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I understand you. I was a RedHat user during 98-2002. At that time RedHat was the king of Linux desktop, and “the year of Linux desktop” was predicted multiple
by diegof79 7y ago
I understand you. I was a RedHat user during 98-2002.
At that time RedHat was the king of Linux desktop, and “the year of Linux desktop” was predicted multiple times.
But in retrospective, I think that RedHat did a good move. Where is Mandriva/Mandrake Linux today?
Even SuSe which is doing fine, didn’t have the growth of RedHat.
It was sad for users hoping for the year of Linux desktop that never materialized; but a good business decision for RedHat.
- dheera 7y agoTo some extent Mac OS X was the "year of the *nix desktop". Not Linux, but it could just easily have been a Linux kernel instead of BSD if they wanted. Android is the Linux phone. 3 billion people are running a Linux kernel in their pocket right now. It did happen, just that it didn't unfold in the way that RedHat users originally imagined.
- pjmlp 7y agoLinux aficionados keep giving Android example. The Linux kernel isn't exposed to app developers, only OEMs writing drivers. Google could switch it for something else tomorrow and beyond Google itself and the driver writers, no else would notice. Same applies to ChromeOS. As for Apple platforms, with each release POSIX APIs become less relevant with Objective-C/Swift/C++ replacements for them. So it is pretty much a pyrrhic victory.
- dheera 7y agoSure, I don't think we should stop at Android. The reason Android and MacOS won market share is because those companies built an ecosystem around it, including hardware, and very importantly the end user never needing to touch the command line. They built a lot of exactly what pure Linux lacks. Ubuntu is pretty far from that. I still have to do quite a bit of command line fuss to setup and maintain my Ubuntu system. Fine for me as a dev, but not fine for mass adoption.