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Without disagreeing in any way, because I don't, the thing is this: the year of Linux on the desktop came in 2020, and the world didn't notice, which is good an

Without disagreeing in any way, because I don't, the thing is this: the year of Linux on the desktop came in 2020, and the world didn't notice, which is good and right and proper. Here is the evidence and the reasoning: How can we define when Linux was ready for the desktop? When people chose it. When can we say they chose it in significant numbers? When more people chose Linux than a competing product. OK, then, what competing products are there? Well there are really only two: Windows and macOS. That's it. Those are the mainstream desktop OSes. There are other mainstream end-user OSes, such as Android, iOS and iPadOS, but they're not desktop/laptop OSes. They run on dedicated purpose-built hardware. Outselling Windows is a high bar. But outselling macOS is easy to measure. It's the #2, and Linux outsold Macs in 2020: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/17/chromebooks-outsold-macs-2020/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/02/17/chromebooks-outsold-mac... It outsold them in the USA only 4 years earlier: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/23/chromebook-mac-google-pc-sales https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/23/chromeboo... ChromeOS is a Linux. More so even than Android, which has a strange custom userland, libc and so on. ChromeOS doesn't. It's based on Gentoo, it has its own display server and things but it's a Linux and it runs desktop Linux apps. ChromeOS, Windows and macOS are fungible. You can interchange one for the other. You can install ChromeOS (in its Flex edition) on PCs and on x86 Macs. You can install x86 macOS on x86 PCs: I've done it. You can install Windows and Linux on x86 Macs, and Arm Linux on Arm Macs is getting there. You can install Linux and Windows on Chromebooks. They are interchangeable. Argue all you like about openness, third-party apps and stuff, it's here and it works. I run Firefox on my Chromebook, because I am awkward like that. It works great. ChromeOS is a Linux, and ChromeOS outsold Macs 3 years ago. The 2nd best-selling desktop/laptop OS is a Linux and macOS was relegated to 3rd place. It is here, it happened, there are some 200 to 300 million happy ChromeOS users out there. No mainstream Linux vendor noticed. Fans of mainstream Linux didn't notice. It's not their kind of Linux. That's exactly what you'd expect Linux fans to think and say and indeed do. But the year of Linux on the desktop was 2020. It happened, it came, and the FOSS world was too busy squabbling to notice.

davidw 4y ago
Recently, my Dell started having some troubles after many years of hard use - the wifi chip seems to have some problems. Since I need to be able to at least do email and web things, I went out and got a $130 Chromebook at OfficeMax. I was actually quite impressed with it! But the screen was a bit too small, so I took it back and upgraded to a $250 computer. I'm very impressed at what it can do for that price. The user experience is very good, all smooth sailing, and in addition, the Linux subsystem is quite usable. I got my Elixir/Phoenix hobby project running on it without much trouble. My original plan was to just hang on to this computer while I ordered a new Dell, but I'm considering whether I need to do that... $1800-ish for a new XPS 13 is a lot more than $250. The keybindings and window manager do bug me a bit on ChromeOS compared to the custom stuff I've had set up on Linux that dates back to fvwm2 days, but it looks like if you dig around, you can tweak things. Seems there's even a focus follows mouse option!

davidw 4y ago

Recently, my Dell started having some troubles after many years of hard use - the wifi chip seems to have some problems. Since I need to be able to at least do email and web things, I went out and got a $130 Chromebook at OfficeMax. I was actually quite impressed with it! But the screen was a bit too small, so I took it back and upgraded to a $250 computer. I'm very impressed at what it can do for that price. The user experience is very good, all smooth sailing, and in addition, the Linux subsystem is quite usable. I got my Elixir/Phoenix hobby project running on it without much trouble. My original plan was to just hang on to this computer while I ordered a new Dell, but I'm considering whether I need to do that... $1800-ish for a new XPS 13 is a lot more than $250. The keybindings and window manager do bug me a bit on ChromeOS compared to the custom stuff I've had set up on Linux that dates back to fvwm2 days, but it looks like if you dig around, you can tweak things. Seems there's even a focus follows mouse option!