[sketerpot]

I remember the early 2000s. I devoutly hoped that Linux would get widely used in some way, even if it never really took off on the desktop. I wanted open source to be fairly common and well-accepted, and not just something that weird people wrote and talked about on Slashdot. And hacker-friendly open-source Linux-based smartphones would be great, but that was just too implausibly awesome to even hope for. I wanted pleasant languages like Python to get serious commercial use.

Now, all those things have happened or are happening. Want to get on board with cloud hosting in any way? The standard options involve Linux VM images. Languages like Ruby and Python are mainstream and well-supported. Android is disrupting the smartphone market, and has the kind of widespread commercial backing I never would have thought possible for an open, Linux-based thing. Microsoft is no longer an unstoppable leviathan; they've stopped being scary.

Occasionally I'll reflect on all this and chortle happily. I wasn't optimistic enough back in the early 2000s, and that's surprising.

[mbreese]

What is really funny is that we never really hit the year of Linux on the desktop. I mean, this has been speculation for years... Will this be the year that Linux really starts to make in roads in the Desktop market? For the most part, the answer has always been no. Redhat and Novell/Suse have all but left the desktop (commercially, not counting Fedora). Ubuntu has all but taken over the desktop Linux market. Overall, Linux Desktop experience has increased substantially since 2000, but it has never really caught up with Windows (now 7) and the Mac. (I actually think that the Mac has hurt Linux adoption on the Desktop more than Windows.

So, I too find it quite humorous that Linux is poised to be a, if not the major player in the next generation of computing - the portable/dedicated devices. But what I find more amusing is that it hasn't been the success of Linux on the desktop that has made this possible, it has been the decline in the importance of the desktop.

So, 2010 may finally be the year of Linux, but it still won't be the year of Linux on the desktop. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

[chipsy]

It's amusing, but not a very surprising outlook for the tech industry; platform shifts are opportunities for competitors to break in.

Linux came a little bit too late to make inroads on the desktop vs. the incumbent DOS/Windows platform of the early 90's - if it, and the GNU tools, had reached the 1991 level of development in the mid-80s when the PC clones first took hold, that story might have been a different one - but in the real world, it still devastated the competition on servers when the Web started its massive post-1994 growth.

Now we're hitting the juncture where, again, a new platform category is poised for growth; recall how netbooks started as Linux boxes, and only ended up running Windows after a combination of effort(Win7), strongarming(subsidies and licensing agreements), and initial advantages(the desktop ecosystem, which is largely netbook-compatible) from Microsoft. This time around, those tactics can't work.

It might actually work out that the desktop still shifts towards Linux in the end; the "bottom-up" nature of progress in tech means that people are going to want a desktop that does everything their mobile environment does (plus desktop things). Hence, desktops will start running Android or a compatible variant...which would naturally work out to mean you'd be running Linux, even if it isn't today's Linux environments.

[mambodog]

Also, don't forget Chrome OS: Diet Linux on the Desktop (okay well, desktop as positioned vs. Linux for servers)