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This is why I have stopped believing that "The Year of the Linux Desktop" would even be a good thing. Android has "regular old joe sixpack" users by the millio
by Crito 12y ago
This is why I have stopped believing that "The Year of the Linux Desktop" would even be a good thing.
Android has "regular old joe sixpack" users by the millions, but has the Android community actually benefited from that? The existing "desktop linux" community has their act together far more than the Android community, despite (or because of?) not having those legions of unskilled users.
- stusmall 12y agoBenefits have come out of it. It's not about the number of users who have it, but about the money companies are backing the users with. Linux has gotten some great new features that benefit the ecosystem as a whole that came out of Google's work on ChromeOS and Android. dm-verity is a good example of this.
- Crito 12y agoHardware support specifically is often cited as one of the ways that "desktop linux" would benefit from joe-sixpack users. That is what has always been lacking from "desktop linux". Hardware support in official ROMs from phone manufactures is good of course, but what is freely available to the Android community is much worse. It turns out joe-sixpack doesn't really give any shits about hardware support being open-sourced. It's nice that Google has given back some stuff, but that's peanuts compared with what the "year of the linux desktop" meme promises.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]