I'd define success as critical mass. And I'd define critical mass as the body of work (apps, support) available to me as a Linux to user that enables me to accomplish my computer/internet/multimedia tasks using only Linux in an easy and functional manner. Is that mass available? For me yes, but I will admit that there are areas that could be better and that that some 3rd parties (Apple, MS) work hard at keeping me from achieving this so that I will be forced to buy their products.

My biggest lack so far is NetFlix not being available under Linux because it uses Silverlight for drm (and MoonLight doesn't work as an alternative).

It doesn't look good to me at the moment for the Linux desktop. Windows 7/ Office 2010 is currently way ahead of anything Linux/FOSS can offer IMO, and I think Linux is currently losing ground.

If there were genuinely competitive FOSS alternatives to Outlook, Word, Excel, etc then maybe Linux would start gaining business/ home office users in significant numbers, and then third party app and hardware providers would have to start providing proper support for Linux - the key to really wide adoption.

Without high quality PIM & office tools like these I can't see how a critical mass will ever be achieved.

I think the whole debate about desktop metaphors is a smokescreen. We need KDE to become properly stable, cleaned up, and most importantly to improve Kontact/ PIM. We need OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice to gain functionality and stability, and combining a few distros wouldn't hurt.

Most end users don't give a monkey's butt about plasmoids, virtual desktops and desktop metaphors. The Windows 7 desktop is basic but the applications are sophisticated - that's what most people want.

IMHO of course - feel free to slate me for saying nice things about MS products..

I do have to agree about the office+PIM issue. I am very hopeful right now seeing the wave of new development hit LibreOffice and the improvements that have been going into KDE PIM. My hope is that over the next 6 months to a year we see LibreOffice take off to become the veritable FLOSS competitor to MSOffice 2010 that OpenOffice tried to be to MSOffice 2003. I'd also like to see a similar takeoff by KOffice, but it looks like it will take a little longer; KOffice is great for a simple office suite, but is only barely able to compete with Open/LibreOffice.

The problem with libreoffice is that it has a lot of cruft left over from staroffice and some decisions made by sun. It will take a while to get all of that out, and it hampers development in the meantime. Koffice is at a much earlier state, but it also has a lot cleaner code-base. So although libreoffice is usable now, how fast its development will go in the future is open to debate. They may be bogged down by their history.

Whatever the case, Windows probably owns the home user market for at least the next two releases or so. Linux had a chance if Microsoft really screwed up Windows 7 anywhere near as badly as Vista, but they didn't. The corporate, government, and education markets will certainly see a continued growth in Linux, primarily for security and stability reasons, and I think that is what is going to push Linux on home users. Users are going to use what they have at work. If their workplace switches to Linux, their home computer probably will as well.

Usual problems seem to be hampering KOffice - http://lists.kde.org/?l=koffice-devel&m ... 919625&w=2

Won't it be interesting to see what kind of desktop market share the Google ChromeOS has after 9 months or 12 months?

I submit that if it's over 1% then this post is correct. Linux on the desktop is dead.

In saying that I am fully aware that ChromeOS IS Linux... But it is Linux in the same way the Android operating system is Linux. Hardly anybody knows and hardly anybody cares.

Maybe more correctly the question should be "Is KDE (or Gnome) on the desktop dead?"

Mamarok wrote:

google01103 wrote:2) there is growth in the Linux desktop distros that is being sponsored by some governments - Turkey and Pardus, N. Korea and Red Star, Guadalinex a region in Spain sponsored distro and Cuba has announced an initiative. Not the largest entities but still sizable numbers.

You forgot Portugal where many schools run Linux, and over all, Brazil where millions of school computers are (or will be) running Linux (and KDE ) But yes, Guadalinex is really a small deployment compared to that

Just my 2cents on this one... I'm portuguese, and at my school teachers gave little to no importance to linux. The magalhaes netbook comes with both OS, but I've yet to see a kid booting it up.
Another issue is that schools and goverment offices have Caixa Magica, a distribution of linux based on SuSe. Well, it's mostly ****, I'm sorry to say... A few years back I caught a developer of caixa magica trying to fix something on compiz in a IRC channel. He told me that he was only using caixa magica because he was helping develop it, and that the distribution was no good.

spoovy wrote:Windows 7/ Office 2010 is currently way ahead of anything Linux/FOSS can offer IMO, and I think Linux is currently losing ground.

If there were genuinely competitive FOSS alternatives to Outlook, Word, Excel, etc then maybe Linux would start gaining business/ home office users in significant numbers, and then third party app and hardware providers would have to start providing proper support for Linux - the key to really wide adoption.

