An interesting show, but I found it rather focused on the Rich/Western/Developed world. There are roughly two billion people on this planet who could be described as “emerging middle-class”. They mainly live in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Their use of computing devices - both mobile and desktop - is increasing rapidly. They are increasingly likely to be exposed to Linux, especially in Educational or Government contexts. It is quite likely that their governments are keen for a variety of political, economic and security reasons to avoid propriety closed source software from western countries such as the US. Is it not likely that such people will form a large proportion of the next two percent of desktop Linux users? I doubt they care a great deal about the relative merits of the latest $2000 shiny toy from Apple or Microsoft, or whether Adobe Photoshop is available for their computer. They may care more about whether it runs the same software that their kids use in school, or whether they can exchange documents with the city tax office.
One would hope that this was true. However, in my own experience ((Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, SA, Georgia (the Republic not the Confederacy), Jordan) (and that of my wife who has worked in about 60 additional countries)) government and to only a slightly lesser degree education is pretty much in the pocket of Microsoft. Nearly 100% of the local vendors support proprietary solutions because that is where the money is. We convinced a couple of agencies in Georgia to consider open source but ultimately it will be up to local vendors to offer solutions, and of the half dozen or so we vetted, only one had appreciable experience with open source. As for academia, open source appears among the usual suspects, physics, chemistry, etc…
Of course, many people live under administrations ranging from the dysfunctional to the damn right corrupt. It is difficult to implement any kind of coherent IT policy in such a context. But nevertheless, there are counterexamples - Uruguay has Linux usage comparable to Windows by some measures as a result of it being heavily involved in the “One laptop per child” programme. China seems to be making very serious moves to promote Linux. I am not suggesting that desktop Linux will become dominant in such countries in the short-term, merely that they will be a source of significant growth. It would only take 15% Linux adoption in this “emerging middle-class” group to create a market of similar size to that of the entire US market. What if the Trump White House provokes a trade war with the Chinese, for example? Embargoes did wonders for Linux usage in Cuba.
I find myself agreeing with the sentiment that if Linux made the changes necessary to dominate the desktop, much of what I love about Linux will have been lost. Then a bunch of us free software folks will be off running another OS and trying to get that one adopted instead.
As @jonobacon said, it’s the values and ideals more than the OS that I want to see catch on. And like everyone on the show kind of agreed on, I kind of don’t care all that much if everyone else is running Linux as long as it continues to exist and remains awesome.
I disagree with the argument that changing Linux to dominate the desktop would kill what we like about it. Pick a distribution - Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Manjaro, Mint, Elementary, Solus, Knoppix, whatever. Assume that enough features, polish, and in-demand commercial applications are added to it that it takes off like wildfire. Eventually it dominates some crazy percentage of the desktop market, like 10%.
The wildly popular distribution will probably be locked down in terms of features and options so the non-tinkerer has a hard time shooting themselves in the foot. So just about anyone that listens to Bad Voltage won’t want it.
But we still get the benefit of new applications targeted for Linux, right? So even if I’m still running Debian on a desktop and don’t give a hoot that fifty million people use OpenSuse every day, there will be video cards, wireless cards, Steam games, non-Steam games, and applications like Photoshop that I can only run easily on Debian precisely because fifty million people run OpenSuse.
Right? Wildly popular desktop Linux is only bad if it becomes like Android - an open source kernel with so many proprietary device drivers, boot loaders, and proprietary services built on it that it’s open source in name only.
Yes…if we have cross-distro compatibility.
And in a world where “Linux” is increasingly meaningless, that’s less likely.
Will it have Solitaire and Tuxkart racing? I’m all in! 
@jonobacon and @sil agreed.
Separate topic: one of you (Jono?) said that Windows Phone failed because it was garbage so the presence of apps didn’t matter. I disagree. I think the thing that killed Windows Phone was Windows Mobile, Pocket PC, and Zune. If none of those things existed, the millions of Microsoft enthusiasts would have bought Windows Phone and it would be a major player in the market. Instead, all of Microsoft’s most fanatic customers were sick of getting burned by products that were either awful or dropped too quickly.
Google would have the same problem if they launched a new and improved version of Reader or Wave tomorrow - nobody would look at it because they would guess it could get the axe at any minute.
This didn’t help either.
