Comments on: Will The Linux Desktop Soon Be Irrelevant?

By: sstory

sstory — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Google already has this concept...an OS that boots quickly (I think perhaps Linux)but then only loads Chrome. There are people for whom this would be perfect, especially on a netbook which can be connected wirelessly to your in home internet connection. It is perfect for sitting a recliner, watching TV and getting internet information at the same time. You don\'t have to worry about OS issues at all I\'d imagine. Since all of your data and apps are online..you don\'t care if anything happens to it. I think it has its place and for a lot of people will be plenty.

As a complete replacement, I disagree. I for one will NEVER trust Google, Microsoft or anyone else with all of my data and want to give up all of my quick apps.

If Linux would run all of the apps I want to use that I run on Windows without a lot of hassle, I\'d definitely switch to it--probably CentOS. It is a really nice OS. The average user doesn\'t even know what an OS is, though.

By: neondiet

neondiet — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I\'m surprised you managed to write that article without referring to Google\'s Chrome OS as what you described is exactly what they intend to do with it. Namely, all your computing needs serviced by online resources using a Chrome OS appliance.

Even if a sizeable chunk of the world were not moving in that general direction and we could pretend for a moment that the thick client days are as strong and bountiful as ever, Linux would still struggle to get a better grip on the desktop than it has. In recent years the incumbents (MS and Apple) have been moving the goal posts towards a desktop experience that relies more and more on GPU acceleration to ease the burden on the cpu and (for mobile devices) improve battery life. We\'re still years away from having a single stable, solid interface on Linux that all the different vendors (Intel, S3, ATI, Nvidia, etc) and open source developers can write drivers for. I\'m hoping that Gallium3D will do the trick. But maybe by the time we get there everyone else will be running around with Star Trek like tablet appliances running a mix of Android, Chrome OS, iPhone OS and some flavour of Windows Mobile.

By: znmeb

znmeb — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

We\’ll just have to wait and see what ChromeOS and MeeGo look like, but I\’m guessing that the days of \”fat desktops\” are numbered. The hardware and software costs are just too high. To be honest, I\’m surprised there\’s even a market for Office 2010, given Google Docs and OpenOffice. Even in bulk buys from Lenovo or Dell, the economics just aren\’t there for Windows workstations any more.

By: au5mounty

au5mounty — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Dare I say it but I am from the old school, I believe it is the right of the individual to choose where the information that the person creates is stored. In my case right here on my own PC. I for one will not be using more than 49% of cloud based applications because for the point of security.

I operate a small computer consultancy business and the confidentiality between my clients & myself remains a paramount. I deem this a point of \'Big Brother\', don\'t get me wrong I am not a conspiracy freak however I have to draw the line somewhere.

Neondiet has another point, concerning hardware api\'s we have seen from examples of MS Windows based video drivers the sheer size of the core modules needed to drive the Direct3d & OpenGL. You expect users in regional areas to have to wait half an hour before they can even have a desktop display in the situation of booting into the cloud? I think not!

To be quite blunt I foresee the same issue arising as MS had found when they mentioned that they could see the Internet shaping to be using server based applications only, everyone went into a furore and now that Google (et al) are attempting the same thing everything is fine. What is the difference?

I will stick with my own PC with dual boot environment (being Mandriva as primary choice) where I have control of my own intellectual property.

My 2 cents worth.

By: cantthinkofanickname

cantthinkofanickname — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I do not like the idea of having a thin client and everything in the \”Cloud\”. I will end up paying piecemeal for applications that I now have on my laptop and due to costs I will have to be limited to one. Open Source will probably die in that environment. Also, I do not think the cloud will have enough speed or power for many years to deliver reasonable speeds. And at least I can do work if the internet is down as my work is local. No way will I store personal stuff online. Anyone suggest what a reasonable evolutionary path might be?

By: skyel

skyel — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I hope you have a difference between desktop and workstation. The \"cloud\" is nice only if you forget to read all the legal part of it, also if you are about to share everything with everyone. Is a path too informal and for the parts of the world where connections are as cheap as crisps.
Linux is a friendly OS, just a little ticky about who his friends are.
OSS is most of the times better than proprietary, just needs more marketing work to be popular.
From the south hemisphere, best regards.

By: shawnisalk

shawnisalk — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Your comments about the cloudy future are interesting in general, but your comment that Linux might become less relevant discounts the popularity of Linux in third-world countries, and southeast Asia, in particular (where, I am told, it is big and growing).

Since entering the Linux world, I have encountered many instances of self-pity and taking the open source vs Microsoft battle too personally. If this sort of thing underlies your article, I don\'t think it is helpful nor does it, I suspect, represent reality.