I think that the desktop and PIM is definitely ready for the broad mass, sure there are things that should be ironed out but that goes for Windows as well. When it comes to the Office suite I agree (although OOo is good enough for most home users), however anyone wanting MS Office can easily install it in Linux if they want to.

spoovy wrote:Most end users don't give a monkey's butt about plasmoids, virtual desktops and desktop metaphors. The Windows 7 desktop is basic but the applications are sophisticated - that's what most people want.

IMHO of course - feel free to slate me for saying nice things about MS products..

Not going to slate you
I've not used Windows 7 yet so I might be talking bollocks now, but I fail to see anything that a computer novice would hold against KDE in relation to Windows. Most people don't install and set up fresh installs of Windows so therefore we must compare a fully installed and set up Windows against a ditto KDE/Gnome/whatever. If it's set up in a basic manner and the applications chosen carefully then I don't see any problem.

Linux is not a business; therefore it can't be put OUT of business. So it's not going to die, not really, not until everybody stops using it, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be using it on my deathbed. If you're using Linux, and you're not reading the hack computer blogs, it's real easy to forget that anyone is using anything else. The problem is that here on Planet Microsoft, success is generally measured by Microsoft's business model, i.e. world domination. It's been suggested that in the past couple of years, Linux's market share has increased in the past three years from roughly a half per cent to one per cent. Somewhere, in a similar planet in strange parallel universe, one hundred per cent growth is not considered a sign of death.

There's another problem, and it's that hack computer writers can always get hits on their column by predicting that so and so is "dying", or that so and so is about to take over the world. It turns out that the writer we're discussing is actually the same hack who coined the phrase "the year of the Linux desktop". Yep, that idiot. Am I really supposed to care what he says now?

What we've learned, I believe, is that Linux doesn't have to take over the world to be vital, innovative, powerful, and influential. If you use Linux, and you don't worry about the hack computer writers, something exciting is always happening. I haven't used Windows in about five years for anything at all, and I'm never running out of new applications, desktop environments, and live cds to try.

Imagine if we had fifty percent of the desktop market... would that mean 50, or even 25 times as much new distros coming out? Are we really equipped to handle that right now? It would just be kind of chaotic and overwhelming. We're going to need to build Linux at about the speed we're going, in my opinion. We're going to need a solid community information infrastructure to handle all the new development that would come out, and that's going to have to come with time.

mshelby wrote:Won't it be interesting to see what kind of desktop market share the Google ChromeOS has after 9 months or 12 months?

I submit that if it's over 1% then this post is correct. Linux on the desktop is dead.

In saying that I am fully aware that ChromeOS IS Linux... But it is Linux in the same way the Android operating system is Linux. Hardly anybody knows and hardly anybody cares.

I disagree. Very very much.

I've read that ChromeOS is based on debian. That may or may not be true, but regardless, it looks like there's going to be enough free software in chromeOS for people to build their own Linux distros based on ChromeOS... and if ChromeOS is a success, it's going to happen.

Furthermore, if Chrome OS is a success, it could easily open up support options for all Linux. I'd like to see Verizon DSL refuse to support ChromeOS the way they refused to support Linux for all the years that I used to.

Chrome OS is all about promoting web-based applications, and web-based applications run on Linux as well as on anything else. The Linux Desktop is likely to start looking more familiar to more everyday users.

mshelby wrote:Won't it be interesting to see what kind of desktop market share the Google ChromeOS has after 9 months or 12 months?

I submit that if it's over 1% then this post is correct. Linux on the desktop is dead.

In saying that I am fully aware that ChromeOS IS Linux... But it is Linux in the same way the Android operating system is Linux. Hardly anybody knows and hardly anybody cares.

Maybe more correctly the question should be "Is KDE (or Gnome) on the desktop dead?"

Isn't this a self-fulfilling prophesy? If a linux OS gains widespead usage then it's not really linux? What are the criteria then? If you are waiting for a Distrowatch-listed linux OS like Debian or Sabayon to gain 1% of the market share then you will be waiting a long time imho, because that means converting 1% of the population into computer enthusiasts. I'm not saying that those distros don't have the technical potential for wider appeal, but they don't have the marketing push behind them, and still far far too many rough edges.

Ubuntu is the only real contender for proper wide adoption at the moment, and even that is still completely unknown to 99.9% of non-geeks. So if Canonical decide to spend more, really push their Unity desktop and if they then gain some serious user numbers does it stop being "real" linux?

I worry that a lot of people talking up Linux fall into the "I haven't used Windows for X years" category. Which kind of invalidates a huge amount of what they tend to say afterwards.

