Lars Noodén wrote:
It is worth noting that desktop adoption of ANYTHING is bucking several trends:On 02/27/2013 12:32 PM, Lisi Reisz wrote:... And the average man in the street does not install his own OS, whatever that OS may be.That is the heart of the matter. Until the OEM stranglehold is broken, desktop adoption will remain low. Fortunately we are seeing a turn of events in two areas as the desktop market recedes a little in favor of tablets and notebooks. Tablets are undeniably dominated by Linux. And Linux on notebooks is starting to hit its stride with Chromebooks. Neither tablets nor notebooks come off the shelf with Debian right now, but with the direction things are heading, it is a possibility eventually. Though I think we'll see something mainstream with a Debian derivative like Ubuntu first.
- desktops are going away - today's desktop device is most likely a laptop, and folks seem to be migrating more and more to smart phones and tablets (many of which have Linux installed, in the form of Android - albeit rather locked down Linux)
- more and more stuff is migrating into the cloud - thin clients are coming back
- for the bulk of folks, the o/s comes pre-installed with their device, auto-updates, and is at least partially locked down (be it by the device vendor, o/s vendor, corporate IT, or one's wireless carrier)
Somehow the notion that we're ever going to see mass adoption of Linux, on the desktop, seems unlikely.
My personal prediction is that the mass market is going to look more and more like the mobile phone market - you get handed a device, it has some kind of o/s on it that periodically updates itself over-the-air, you load apps and/or run software in the cloud and that's that. Not that I necessarily agree that this is a good thing, but think about cars - how many people build their own car (or even assemble the parts out of a box), and less and less of cars are owner-maintainable. Most likely, you drive a car off a lot, maybe with a few add-on accessories; or maybe you specify a custom order from the factory. These days, most folks buy (or lease) a car, take it to a mechanic for scheduled maintenance, and call AAA when things go wrong. Building and maintaining your own car is mostly for hobbyists or racers.
That still leaves a sizeable group of folks who do/will continue to assemble (or at least order) semi-custom hardware configurations, load an o/s, load software, etc. - but it's not going to be the mass market:
- developers- folks needing specialized tools which need lots of "horsepower" (graphics, video editors, engineers, gamers, ....)
- corporate/institutional IT departments - system builders - service providers (all that SaaS has to run on something)- folks who spend a lot of time on airplanes, or otherwise disconnected from the net
- folks who are particularly security conscious - hackersNow personally, I figure the next big wave of Linux adopters is going to come from the Macintosh world:
- a significant percentage of Mac users are technical users of one sort or another
- a significant number use a Mac because it comes out of the box multi-platform (BSD Unix underneath, a nice GUI on top, lots of packaged software); and with emulation you've got Windows and whatever other o/s you want in virtual machines - with good performance even -- particularly nice if you're a developer, or if you're in academia (linux data analysis tools, MS Office for writing papers and presentations, Quicken under emulation for paying your bills)
- but.. each new release of Mac O/S, gets more locked down, looks more like iOS, and gets just a little buggier -- and I know an increasing number of long-term Mac users (myself included), who keep opining that, one of these days they're just going to reload their laptop with Linux and be done with it
- if Apple keeps up their current direction with MacOS, they're going to lose a lot of their market to Linux
Just one man's opinion, Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra