Do you think 2010 will be the year of the linux desktop?

[QueBert]

It does since 7 (and maybe Vista, I'm not sure).

You mean the premium/ultimate versions? 99% of people I know with Vista it came pre installed on their computers. And I don't think a single one has anything other than home. Which by default will not play DVD's.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

No, not only in 2010, but more than likely, ever. I can still remember the Linux geeks in the late 90s predicting the impending demise of "Windoze" and crying about how bad "Internet Exploder" sucked and how Linux/Netscape would conquer all and usher in a new era of Linux dominance. It hasn't happened in the last decade and probably won't, for a variety of reasons that others have already mentioned here.

 

[PieIsAwesome]

No, probably never will. Things go like this:

Reasonable person: "Linux will never become mainstream because getting simple things to work can take too much research and work. Lots of things are not polished or designed to be useable."
Linux fanboy: "Well, the people who contribute to linux don't care about mainstream, they simply make the software and share it with other people. They don't care if other people are too stupid to understand how to make it work for them."
Reasonable person: "Okay. Linux will never replace Windows."
Linux fanboy: "STFU Linux>windows!11!"

 

[Platypus]

The question of this thread is if this is the year of the Linux desktop. And because you CAN'T do exactly what you suggested, the answer is no.

Why can't there be a Linux distro that is accessible like that? Why is that so foreign?

That's a topic that really merits its own thread but in the open source world, there is much more potential for issues to come up initially because anyone can write anything. That power and strength also comes with a big inherent weakness.. the potential for things not to work exactly as planned. This, for some people, is intolerable. This is the reason Linux will never take off as a desktop replacement for majority of users, because they simply don't want to spend the effort to figure out why something is failing. Almost every non Linux user I've talked to that has tried to install it has given up for one reason or another because of something drastically simple to fix that would have taken 5 minutes of looking to understand.

It's far easier for Microsoft or Apple to release something that has been tested over and over than it is for something written by one person to be tested at length. This causes issues that the users I'm speaking about to stop dead in their tracks. Here's a good example: all things considered, there is very little motive for hardware manufactures to write device drivers for the home end user. For enterprise class hardware, sure, but not the former. Because of this, a lot of drivers are written by the user base or adapted/reverse engineered. They're not going to be perfect 100% of the time.

It's really like, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't have a highly customizable, fast, secure, easy to use, free operating system that anyone can contribute to without understanding that since its community driven for the most part, you are going to have to deal with issues every now and then.

 

[ViviTheMage]

nope

 

[sandorski]

Any OS that requires the User to be a Component of the OS is doomed for failure. That shit is supposed to be the Operating System, not the User.

 

[dwell]

It's really like, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't have a highly customizable, fast, secure, easy to use, free operating system that anyone can contribute to without understanding that since its community driven for the most part, you are going to have to deal with issues every now and then.

Well, outside of the failure to create a compelling desktop alternative to Windows/OS X, Linux is rock solid. There's device support for just about every hardware config out their (sans some of the desktop-specifics like printers, scanners, etc).

I laugh when people label Linux a failure because it's not successful on the desktop. It's invaluable in the server/embedded/device spaces. If I need a couple dozen caching or db servers, Microsoft/Sun/IBM can lick balls if they think I am going to pay them for their OS when Linux is free and runs on commodity hardware. The kernel kicks absolute ass and at the heart of it, that's really what Linux is -- a kernel.