By: three_jeeps

three_jeeps — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

As I was reading your post, I had to ask the question \”What do *you* do with your PC?\” It certainty reflects a very different perspective than what I do, and for me, the \’cloud\’ is an abstract pipe dream. Or at best, a recombination of old ideas aimed at trivializing the driving force that drove the desktop/workstation development: my tools that run in a timely manner. I say that, even though I do some research work in a related area. The \’cloud\’ existed long before the current version got so much \’ink.\’ One cobbled together a lot of punch cards, threw them into the opening of the cloud (aka, the \’job window\’) and after a few hours of flashing lights behind the glass encased walls, after the program ran locally and perhaps talked to the mother ship at the main campus, the output appeared in a rolled up listing attached to the deck of cards. Certainty seemed like a cloud to me. I know this is the pedestrian viewpoint, but the crux of \’cloud computing\’ is having applications scattered about in the computing ether and either attaching to those services or having some instantiation locally for the length of the task.
I use my PC for real work – constructing sophisticated control algorithms and simulating the devices they control, doing circuit design and evaluation, reading research papers, and performing the usual administrivia (reports, presentations, email, calendar, etc.)
I could never envision doing any of this in a cloud, so for me this entire concept is so abstract and for the most part, useless to me, I can\’t understand why it continues to live. Perhaps because the most exciting thing the current generation perceives and does with computers is facebook, itunes, and googleing. From my perspective, people wanted to do things on *their* machines, create things on *their* machines, and be the master of *their* machines, thereby controlling ones destiny. Perhaps that is why Linux will not become irrelevant, until real productivity becomes irrelevant…at which point we become part of the mindless minions gathering firewood for some higher power.

By: hibrium

hibrium — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

All this dreams (the us citizens loves it since James Dean) come true until the next botnet (they\’re more efficent and have some years ahead) implode the cloud and open yours secrets to the WEB citizens … I think this is a real thing now, I guess.And the secure way is charged (more and more). Off-line … rain and others natural disarters keep away yours data, photos, jobs …. and you stay alone in island … buy a portable radio too … and some gallons of water … RIP

By: bobt

bobt — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I think three_jeeps nailed it pretty good. The cloud sounds like that room where they used to keep the 360. Why would I want to give control of my computing resources back to the priests of the cloud??!!

By: hhemken

hhemken — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I, too, concur with three_jeeps. Only a fool would store critical information out in some no man\'s land that can disappear or be compromised in an instant. Anybody who does work that entails processes that run for hours to create images, video, music, number crunching, simulations, etc. looks at the notion of the cloud with a mix of perplexity and terror. It is nonsensical, and little more than an iterative rehashing of a business model that still has not caught on save for casual users.

If all you do on your computer is visit Facebook, listen to music, watch videos, send and receive email, and other such things, then sure, the cloud is for you. If you use it to create digital assets or perform lengthy data-crunching and intellectual property creation, it is just a sappy marketing ploy. Frankly, if I never hear another word of Cloud BS again, I won\'t miss it.

By: csmart

csmart — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I didn\'t mention Chrome OS for fear of being labelled a Google lover or something - plus I knew that you, our awesome readers, would bring this up in the comments ;-)

Yes, I too don\'t trust Google enough to hand my entire life over to them however, the idea of putting all your stuff on \"the cloud\" doesn\'t mean it has to be under the control of a company such as they.

Indeed, you could run your own LOCAL \"cloud\" and connect your machine to that - when you\'re away, you connect to your home machine over your internet connection.

What I\'m hoping to see is a freedom driven cloud service whereby all your stuff is under your control. A market of free (libre) applications which you can plug into your own instance.

@three_jeeps, yes, that\'s why I said desktops won\'t go away any time soon. I also mention that \"the cloud\" is nothing new.. Sure, right now you can\'t see yourself using \"the cloud\" for *anything* (really??), but who knows what will happen in 20 years time? You could use far more computing power on \"the cloud\" than you could on your own machine.

I\'m not sold on \"the cloud\" myself, but I\'ve already been using it for years with Internet banking, email, etc.. I never could have imagined myself doing that 20 years ago.

-c

By: ptang

ptang — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I personally think we will see a gradual shift, with the open-source movement offering more server side \'cloud\' applications, which interested users will run either locally on their own servers, or on rented dedicated servers/virtual hosts.

I do not see this as the death of the Linux desktop, nor even its becoming irrelevant. If anything, it is the more mainstream desktop OSes who would be likely to lose some of their market, as more and more casual PC users pick up lightweight clients (i.e. running Google\'s ChromeOS, etc.).

By: cram2linuxmag

cram2linuxmag — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I think those changes could happen but currently in countries like Venezuela, the desktop OS will be important for a while.

By: alanmaher1kiwi

alanmaher1kiwi — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I live in a rural community, and (thankfully) being near to the exchange, I am blessed with a quite reasonable DSl connection.
Most of the people that I work with are still living with dialup hell.
And the \"cloud\" does not mean a thing to them.
Youtube is wishful thinking etc.
They are \"connected\", but not as we would \"know it\".
Spare a thought for these people, because they not only exist,
they are quite numerous.

Alan
NZ

By: wytcld

wytcld — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Here\'s why this may be partly wrong: when we\'ve all got 100meg or even gigabyte pipes, we\'ll be moving much fatter stuff through them. And we - or the teenagers of that time - will be wanting to originate much of that stuff. Working with huge blobs of information will always, in general, be faster on a local workstation than over the pipe. The transmission distance and bandwidth will always be better over a local bus.

