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The author declares that... "All a company needs to do is provide a homogenous/coherent user experience, smooth the rough edges, and not be as scummy as Google

The author declares that... "All a company needs to do is provide a homogenous/coherent user experience, smooth the rough edges, and not be as scummy as Google, Apple, or Microsoft and they will win." ... but as far as I can see that's Canonical and they're a long way from owning the desktop. Snaps, which the author lauds, are their thing! The author laments that Ubuntu didn't install the media codecs, but they have a panel during install asking if you want to install commercial stuff including such things. That could be more prominent, admittedly. The real problem is that there's just so much commercial software out there and most of it runs on Windows or (often rather grudgingly) on Mac. It's been an issue for decades. Back in the mid 90s I was working with "Windows for Workgroups" at the same time as messing with Linux. Linux was enormously superior at that point; pre-emptive multi-tasking, memory protection, high quality scheduling, and an excellent networking stack versus a very clunky OS balanced precariously on top of DOS. But Linux didn't have Microsoft Word, it didn't have Excel, it didn't come pre-installed if you bought a PC, and it couldn't run MS DOS software. Windows won, and once Windows NT was out it was a much more even race even on the technical qualities. The best thing that ever happened to desktop Linux was the commercialisation of the web, because it effectively made a huge swathe of important software usable on Linux. This is sufficiently the case that I've been able to use Linux (usually Ubuntu) at work for several of my recent gigs, but I still can't use it at my current day job (for example) because the miscellany of Data Loss Prevention software doesn't run on it but does run on Windows or MacOS. I'm not sure Linux will ever "win" the desktop, though the share of desktop might increase in proportion to the dwindling of that market versus mobile devices.

rurban 2y ago
> ... but as far as I can see that's Canonical and they're a long way from owning the desktop So far I see Redhat owns GNOME and all the base systems, and they already do own the linux desktop. Good so.
linguae 2y ago
Yup. I recently read a fascinating article about Apple selling a Mac emulator (similar in usage to the open source Basilisk and SheepShaver emulators) for Solaris back in the mid-1990s. There actually was a market for Unix workstation users who needed access to proprietary software packages that only ran on Windows or Mac OS. Even though Unix ran circles around DOS-based Windows and the classic Mac in terms of stability and power, Unix users still needed to be able to collaborate with their Windows- and Mac-using colleagues. Come to think of it, this also reminds me of why certain Lisp machine vendors such as Texas Instruments and Symbolics made Lisp machine expansion cards for Macs: this provided Lisp machine users the opportunity to use desktop software tools without having to buy two physically separate computers, a very expensive purchase in the early 1990s. (While I’m on the topic, even Apple shipped some Mac models with expansion cards that had x86 chips for the purpose of running DOS and Windows).

rurban 2y ago

> ... but as far as I can see that's Canonical and they're a long way from owning the desktop So far I see Redhat owns GNOME and all the base systems, and they already do own the linux desktop. Good so.

linguae 2y ago

Yup. I recently read a fascinating article about Apple selling a Mac emulator (similar in usage to the open source Basilisk and SheepShaver emulators) for Solaris back in the mid-1990s. There actually was a market for Unix workstation users who needed access to proprietary software packages that only ran on Windows or Mac OS. Even though Unix ran circles around DOS-based Windows and the classic Mac in terms of stability and power, Unix users still needed to be able to collaborate with their Windows- and Mac-using colleagues. Come to think of it, this also reminds me of why certain Lisp machine vendors such as Texas Instruments and Symbolics made Lisp machine expansion cards for Macs: this provided Lisp machine users the opportunity to use desktop software tools without having to buy two physically separate computers, a very expensive purchase in the early 1990s. (While I’m on the topic, even Apple shipped some Mac models with expansion cards that had x86 chips for the purpose of running DOS and Windows).