The Perennial Year of the Linux Desktop
My old Rabbi once told me “Zealotry is an affliction of the newly converted”. Views often mellow with age and a certain ambivalence sets in. At some point, you begin to understand that the world exists as it always has and your arrival in it was much like a raindrop hitting a lake during a storm: a life-changing experience for the drop, but of little import to the lake itself. I don’t mean to sound pessimistic here; the lake needs rain, but it did not need that specific drop.
However, for the newly converted, it is hard to come to terms with the fact that this life-changing experience does not extend beyond the confines of their own skin. Surely, this life-altering event was a spark in the dry forest of the universe ready to set it ablaze, not merely a drop in a pond! So, it is of no particular surprise that, every year, someone announces that THIS is the year of the desktop for Linux.
I’ve been using Linux since 1997 and the spiel has become a familiar one. It usually hinges on one of two things. The first is that there is a new tech development that’s going to revolutionize the way we use our computers and Windows will not be able to keep up. The first such scenario I can remember was the increasing affordability of LCD displays. Enlightenment was THE window manager that would put Windows out of business. It looked glorious on resolutions higher than 1024x768 and made full use of those 16.7 million colors. Surely the throngs would see what we had in the Linux world and beat down our doors.
The second reason it is finally the year of the Linux desktop is because of some change Microsoft has made: they’ve changed the start menu, they’ve removed something people loved, they’ve introduced a new EULA and everyone will run to Linux out of fear for their privacy and the list goes on. It’s hard to say that last one with a straight face in the age of Amazon Echo and Google Dot. As studies have shown, most people want more privacy with the things they use, but are unwilling to give up the things they use for more privacy.
In the late 1990s, Linux was as close to parity with Windows as it ever has been. DOS games were phasing out, but they were still available and all gamers had the ability to run DOS games. The Red Hat Linux boxed set was on the shelf right beside Windows at CompUSA and they constantly extolled the virtues of Linux over the intercom while you were in the store. Computer literacy was much higher among computer owners because you had to have a certain level of proficiency just to keep the thing running. Windows was so prone to crashing, the gaming company Sierra On-Line popularized the phrase “Save early, save often”. Plug and Play was so buggy it was renamed in popular parlance “Plug and Pray”. It was Linux’s time to shine, yet it didn’t happen.
Readers might be quick to point out that is the time when Microsoft was allegedly being anti-competitive and blame Linux’s lackluster performance solely on that, but in 1999 Linux had 25% of the server market share and was rising faster than Windows. It obviously wasn’t the only reason that Linux did not excel on the desktop nor the reason it has not since that point. OS/2 Warp eclipsed Linux before being abandoned by IBM and Chrome OS did the same in more recent years.
Later, when the internet exploded and the skill of the average computer user plummeted, the trope was that Linux was not successful on the desktop because it did not come pre-installed on any desktop PCs. So, companies sprang up to fill the niche. A little over a year ago Dell joined them, then early this year Lenovo did as well. This hasn’t resulted in a huge influx of new users, so there is obviously more at play we have not considered.
This article is not meant to disparage Linux, however. The world truly runs on Linux. I would venture to say that every person who has more than one electronic device is probably running Linux. Linux has been nothing short of a revolution and I wish this article to not only give my deductions as to why Linux has not conquered the desktop, but to also explain why we do not wish it to do so. I believe that, in order to explain Linux’s failure on the desktop, we need to only look at its successes everywhere else. Linux has exceled on servers, embedded especially through Android and is beginning to excel on lower end hardware due to Chrome OS. Let us look to our successes in order to understand our failure.
Linux began taking the server market in the late 90s. It was a meteoric rise that appeared to come out of nowhere. As I said previously in this article, in 1999, Linux was gaining server market share faster than Windows. I think we can largely attribute this to the open source philosophy and how it put businesses in the driver’s seat. With Windows, if you want a feature you can request Microsoft to add said feature, then wait and see if they accommodate you. With Linux, you can hire a developer, have him work on all your requests and craft the product to better fit your business needs. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what we saw begin happening in the late 1990s: businesses began hiring Linux developers like crazy and then directing their work. It’s no wonder it fit business use cases so well when businesses were funding development. Add to that the fact that businesses existed from the early days whose main goal was to offer Linux support for a price and it becomes very easy to see why Linux took over the server market.
