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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

While the Year of the Linux Desktop may forever be a joke, 2010 is the Year of Linux on the Small Computer you Carry With You Everywhere.

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And the Small Computer you Carry With You Everywhere is the new Desktop so in the end Linux will get there.

If and when android tablets are going to be sold in numbers the 'small computer' may not even be all that small.

I think Chrome OS tablets and netbooks/desktops are more likely to succeed than Android tablets actually. They both run the Linux kernel so for this discussion perhaps the point is moot.

It will be small, medium large and everything in between.

If only... the year of the Linux Desktop was also supposed to be the year of the open operating system. I have nothing but nice things to say about the android that google makes, but the custom versions of android that manufacturers ship tend to be just awful. There are exceptions, of course, but I can't see the proliferation of android on cheap devices reversing this trend. The spirit of openness is truly being perverted by the uninstallable crapware being put on those phones. The year of linux everywhere finally arrives, but the only way it managed to get here was by becoming most of what the open software movement was against.

It's particularly bad as a long-time free software desktop user who finally this month broke down and bought an Android phone as his first smart phone. It's like going back to the days of Windows 95.

Back to the days when you had no idea what you were downloading installing when you grabbed a free utility off the 'net, and had no legal way of finding out.

Lol... sorry, but that sounds desperation. :D

If that were the case then we already got the Year of Unix on the desktop and the Year of Unix on the smartphone. Yep, I am talking of OS X. Funnily enough Linux people (and others) laughed at the idea that OS X is Unix... it was too far from it.

I think we can agree that Android is not really Linux, at least not what we mean colloquially for it. So no, it won't be the year of the Linux.

But yes it will be the year of FOSS on your mobile. That, I think, is the big novelty. :)

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