The market has rejected Linux desktops. Get over it.
I’ve been running Linux on PCs since 1998, when Red Hat still cared about the desktop and Mandrake was supposed to be the distribution that was going to bring Linux to the masses. That was also about the time that the mainstream media got infatuated with the story of the free operating system from the Finnish hacker that was going to bring down Microsoft Windows.
Spoiler alert: I’m going to give away the ending now. It never happened. In the decade since it was first proclaimed as the “Windows killer,” Linux on the desktop has made virtually no progress in real adoption numbers. According to market share trackers (based on real PC activity and not just sales) such Net Applications, StatCounter, W3Counter, and others, the market share of Linux has been hovering around just 1-2% of total PC operating system installations for a decade.
Even in the past two years since the netbook phenomenon began with Linux as its primary OS, Linux market share has failed to make a major jump. The chart below, based on Internet visitors tracked by Net Applications, shows the trajectory of Linux desktop market share over the past 24 months.
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Re: The market has rejected Linux desktops
The fact that someone feels the need to write this garbage shows that Linux is making serious inroads into the desktop.
Browser desktop
I'm not sure the fact that apps are in a browser tab as opposed into a wm makes the difference in Linux adoption. The point is the apps themselves, we need more critical mass to inform people that the apps are there and are great, we need more next-door-guys to give hints about "use this for that use that for this" as it happens in the windows ecosystem. And I see this happening, the ubuntuforums is a revolution in this respect (like it or not).
Once users are onboard they will follow us to the next cool thing, but trying to bypass the traditional desktop via the cloud because we think we cannot win in that field, is not the way forward IMO, people still love the traditional desktop, with local apps and local storage.
To make the usual car example: nowadays to rent a car will cost you as much or even less than buying one, over say ten years usage, but with much less headaches (you don't care about the car). How many rent a car? They want their own (cloud vs. local).