Has the Linux Desktop missed its chance?

I didn’t vote because the options don’t really tally with the question.

Linux on the desktop is destined to be nothing more than a niche. I’ve been saying this for years. It had its chance back in 1998-2000, when Windows Me was shit, and Apple were still relying on the bodge job that was Mac OS 8. And it wasn’t for lack of trying either.

Linux on the desktop has yet (in my not so humble opinion) to stand up to the popularity and reach of Windows, and the awesome engineering, stability, design and usability of macOS. The fact that WINE is still A Thing, and that many DEs still try to ape macOS (hi, Elementary), speaks volumes.

But Linux everywhere else - on servers, cloudy things, embedded systems, IoT devices - has already dominated, and “won”. A free POSIX OS with a rich userland (including GNU) that can scale from a TV set top box, NAS or credit-card sized board all the way up to a massively multi-CPU, multi-GPU scientific compute cluster is a magnificent achievement. The number of important FLOSS projects, platforms, frameworks and languages which have spawned from Linux and its ubiquitousness is almost immeasurable.

Here’s another metric: has Microsoft released Office as a native app on Linux? They’ve released it on every other major platform. Has Adobe released Photoshop or any other major part of Creative Suite on Linux? That the GIMP still exists tells me, no. Why? Not because there’s no demand, but the cost-benefit ratio for such a relatively small user base says, “I don’t think so”.

Linux, for the most part, is utterly dominant in computing today. Just not on the actual big computery thing you type things into.

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