I am a Linux enthusiast, I love how elegant and minimalist it is (well, Slackware anyway ). I love how it allows me to be in complete control of my own desktop and data. But i'm also a Windows user and I have to say that for sheer productivity it's still way out in front - and more so in 2010 than it was in 2008 or 2009.

FOSS PIM is not in any way shape or form in the same league as MS Office/Outlook, and only someone who hasn't used it in years could say that it is.

spoovy wrote:I worry that a lot of people talking up Linux fall into the "I haven't used Windows for X years" category. Which kind of invalidates a huge amount of what they tend to say afterwards.

I am a Linux enthusiast, I love how elegant and minimalist it is (well, Slackware anyway ). I love how it allows me to be in complete control of my own desktop and data. But i'm also a Windows user and I have to say that for sheer productivity it's still way out in front - and more so in 2010 than it was in 2008 or 2009.

FOSS PIM is not in any way shape or form in the same league as MS Office/Outlook, and only someone who hasn't used it in years could say that it is.

Don't trust what anyone says about the relative merits of different desktops until they get down to specifics. "Sheer productivity" is NOT a specific.

I'll say this much, and some people are not going to like it. In my opinion, the strength of the Linux Desktop is that it integrates the command line and the GUI, for two handed computing. The command line is not better than the GUI, but the command line and the GUI together are better than either one alone. You can run Linux without ever using the CLI, but that's running Linux as if it were Windows, and Windows will always be better at being Windows. You don't have to be a "computer enthusiast" to run Linux as if it were Linux, you just have to want to save a lot of time over a lifetime of computing, and be willing to invest a little time and effort up front toward that end. With the support of the GUI (it doesn't go away, you know!) learning the CLI can be done over time, and pay huge dividends over the years to come.

Here on Planet Microsoft, where the huge corporation that was my ISP tried to flatly tell me that I couldn't use Linux with their network, migrating to Linux is not always easy, and it may not be worth doing if you're going to have a second rate experience. Sadly, because of the prejudice against the command line, many of us are afraid to tell new users what they need to do to have a first rate experience, and they come and go without ever understanding what the big deal is. I'm sure there are successful Linux users who never use the command line, but I'm not sure that I know any personally.

blackbelt_jones wrote:Linux is not a business; therefore it can't be put OUT of business. So it's not going to die, not really, not until everybody stops using it, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be using it on my deathbed. If you're using Linux, and you're not reading the hack computer blogs, it's real easy to forget that anyone is using anything else. The problem is that here on Planet Microsoft, success is generally measured by Microsoft's business model, i.e. world domination. It's been suggested that in the past couple of years, Linux's market share has increased in the past three years from roughly a half per cent to one per cent. Somewhere, in a similar planet in strange parallel universe, one hundred per cent growth is not considered a sign of death.

There's another problem, and it's that hack computer writers can always get hits on their column by predicting that so and so is "dying", or that so and so is about to take over the world. It turns out that the writer we're discussing is actually the same hack who coined the phrase "the year of the Linux desktop". Yep, that idiot. Am I really supposed to care what he says now?

What we've learned, I believe, is that Linux doesn't have to take over the world to be vital, innovative, powerful, and influential. If you use Linux, and you don't worry about the hack computer writers, something exciting is always happening. I haven't used Windows in about five years for anything at all, and I'm never running out of new applications, desktop environments, and live cds to try.

Imagine if we had fifty percent of the desktop market... would that mean 50, or even 25 times as much new distros coming out? Are we really equipped to handle that right now? It would just be kind of chaotic and overwhelming. We're going to need to build Linux at about the speed we're going, in my opinion. We're going to need a solid community information infrastructure to handle all the new development that would come out, and that's going to have to come with time.

I like your logic here. And your way of thinking. I agree with everything you wrote. I still stand by my original post because I had framed it around Google's marketing efforts to push the ChromeOS. I didn't communicate that very well. I still think that if Google succeeds in garnering marketshare for the ChromeOS that it will be done without calling it 'Linux.' and if that happens then 'Linux' as a desktop truly is a non-starter. It's not 'sexy' enough to be marketable so it will be marginalized. Not saying I like that... just that it is what it is.

I repeat that my post should have better stated, "Is KDE/Gnome on the desktop dead from a marketability standpoint?" This is a very important question for both DE's. No matter what level of advertisement you do, some form of Marketing has to occur to 'get the word out.'

Ha! I used the word "S-E-X-Y" above and the bot sensors took it out! Didn't realize that was such a dirty word!

@mshelby: S-E-X-Y isn't, but S-E-X-* is