The Linux desktop is in trouble
Mid sized companies, certainly not in the league of Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. Most average people in the States (and probably world wide), would show no recognition of those names (RH and Canonical).
As someone who has worked in the IT industry for 20 years. I can tell you the year of the Linux desktop is never happening. An it has nothing to do with fragmentation or companies pushing it. The majority of people don't even know what a operating system is. That Linux exists, hell many don't even know what Windows is, seriously.... They have a computer they turn on and look at porn... That's it.
I've worked at a company that pushed to move people to openoffice to save a heap of money. They abandoned the plans when employees who's only skill is typing at 80+WPM complained, despite being offered on site training with full pay. For software a 12 year old should be able to figure out.
I did freelance work for a company back when people used to actually get photos developed that was paying Adobe thousands of dollars so some people in the office could do red eye reduction on school photos. Oh and who was contractually obligated to pay to upgrade to the latest version of the software when it was released regardless of if they needed those new features or not.
You get people who make shitty youtube videos who tell you, you can't be a true professional and use kdenlive. That Windows is for gamers, Linux for nerds who don't do anything creative and macs are for professionals.
Ohh an why does any of this matter, we're in the post-pc era remember. roflmfao...
Harvey, I've been waiting for the year of Linux on the Desktop since at least 2010. But I don't disagree with you, I think it's simply wistful thinking on my part. However, the internet of things is most definitely linux and linux based, which is a major achievement.
I am not touching this topic - - - no no no ! ! !
I will leave this as food for thought, if you will. There is some good reads here, Harvey that is good haha porn.
Humor me for a second if you shall.
There was people who said we could not sail the seas and discover new lands.
There was people who said trains would never catch on it was a fade.
There was people who said those same things of cars, going to space, landing on the moon, the list goes on.
That is the great thing about humans - for every person or group that says something is impossible there is a group opposite that mindset that will step up and say well watch this.
the multiple DEs aren't the problem IMO, but the fragmented bases... i hopped between many distros until I got to Solus, some were too outdated, the others were too bleeding edge which made them both unstable for even basic tasks . Solus kinda perfected the orchestration between latest and stable. Which is the most sane choice until now.. but it all boils down to subjectivity here. And the fragmentation of the Linux Desktop was always a double edged sword
Further to Harvey's point on normies( 
), I think the only way any Linux distro will become truly mainstream is if it's adopted by hardware developers. The average user doesn't know how to install a different operating system on their device, so often the only way to convince people to adopt a new operating system is to have it already preinstalled on the device they're using.
That's all very unlikely though, unless a large business decides to take up the mission. Microsoft can just keep giving hardware developers new incentives to release their devices with Windows preinstalled.
Cause Harvey is right. A surprising amount of people don't even know how to install new software on Windows itself, nevermind installing a different operating system.
Of course, we can hope that the next generation growing up with 21st century tech might put in the effort to learn how it works. A bit of healthy scepticism considering that apparently some parents recently haven't even toilet-trained their kids according to an article today, but there is hope.
On that note though; perhaps if and when education improves, people's willingness to adopt new software may also improve. Of course, the way our UK education system at least is heading at the moment, education seems to be degrading rather than improving, but eh, we can dream of a resurgence.
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Digressing, but...imo education has actually gone far downhill in my area than what it was when I grew up (40 years or so ago). The darn 'No kid left behind' is absurd. You drag smart kids down and make them bored. They are the hopes of the future (or you would think). Of course, the fact that teachers make less than workers at McDonalds...is rather worrisome too. Oh, and I'm in the US, which is sadly less than it once was (or maybe I'm just more aware now).
Even then, I realized in college (early 80s) that it wasn't so much what classes you took, but what work you did outside that actually made a difference. So, if you don't make the effort, you really don't learn anything. And circling back to the topic, if people just exist as vegetables, nothing will ever change regarding the desktop.
