Matthew Paul Thomas spoke about this informatively a few years ago. As he points out, taking Ubuntu as an example desktop Linux, the first version of Ubuntu in 2004 had 375 graphical apps; poking at my copy here there are some thousands. Maybe 5,000? Let’s double that to include lots of apps which aren’t packaged for distros, so 10,000. That’s a nice trend up, but in the time since 2004 Android and iOS have both been created, been released, and hit a million apps a piece. The Mac app store has been created and released and has 21,670 apps, the day I wrote this.
But that wasn’t really the point I was trying to make in the discussion. If any measure of success includes mainstream popularity, among mainstream app developers or mainstream users, then the Linux desktop has failed dramatically by comparison with its competition. But is that actually the measure of success? Most people on this thread are using desktop Linux, happily. Mainstream success doesn’t enter into it. So my question is this: if we acknowledge that we haven’t had mainstream success (rather than trying to claim that we have, or that it is just around the corner), and we decide that we don’t want mainstream success, what changes about how we build the Linux desktop? What would our priorities be? Would they be any different to what they are now? It doesn’t mean that we would suddenly scrap all efforts to make the desktop pleasant; I don’t want to have to write shell scripts and bash commands for everything, and neither do @danrabbit or @jonobacon, so there’s three at least. But would anything we do change? If what we do wouldn’t change after saying “we are no longer concerned with mainstream success”, then presumably our existing plans aren’t aiming towards mainstream success. So what are they aiming towards? And should we change it?