The biggest push may indeed come from the Steam Deck. A PC in a handheld form factor, that allows you to hook it up to a monitor for a full KDE Plasma desktop experience. Very exciting. If we see a lot of people enjoy it and the Steam Deck is a success, you can be almost guaranteed that more devices will come along and slap SteamOS 3 on it and then also have a KDE Plasma desktop available.
Linux needs a time machine to go mainstream. It would have had to have happened by about 2006 or so… after that point, personal computing pretty much died. Sure, you have a desktop or laptop system in front of you, and so do I, but I contend that we are the exceptions, that we’re no longer typical.
There are people who do not use the internet with a personal computer as their primary means of using it. These people are many. These people are young, and will retain that habit their entire lives.
If it’s any consolation, personal computing is dead for all the operating systems, and no one really won.
I disagree.
Sure there are more mobile devices in the world than “desktops”, but I don’t think that desktops are by any means an exception. I haven’t bothered to try to find any data, but I’d be surprised if the number of desktops in use today is less than it was in 2006.
Desktop usage is only kept afloat by their use in business. When you sit down in front of a desk at work, there’s a computer on it.
That also doesn’t bode well for linux, even if people could become familiar with it and comfortable with it, it’s doubtful that anyone in charge of computers in the office would be comfortable having those be linux desktops.
The age of the desktop really is over. Linux didn’t become mainstream, and now it’s completely moot. Even if you want to disagree with me emotionally, surely you see the writing on the wall? Everything I’ve said only becomes more true 5 years from now, 20 years from now. Not less.
That’s like saying accounting software is only “kept afloat” by its use in business. Sure, there’s more business use than personal use, but it’s business use will continue to grow.
Do you seriously think there were more desktop users in 2006 than there are now ?
You seem to think I’m pining for some kind of linux-desktop utopia, which isn’t the case at all. I’m not saying I want linux to conquer the desktop, just that the desktop isn’t dead.
Personally I think the last 20 years in computing has demonstrated that opensource is the best model for server software, while proprietary is the best model for desktop software. If linux desktops were a better product (in ways that matter to most users) then it would have gotten more traction.
If you’ll let me do plus-or-minus on the year 2006 and the “now”, then that’s almost certainly (going to be) true.
I think rather, that you think this is a winnable race when the Earth just opened up and swallowed all of the race cars and yours is about to fall into the abyss.
It’s just over. I’ve seen too much from random yahoos about how their primary computing experience is a phone. And it’s not as if those people are going to work and sitting down at an office computer, they work at Arby’s or whatever. The other explanation is that there’s an orchestrated conspiracy to mislead me into believing the desktop is dead by a team of millions of propagandists writing subtly about how to do common computing actions on Android, or that the desktop has just came and gone, like dumb terminals before them. Like teletypes.
Probably, but that didn’t stop Microsoft and dotnet from conquering some large fraction of that market. God knows why.