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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

It was discussed (in tech media) much more back then ("This is the year of Linux on the desktop!" used in a non-sarcastic manner), but you're right in that it is actually more viable today than it was then, mostly due to Microsoft shooting itself in both feet in the interim.

It is still unlikely Linux will achieve any sort of mainstream adoption (for a few reasons, including Ubuntu following a very Microsoft-like policy of going all-in with touch at the expense of UX for traditional desktop users, continued fragmentation of the various distros, etc), but at least these days it isn't nearly as surprising to learn some of your more casually tech savvy friends use Linux as it would have been back then.

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Linux went mainstream ages ago. First with TiVo, now with Android.

GNU/Linux + X11 + Gnome/KDE never went anywhere near mainstream, perhaps, but Linux sure as hell did.

AGain. Android. Is. Not. Linux.

When we talk about Linux as an OS, we don't talk about Linux as the kernel. This is very tiring to read this everytime. The Android userland has nothing to do with any of the Linux distros out there.

It's not Linux who went mainstream, it's Android userland. Try running Android applications in "non-Android" Linux for good fun.

> When we talk about Linux as an OS

...we talk incorrectly. Linux isn't an OS. Linux is a kernel, around which many OS's (Ubuntu, Red Hat, ChromeOS, Android, for instance) are built.

So Shuttleworth was right it was a UX problem...

I wouldn't be surprised if Linux achieved a majority-share in the Desktop PC market... caused by the Desktop PC becoming completely irrelevant to consumers. (If only developers own PCs, and the majority of developers use Linux, then the majority of PCs will run Linux.)

In polls here, more respondents report running OS X than report running Linux on their desktops and laptops.

So, it is uncertain whether it will ever be the case that the majority of devs use Linux although I guess there's a good chance of it happening if Apple ever decides to abandon the desktop / laptop market.

That or if someone invests heavily enough into building a coherent linux desktop.

There are a lot of great things about linux and some of the desktops are quite good (gnome 3.4+, kde) but they just aren't quite there with the small glitches and annoyances that come up just often enough to be off putting for end users.

I think linux or another free OS needs a huge backing to make it mainstream and we may see that with android (or something in a similar vein) in the future but for now the desktop is left Apple and Microsoft

Sounds like something Ubuntu has been castigated for trying to do.

Don't work on open source, unless you do everything each person wants (and these may be conflicting) then someone will decide it isn't open enough regardless of the actual license.

I don't understand why it has to be open at all. Why isn't there a company building a closed/polished corporate desktop experience on top of Linux? (Basically, doing with Linux what Apple did with BSD.) It's not like anything in Linux has switched to GPLv3, so there's nothing stopping this from happening.

Dev here. Moved from OSX to Ubuntu a year ago. Love not having to agree-click ULAs all the time. Setting up dev stacks is very often so much easier and better documented. Working with open source software to develop open source projects is very enjoyable and very often I feel this is just the beginning of something very profound.

With proprietary OSes I constantly have the feeling of banging against elaborately engineered limitations. This feels so counter-productive. Instead of producing something great why not spend incredible amounts of work-years on creating artificial limitations for the users, right. No thanks.

In other words I like my computers to be general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

I don't think they are that wedded to Apple long term. Unix yes. they like the hardware but there are costs to not running on a production like environment. If docker or similar takes off it will push more to Linux as there will be less virtualization in the stack.

Not "if" but "when" (on a long enough time horizon)

i'm going away from apple products as a developer due to apples fierce decision to not let me decide how I want to use the hardware I bought. No bitcoin, can't run a live USB unless it contains OS X.. all bullshit. Looking to offload my Macbook Pro and iPhone 4 as we speak and going back to linux + droid. Have been a LONG time apple user but their continued hostility and undercutting of developers ideas at the expense of developers is crooked.

Anytime someone comes up with an extremely good app.. It magically becomes part of iOS leaving that person high and dry. Done. With. That. Shit.

Even developers may not need PCs for much longer...with the emergence of browser IDEs (my startup is working on one), especially for web development, PC becomes unnecessary...Even Microsoft has taken a baby step in bringing visual studio to the browser.

I can't develop on the road without internet and performance is tied to a browser? No thanks, I've got stuff to get done.

take the long view...it is possible to cache data in the browser..performance is a temporal issue, there is already major performance improvements happening in the browser...don't be so quick to shoot down the browser:)

as someone who uses Ubuntu as their main OS, I don't really find the OS that touch-centric. If anything, it's a lot more similar to OSX than Win8.

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