> Look at Quartz (Apple), ChromeOS (Google), and Android (Google). Really good point. In my "last mile" comment I failed to address these success stories, but

> Look at Quartz (Apple), ChromeOS (Google), and Android (Google). Really good point. In my "last mile" comment I failed to address these success stories, but the two points are pretty complementary. MacOS abandoned Linux entirely. Android abandoned most of it - kept a lot of the system bits but threw away practically all of the bits a user (or even a typical developer) would see. ChromeOS is the closest to a real Linux desktop, and even it's changed quite a bit. I have a second-gen Chromebook Pixel laptop and I love the fact that I can use it both as a turnkey web-browsing appliance and as a real Linux development machine simultaneously (via crouton). But that only happened because Google invested millions in crossing that "last mile" for their own users. Many millions if you include all the money they've poured into Chrome and Google Docs and other things without which Chromebooks wouldn't be usable for most people. I guess I should amend my point to say that native app based desktop Linux will always succumb to the last-mile problem. The very freedom that lets anyone develop whatever they want also means there will be regression to the mean when it comes to quality - and the mean just isn't good enough. Someone has to pay to raise that standard, and anyone who's paying won't pay for random half-finished crap. An integrated, polished system is the only kind of desktop the market will support.