Posted on 11/15/2018 9:30:47 AM PST by ShadowAce
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: <yyyy> will be the year of the Linux desktop. Even in Linux circles this is greeted with eye-rolling. Here’s the funny thing, though: Linux long ago won the hearts and minds of end users, even while the Linux desktop continues to spin its wheels.
How can that be?
The paradox is easily explained. But as for Linux’s failure to capture desktop hearts and minds, that’s a complicated story. I’ll lay it out for you.
First, the paradox: According to the latest Annenberg Surveying the Digital Future report, the average American now spends 24 hours a week online. Meanwhile, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Trends Report shows the average adult in 2017 spending 5.9 hours a day watching or listening to digital media.
And what do roughly 95.6% of all websites run on? With the exception of Microsoft sites, the answer is Linux. Facebook? Linux. Google? Linux. Yahoo? Linux. Netflix? Linux. I can go on and on. You may use Windows on your desktop, but it’s effectively just a front end to Linux-based services and data. You might as well be using a Chromebook (running on Linux-based Chrome OS, by the way).
But as a matter of fact, Windows is no longer the top end-user operating system. Oh yes, it does still dominate the desktop, but the desktop hasn’t been king of the end-user hill for some time. By StatCounter’s reckoning, the most popular end-user operating system as of September 2018, with 40.85% market share, was — drum roll, please — Android. Which — guess what — is based on Linux.
So, in several senses, Linux has been the top end-user operating system for some time.
But not on the desktop, where...
(Excerpt) Read more at computerworld.com ...
Love me some Linux Mint
If Quickbooks and Turbotax would create a Linux port of their system, there would be no need for me to maintain ANY Windows OS in my house.
For work, I need Viso to have a port [sigh].
You DO know that MSOFT is concerting over to a version of Linux as the core of Windows, and “windows” will only be the desktop, right?
Cinnamon mint 17.3 here. Love it.
Linux is an odd thing. I had to ask a few IT friends which flavor to choose. Mint is very XP-like. I love it and use only Linux for online shopping or banking.
I think the best thing about Linux is it runs better on half the hardware than windows. For example I cobbled together my Linux box from spare parts. It only has a single 64bit CPU yet runs better than windoze on a dual CPU.
The desktop is dying, and no-one will care anymore. It will all be tablets, smartphones and gameboxes.
(and if you don’t believe me, then why are all the PC gaming powerhouses suddenly catering to the smartphone crowd - because they know where the future money is...)
Tech bookmark.
Serious gamers will be on a desktop. I built a super mega game box with an 8core CPU 16g ram ssd and gtx960 Gpu (all I could afford at the time)
i doubt business will run on tablets, smartphones and gameboxes...
CAD, high end 4k and higher resolution video takes resources just like real games.
I can barely play LA Noir. Not a gamer.
Ubuntu user myself.
It does most of what I need.
And at least in the tablet and smartphone segments, a lot of those will be running Android, which is a code fork of Linux.
Tablet sales have been in decline for 16 quarters now.
Windows just works for me, so I run that 99% of the time. I do have Mint on a dual boot, but I hardly ever use it.
Side-by-side with Win7Pro on the same CPU in a Dell box, using verizon speed test, this Linux box uploads/downloads twice as fast as the Win7Pro box. My IT friend says it's because of Win7's overhead.
FWIW
I've seen some Anroid pads and they are pretty impressive.
From the old system to the new:
scp -r ~/* zeugma@newssystem:.
If you're logged into the new system:
scp -r zeugma@oldsystem:* .
If you just have the hard drive from the old (note:$OLDDRIVE = whatever directory it is currently mounted as), "cp -r $OLDDRIVE $HOME
My bookmarks file for Firefox is essentially the same file that I've transferred from one system to another starting over 20 years back. Yeah, Firefox now stores the data as a json file, but it started as bookmarks.htm back in the day, and I've been able to maintain it without significant loss for that long.
Part of that is that I'm religious about backups. Part is that maintaining consistency with linux is easy.
True that, but that’s business. For ‘fun’, fanatics like me (dinosaurs) will still build their own PCs, but the lion’s share of the market for digital entertainment these days is driven by non-desktop devices.
If it weren’t for the fact that my favorite games require Windows, I’d be running Linux on my home PCs. The moment that changes, it’s bye-bye Redmond.
One of the major studios (Blizzard) just announced that their next major title in a well known franchise will be a mobile game. Other studios are trying hard to break into the console/mobile market, and starting to let their desktop IPs wither on the vine.
Bleh. Not happy about it, it just seems to be the way things are going.
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