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yursan9 Well Linux is actually good environment for that
Linux needs marketing! And for it, needs money. And the big companies prefer spend money with IoT. In the end, Linux is used developers. Desktop is dying for normal users, smartphones is the way for than. Desktop is only for professionals that need it.
Yes, but they'll pry my desktop from my cold dead fingers 
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Nobody should be surprised about the contents of this article. If there is anything I've learned from the years of being involved in the Linux ecosystem and reading Linux news, it's that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (and ZDNet as a whole) is not known for writing articles which are well researched, well thought-out, or delivered without bias. Most of Steven's pieces are just pro-Linux Mint and anti-everything else. I have nothing personal against the author to be clear, the simple reality is they have a bias and ZDNet is one of those news outlets that prefers quantity over quality and to maximize clickbait to drive clicks, so there's a home for the author to "spew" out articles.
Linus drives click. When it came to his view on the current situation on the desktop, he said: "I still wish we were better at having a standardized desktop that goes across all the distributions. There's been some progress there. I mean, this isn't a kernel issue, this is more of a personal annoyance how the fragmentation of the different vendors have I think held the desktop back a bit. But there has been some progress on that front too with Flatpak and things like that. I'm still optimistic, but it's been 25 years and it's going to be another few years at least."
He also stated in response to the fragmentation of application container formats (AppImage, Flatpak, Snap) that: "That may be what Chromebooks end up doing, is that maybe that will turn into a de-facto standard for desktop applications. When Chromebooks just start running Debian packages or something. We'll see."
Source:
I respect Linus' views and thoughts on what he believes to be holding back the desktop. Literally nobody else has worked on Linux as long as he has, so to say he knows a "thing or two" about the ecosystem would be putting it mildly.
But the ecosystem has room for everyone's voice and I don't agree entirely with Linus' remarks. Personally, I do not believe the development of multiple desktop experiences / environments is what is holding Linux back. Each project has purpose for being, whether you agree with it or not, and each try to provide some value-add for their users. Where I think the Linux community falls short is maximizing the interoperability of desktop applications and desktop environments through the use of FreeDesktop standards / standards. There's been some progress made, some occasional standards / specifications written that are widely use, but in the almost 20 years that FreeDesktop has been around we don't really have that many specifications to show for it.
Some examples, not the exhaustive list:
- Standardizing Autostarting of Applications, which hasn't seen any changes to the spec since its initial draft in 2006.
- Desktop Entry Specifications. While this is a great specification and allows for extensibility, it's fairly common to see GNOME vendor keys such as
X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Bugzilla, or docpath stuff such asX-DocPath. I don't see a reason why we couldn't improve the specification to have a standardized way of specifying the Issue Tracker URL with optional products and components, and standard local and remote documentation URL keys. - MPRIS D-Bus Interface Specification. There's a lot to love about the specification but its player interface could be improved to more easily expose MPRIS metadata and Xesam properties.
Something that is also really frustrating is the lack of a modern specification for desktop notifications. We sorta have a half-assed standard which most desktops support, but that lacks text input / response actions (so say you get an instant message, you'd be able to reply to those within the notification should a desktop support that part of the specification), urgency levels aren't granular enough, and most categories are vendor classes rather than having an up-to-date list of categories.
On KDE's part, they lack support for what I'd see as a considerable amount of the existing specification, you can see here. But they support things like quick replies.
Why is that not part of an upstream specification? We should not have an expectation that software developers implement multiple forms of the specification, whether they're building an app or a library. By having splintered specifications, we're making it more difficult to support multiple desktop experiences / environments and forcing developers to make a choice on what platform(s) they support, or putting the bar so high that they don't bother at all.
I obviously don't agree that Debian packages and Chromebooks are the standard going forward, nor do I really see application container formats being problematic for software developers. The easy part is software delivery, the difficult part is developing the software itself in a manner which maximizes the likelihood of you providing an experience across all desktop environments and all Linux-based operating systems. It's why we see so many Electron-based applications. You can say what you want about "well it doesn't look native" or "it doesn't fully interop with my desktop" but it runs and likely operates in a consistent manner everywhere, which can't be said about GTK3 or Qt5 applications.