Embedded is another area where Linux has exceled. Again, you have businesses paying developers to mold the product into something that fits their needs. Because Linux is basically a kernel and amorphous collection of software compiled to run on that kernel, it is easy to carve out a Linux distribution that fits your hardware’s capability and needs with little overhead. You can do a lot with 1 gigabyte of RAM if it’s only running what you need to run and little else. Because it’s all open source, you can even change the kernel to fine tune it to your hardware and limitations. This fact brings us to android.
Android is the first interesting use case because it is an operating system designed for consumers that fulfills the function we most often look to an operating system for: an application launcher. Whereas many embedded systems only exist to run the hardware vendor’s software, android allows you to install and run the applications of your choice. So, how does android differ from Linux on the desktop? Android is controlled by a single company that has designed a single UI across all devices, controls how you install programs, is in charge of releases, and has locked it down so the average user has their settings they can change and no more.
The last and currently emerging success story is Chrome OS. Google has built upon its winning strategy with android by bringing the same vision to the desktop. The strategy is: single UI, control how you install programs, and lock it down. You have support and one company to look to for that support. It’s all very simple and streamlined. Manufacturers feel safe making Chromebooks because Google has their back. They can concentrate on making the hardware as well as drivers and let Google take care of the operating system.
This finally brings us back to Linux on the desktop. A lot of Linux’s failure on the desktop can be attributed to the open source model as well as what many of us consider the strengths of Linux as a desktop operating system. There is no single company controlling Linux and there is no one single distribution. Because of this, there is no one single vision driving Linux on the desktop. Since the early days you’ve had a multitude of window managers and desktop environments: the two stalwarts being KDE and Gnome.
Because it is open source, anyone with a vision can realize that vision within Linux. If you think you can do something better, you can fork it or start from scratch and try. Because it’s not funded by a company, most development on the desktop is slower and may have more bugs, but it also exhibits a wide variety of approaches to the desktop experience. Some desktop apps and drivers are like shooting stars: they blaze briefly and then they’re gone. But, each one is someone’s vision, someone’s passion and desire to bring something new to the Linux experience.
Car mechanics often think everyone is interested in engines. They talk about horsepower and cubic ccs, about carburetors and valves, but in reality most people are interested in how they can get from point a to point b as well as how comfortably they can do so. Linux desktop users are no different. They don’t want something locked down. They want easy access to it all. If they break it, they will blame themselves and not some company. They want to configure it, customize it and express themselves through their desktop. The average person just wants to turn it on, launch their favorite apps and make their hardware available to those apps. They just want it to work and get out of the way.
Linux users will often agree that supporting Linux on the desktop is problematic for services as well as app and hardware developers. The desktop is a very fractured place in penguin land. It not only matters what kernel you’re running (which may change often), but what distro you’re running, the version of it and what desktop you’re running. So, Linux users thought to rectify that. They came up with a universal package manager and they liked the idea so much they came up with three: appImage, flatpak and snap. To top it off, people who run one may be adamantly against running one of the others! Even more, if someone tries to replace their system’s packages with one of the universal packages, people might go ballistic. We didn’t solve the problem, we just rerouted it.
This makes it all very confusing for the mainstream user. Not only have you given them a desktop that’s potentially more buggy and will happily break for them, you’ve given them a desktop with no consistence. They can’t just look at a desktop and say “That’s Linux and I have used Linux, so I’ll know my way around it.” It could be completely different than they’re used to: different DE, different package manager, different shell, etc. This represents a nightmare to the mainstream.
I’ll end the article with these questions: No it’s not the year of the Linux desktop. It probably will never be. But, if it takes putting a single company in charge and going with their vision, their UI, etc. do you really want it to be? Moreover, is failure of Linux to gain mainstream adoption on the desktop really a failure of desktop Linux? A lot of people labor daily to give you what you have and don’t get anything in return. They’re the reason you use Linux on the desktop. They provide the choices and the visions, competing as they may be, that make Linux your choice for the desktop.
No, it’s not the year of Linux on the desktop. It hasn’t been for the near 30 years it’s been around and it won’t be next year either. But, that’s not a failure, my friend. That is a feature.
