Chasing after the mythical “Year of the Linux Desktop” hasn’t been relevant since smart phones and tablets became mainstream.

Back in the old days, nearly everyone had a desktop or a laptop, but nowadays those devices are mainly used for very specific applications such as work or gaming. Most people used to read email, browse news, do Skype calls with friends or listen to music on their desktop, but the world has change a lot since those days. Nowadays, mobile devices can do most of the things that people used to do with a desktop, so even if Linux gained 51% market share tomorrow, it wouldn’t have much of an impact on most people. They would continue using their phone or tablet as their primary computer regardless.

In recent years, gaming has changed a lot too, and the number of games you can run on Linux has increased dramatically, so in that regard many obstacles have been removed.

Work applications are a very different story though. If your work doesn’t revolve around online tools, you’re pretty much stuck with Windows. If your work involves using special instruments your options are even more limited. Usually, the company that manufactured the device has only tested their application under a very a specific version of windows, and they don’t intend to patch it to work with the next one. Instead, they want to you to spend another 20-50 k€ on another reactor, autoclave, spectrometer, robot, whatever every time you get tired of keeping your computer permanently offline.

Android is based on Linux. It already hold a majority on smart phones, which is a type of computer. The “Year of Linux” has already been a decade.

I hope that the business decisions that Microsoft is starting to make, i.e. becoming increasingly consumer unfriendly, will help drive people to Linux.

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