much as my Mac laptop, maybe more.

It may have the best GUI shell available for a small screen. Stuff that used to be tricky, like mounting devices or connecting to networks, is now quite elegant. Workhorse open source apps like Firefox and Thunderbird are now very mature and usable. I can get (some) decent fonts and they look about as good as any other OS on-screen.

So I can customize it more, and I have the reliability of apt-get, a lot of very good apps, and for the most part it is slick, attractive, and Just Works. Perfect for a hacker who hates system administration.

That said, Linux probably won't conquer on the desktop, ever. They missed their chance, because the desktop is now obsolete. Network-oriented devices like phones and the forthcoming Chrome netbook are the future. Ironically they will run Linux, but only for the most basic OS functions; all this desktop stuff will wither away.

2010 will be like 2009.

The year of the desktop for Linux will keep on not arriving, but the Linux desktop offering will keep improving incrementally.

Windows will continue to stagnate. Mac OS X will continue to innovate and the Linux desktop community will be better at copying the good bits than Microsoft, partly because of less cruft and partly because Microsoft is still trying to get a sense of itself in a changed world.

Personally, I write code on all three, have basically the same environment on all three (Vim, Vimperator, bash, GCC, CMake, OpenGL, Cg) and find all three usable for most purposes.

No it isn't IMO for the following reasons:

- Windows 7 is actually pretty good. Those who were put off by Vista are, I think, being sold on 7 a lot easier

- The Linux UI experience still, IMO, isn't up the the level of a non-technical user. Microsoft and Apple have invested a LOT of time and money into UI and Linux needs to learn from some of their ideas.

- Apart from the UI things still aren't "slick" enough for non-techy users. Example; People make a big thing of package managers as being something awesome - however in my experience people dont find the Ubuntu one particularly intuitive.

- There is still too much techno-jargon within easy reach of users

I love Linux but it isnt yet a viable desktop for the consumer market.

Someone needs to charge for it; and push the funds into developing the UI. I think the uptake will be MUCH higher if people are paying, say, $30 for it (crazy huh?)

Well, a couple of years ago, many people thought that Linux would take over the desktop as soon as it could match windows' and Mac OS's ease of use/installation, because it is much stabler, safer and free.

Now the time has come that Linux has (almost?) caught up with those other OS's in terms of usability. Unfortunately, Windows has become a lot safer and stabler in the mean time; and we have come to realize that the security of Linux is not just because of technical reasons -- for a large part it is because it is simple a less interesting target. Also, the price is not really that important.

So, no, Linux will not quickly beat Windows on the desktop. On the other hand, it might become easier to switch, also as more and more software becomes available on Linux, and this could make Linux's growth at least pretty stable for a couple of years to come.