Monday, November 11, 2013
"Year of the Linux Desktop"? More like, "hey, buy our new linux phone, okay?"
On May 30th 2013, Mark Shuttleworth marked Ubuntu bug #1 as "fixed". The bug was a vision statement for Ubuntu Linux which was titled, "Microsoft has a majority market share." The reproduction steps were "visit a local PC store... attempt to buy a machine without any proprietary software." Shuttleworth wrote a post explaining why he marked it as fixed. Was it because you can walk into a PC store and see Linux computers on sale today? Well, no... Instead Shuttleworth explained that Android was a major share of "mobile computing", mentioned the Ubuntu Azure and Ubuntu Cloud programs, and declared "from Ubuntu's perspective, this bug is now closed." Meanwhile, yesterday I ran Ubuntu 13.10 in a virtual machine and suffered severe lag on the desktop due to fancy desktop graphical effects which cannot be disabled. Well played, Mark.
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The other awesome thing not mentioned in Shuttleworth's post is ChromeOS, which is basically the Chrome browser on top of linux. While it may not fit the needs of programmers, it is an incredibly good platform for your average computer user who wants to use facebook/email and some word processing or spreadsheets.
ReplyDeleteI think in the next 2 years, we will look back at the "Year of the Linux Desktop" trope and realize that it came true, but perhaps not how many expected. SteamOS and SteamMachines could well become the next fast growing gaming platform and android tablets and ChromeOS laptops the trusted computing devices for millions. In my mind, its not about linux per-se, but the ability of open source software to be customized to a variety of use cases, and be much faster to market than closed sources competitors.
If there is one thing Linux needs, it's better graphics.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the GNU website, even Debian isn't completely free. Ubuntu only added a ton of other non-free stuff on top, so I think that would put it on Stallman's blacklist. Fortunately for them, Linus doesn't care how they use his work, but pure Linux is much different than what Ubuntu and Android have become.
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