For software delivery, the reality is Snap has won. You don't see large swathes of developer marketing stories comes from the AppImage or Flatpak camps, nor the excitement from software vendors on those formats. But you do see them from Snap. In my opinion, the only reason Flatpak has had the success it has, is because it's developed by GNOME and Red Hat and force-fed to you through GNOME Software (something we fortunately do not have) and worse, GNOME Shell.
Back to the ZDNet article, let's touch on a few points:
None of the major Linux distributors -- Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE -- are really all that interested in supporting the Linux desktop.
I'm sorry but that is bullshit. Plain and simple. All of the above mentioned vendors invest huge amounts of money in desktop development efforts.
True, the broad strokes of the Linux desktop are painted primarily by Canonical and Red Hat, but the desktop is far from their top priority.
Red Hat heavily invests in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, GNOME and RHEL have massive deployments in enterprises, Point-of-Sale devices, etc.
Another major player in setting the tone of the Linux desktop are the smaller Linux communities. These include Linux Mint, Manjaro Linux, MX Linux, elementary OS, and Solus. They're all doing good work, but they're also running on a shoestring basis.
This might come to a surprise to Steven, but just because a project gets money does not mean it's going to put it entirely into the desktop. Some of us care about tooling and opt to invest there as well.
Take Mint, my own personal favorite desktop.
Case-in-point about constant Mint bias.
Steven goes on to talk about frankly non-issues like various Mint developers ensuring that their non-OSS work takes priority and various development items being deferred, such as Muffin work. None of it really fits into the picture of desktop fragmentation, but it plays into the narrative that Steven is trying to push that we're all in trouble.
For the million or so of us, there are hundreds of millions who want an easy-to-use desktop that's not Windows, doesn't require buying a Mac, and comes with broad software and hardware support. Are you listening Linux Foundation?
Such a desktop, in turn, would be more commercially successful than our current hodgepodge of desktops. This would mean that many more Linux desktop developers could make a living from their work. That would improve the Linux desktop overall quality. It's a virtuous cycle, which would help everyone.
In the case of the consumer options for devices they can go out, purchase, boot up and use, the issue isn't the lack of a singular "standard" desktop environment that is keeping people away. The entire issue around surfacing available devices for people to buy can be solved with marketing. We have had big names for years that ship computers with Linux or no operating system at all, whether it's Dell, Lenovo, even HP. Whether they actively market those devices to the general public is another story.
tldr;? No, the Linux desktop is not in trouble. Typical FUD non-sense. Move along.
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I'd just like the percentage of desktop linux adoption (at least as it's reported) to climb from 2% to something like 10%. I'm ambitious, eh ?
I do agree with FUD analysis. I will also say that from my dealings with Linus (mostly in far past), he would be the first to admit he doesn't know/keep up with everything going on. But you're right, he has great insight and experience with the kernel. From recent news stories, he'd rather everything he said wasn't taken as 'the gospel' too (ah, the price of fame)
JoshStrobl Nice, thorough.
Everyone has their opinions on why 'Linux' does not have sufficient market share in the desktop space. It is quite alarming but, hey, I believe that there are more people using Linux now than before! JoshStrobl is right about Snaps and software delivery being 'the easy part'. Windows also has many methods of software delivery. (Eg. Steam, MS Store, etc...) It does not seem to impede its profits, however. People will come to use Linux, if ever, in their own time. We just have to focus on building a better OS (or a better 'family' of Operating Systems). I don't see why we have to fret over market share. It is unlikely that the users of MacOS worry about it despite having a relatively lower market share compared to Windows. Instead, Apple made it a selling point and marketed it as an 'elitist computer'. Do yourself a favour and stop worrying about market share. Enjoy using Linux! Always remember that Linux is just another tool in the toolkit. Use it wisely for your own good and the good of others. Keep up the good work, Solus! 
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Fatih19 Windows users can flex about their working games and Adobe software.