The year of the Linux desktop... *sigh*

A Linux desktop?

The year of the Linux desktop has finally come! Really, this time. At least, that's what Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, says.

Give me a break.

Read the article. Not one of the arguments is bound to this year. No concrete dates, no concrete events.

What Zemlin's arguments have in common is that they're all transitions, and we're in the middle of them. We are seeing driver support arriving, netbooks are breaking through, the desktop is becoming less relevant, etc.

My first encounter with open source was using Firefox. It was great, it was amazing - how could something like Firefox, contributed to by many volunteers, be so much better than a browser backed my behemoth Microsoft? And what injustice that it still owned just so little market share and thus had problems displaying some websites!

Fast forward a few years, and Firefox has gained a significant amount of market share. Yet, can we point to "the year of the Firefox browser"? I can't. At some point last year, I suddenly realized that Firefox had become popular, and had been popular for a while. It had all been very gradually and hardly noticeable.

After Firefox, I moved on, further into the realms of open source. To Ubuntu, then Xubuntu. Desktop Linux. It's making some progress. Perhaps it will move out of obscurity, slowly, like Apple's OS X did. Perhaps this is already happening! And perhaps it never will. perhaps it will always stay that obscure little operating system with a negligible market share.

What is certain, however, is that it won't come in a year, so stop whining about that year of the Linux Desktop.

Back To Top