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Linux has certainly had a number of years over the years. 2006 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1836228,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1836228

• jamesaguilar 13y ago
  Indeed. The year where one could make do with the Linux desktop came and went not long after Ubuntu was first released. I am confident that I could give one to my parents and they could eventually learn to function with it. The question is, when will the year come where it is the easiest and most attractive option? I'm a little bearish about that being soon.
  • phaer 13y ago
    It depends on your use case. If someone did not have 10+ years of intensive windows using wants to browse, listen to music and read some e-mails for example and than Linux or rather Ubuntu is the most attractive solution. You don't to check your anti-virus software every few weeks and upgrade for all your tools a coming automatically. The hardware costs far less than a mac and the software is free, which non of the alternatives is. In fact i do see more and more non-techies with ubuntu net/notebooks (central and southern europe if that matters)
  • Silhouette 13y ago
    The question is, when will the year come where [Linux on the desktop] is the easiest and most attractive option? I'm a little bearish about that being soon. I used to be, but I'm coming round to the view that with all of the big commercial players, now including Microsoft, pushing heavily towards services and "the cloud", the decay of their traditional desktop offerings will create an opportunity for a Linux-based (or other OSS) platform to become relatively attractive a lot sooner. This is partly about the operating system itself, but it's just as much about the applications. Building a direct competitor to MS Office is something few sane people would consider attempting, given market conditions and the effort required. Implementing a native desktop competitor to a typical on-line "office suite" today is something a small team of smart people could do, reaching functional parity within months, and there is nothing close to a dominant incumbent in the market yet, nor is the user experience for these web applications anywhere near as polished. In short, as they lower the barrier to entry and open up the market, they make it easier for Linux-based applications to catch up. They also make it more attractive for someone to invest significant resources to polish up those applications as a commercial venture.
    • Pwnguinz 13y ago
      With the rest of the world moving on, if you have a relatively attractive solution to an obsolete problem, what's the point?
      • Silhouette 13y ago
        I don't think the rest of the world is moving on, at least not for long. Full cloud has too many fundamental drawbacks to become a universal solution. It's the buzzword of the moment, but it's taken a very long time to get there by tech industry standards, and it's still underwhelming even today. With execs at the big publicly held software firms looking to the next quarterly financial call, they're all going with the hype anyway. That creates an opportunity for a disruptive movement that shifts the market instead of pandering to it. My guess would be that private clouds, software-defined networking and a bunch of tools that better support things like remote working and BYOD will steadily push full external cloud solutions out of most large corporations, and smaller scale tools based on the same basic ideas will emerge to support SMEs. And that brings me to my big question: What is the only operating system in the world that is already demonstrably a credible platform for all of server, desktop and mobile computing?
• quacker 13y ago
  I mentioned the Ubuntu phone to some non-programmer friends recently when they were talking about the new iPhone. They had never of Ubuntu.