Comment by hnlmorg

Comment by hnlmorg 21 hours ago

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“The year of the Linux desktop” has always been a stupid statement because it never quantifies what the success criteria is.

For example, we now have first class games support via Proton. First class application support via Electron and other web technologies. Linux used in schools via Chromebooks. Etc

Linux was never going to be Windows-killer but I’m constantly amazed at just how easy it is to use vanilla GNU Linux in a variety of previously closed domains and how Linux has taken over as the de facto base for many commercial systems too (phones, tablets, Chromebooks, smart TVs, set top boxes, etc.

There’s also plenty of OEMs that support and even ship Linux systems. And that would have been unthinkable to anyone who lived through the 90s and saw how MS penalised OEMs and retailers for shipping non-MS OSs.

So at what stage do people say “Linux desktop has picked up”?

seba_dos1 17 hours ago

The year of Linux desktop already happened in 2006.

That's when I switched to it full-time on my desktop and never looked back. It's the only success criteria I care about :)

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gf000 21 hours ago

The Linux kernel is a beast of an engine at the heart of all sorts of things, from small to large.

But the "desktop" itself refers to the GNU Linux userspace, which has plenty to criticize it for (with that said, I personally find windows to be worse on many counts). Desktop OSs are a generation behind mobile OSs, and they have a really hard time making that jump, with possibly OSX being the closest to it. They have a terribly insecure "security" model (compare the number of vulnerabilities per user for a desktop OS vs mobile - especially considering that they something like Linux desktop is barely targeted compared to the billions of android users) where your user usually runs your applications - this worked in the age of huge servers with lots of terminal users connected, where the number of processes running for=as the user were readily inspectable (due to their low number and being directly started by the user). But with applications we have tens of thousands of threads/processes running simultaneously. The processes are running by me (and thus can do everything I can), but not directly for me. The sane thing to do would be to run them in a sandbox, basically what android does (runs them as generated "system" users, and has a well-defined IPC architecture to cut holes only where necessary).

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