Now, it might be that after putting together the framework of what you want to compose, you send it out to a render farm elsewhere to be completed overnight. But the framework assembly itself you\'ll still want to do locally, because it will be quicker, more responsive, because you\'ll be working with quantities of bytes that exceed the fatness of your pipe, and that benefit from not having the latency of hundreds of miles of transmission.

However, when you\'re on the road, you\'ll still want remote access to your workstation. And you might even migrate a snapshot of it to someplace nearer in the cloud, if your netbooky thing doesn\'t have the guts for it. Still, the primary user workstation will be with us for a million years. It will always have local capacities that exceed the pipes.

By: cosmotopper

cosmotopper — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kudos for writing this article. You may be right, open-source desktops may become obsolete, but if so, it will be a tragedy for the global network and the inalienable rights of billions of human beings. (IMHO) We have allowed three decades to slide by during which the most pernicious monopoly in modern history has attempted to consolidate it\'s hegemony over desktop computing. Thanks to the remarkable success of the open-source business model, and to the Web, Microsoft has failed in that attempt (so far, at least).

Unfortunately, there are numerous other powerful forces moving aggressively to re-establish their ability to impose a variety of corrupt authorities, all of which are threatened by open-source software, open-access to bandwidth, and most of all by a desktop-centric data storage model. So-called \'Cloud Computing\' is one of the tools by which they hope to accomplish that.

There\'s nothing intrinsically wrong with thin-client systems development, the problem lies in the assumption that the provider of thin-client application services must (or is entitled to) take a proprietary interest in the physical database infrastructure it requires, and particularly in the common user identification layer of that database.

I would suggest that while Microsoft remains the most obvious member of the Corporatocracy intent upon asphyxiating open-access and uses of the global computer network, Apple, Google, Adobe, Symantec, Comcast, Sprint, and AT&T are all in the hunt (just to mention the most obvious examples). Counting heavily on their success (domestically): organized labor, the entire defense industry, the public employees industries (including educational institutions at every level), Too Big To Fail, Inc. (Wall Street), every US government agency, Congress, and the Executive branch. Add to that the governments of every industrialized nation on the planet, and the global banking system (for which most national governments are merely surrogates in any case), and you have an idea what \'we\' are up against.

Who is \'we\'? It\'s those of us who recognize the necessity for Darwinian collaboration, open data pathways, protecting the natural evolution of standards, and the exclusion of proprietary IP legal intrusions into the abstract regions of the global network. Crucial to our success has been, and will continue to be the neutrality of companies like Intel, AMD, and Cisco in pursuit of faster processing, non-proprietary packet exchange technologies, and open hardware standards in virtual processing.

What is at risk? The future of the global computer network as either the guarantor of the Sovereign Rights of Man: our \"unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness\", or as the instrument of an Orwellian future, in which billions of human beings are suffocated by the corrupt authorities of a privileged few.

Our chance of success? At this point I\'d rate it a tossup.

By: zman58

zman58 — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Linux desktop is not going away anytime in the foreseeable future. The cloud will never replace the need for a productive desktop--how could it. Hardware continues to become cheaper and desktop software continues to provide ever more to the user. With FOSS, you can create and deploy solutions to your hearts content. The ability to distribute and install fast and effective solutions in a blink is the key--FOSS provides this.
The cloud merely provides more options into the mix.
Doing business on the cloud requires giving up quite a bit of control and allowing you or your business to be restricted to only what another chooses to provide. Do you think metered use is right for you? Do you want to pay to use something each and every time you use it? Do you want to own the data you create or have someone else owning or controlling it?
I see no reason that the Linux desktop will fade away. What I continue to experience is that it will continue to provide even more productive systems when used along with the specific and restricted services we typically associate with the \"cloud\". I am leveraging the use of LAN based cloud services in my home now with a home server. I can do that in a very cost effective way because I use FOSS. The cloud can work in everyone\'s favor, not just for services provided from afar.

By: golding

golding — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The main reason I see for the Linux Desktop not gaining traction is when important (to me) sites keep changing their design so that the common Linux browsers don\'t work properly.

Case in point, until the 17th of March, about a week ago, I was a happy user of the Australian Govenments CentreLink Online Services. It worked very well and I had no problems doing my business with them entirely online. On that date the service changed its website design and now I cannot logon.

I borrowed my fathers netbook with MS XP and the site worked perfectly, however, on my machines, both laptops and the desktops, it fails completely. I tried to contact them regarding this and I received the usual response, \"It isn\'t Windows, we do not support Linux\".

The bit that really gets me is this is the first time I have actually run into a problem that stopped me cold on Linux in the entire time I have been using it, around 12 years.

Chris, you work, and play, in Canberra, want to go around and kick some one up the arse for me?

By: golding

golding — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Oops, just checked when I started using Linux, was when Win95 started beta testing and I was handed a copy of RedHat 3.x so is actually 16 years, and have been exclusively Linux for 14yrs, I didn\’t like the way \’95 locked down the user … eep!