

Intel: The year of the Linux desktop is here - tanglesome
http://www.zdnet.com/intel-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop-is-here-7000020849/

======
Permit
Linux has certainly had a number of years over the years.

2006
[http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1836228,00.asp](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1836228,00.asp)

2008
[http://www.maximumpc.com/article/2008_year_of_the_linux_desk...](http://www.maximumpc.com/article/2008_year_of_the_linux_desktop)

2009 [http://www.fastcompany.com/1116502/2009-year-linux-
revolutio...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1116502/2009-year-linux-revolution)

2010 [http://xerosphere.net/is-2010-the-year-for-linux-on-the-
desk...](http://xerosphere.net/is-2010-the-year-for-linux-on-the-desktop)

2012 [http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133669-could-this-be-
the-y...](http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133669-could-this-be-the-year-of-
the-linux-desktop)

~~~
jamesaguilar
Indeed. The year where one could make do with the Linux desktop came and went
not long after Ubuntu was first released. I am confident that I could give one
to my parents and they could eventually learn to function with it. The
question is, when will the year come where it is the easiest and most
attractive option? I'm a little bearish about that being soon.

~~~
Silhouette
_The question is, when will the year come where [Linux on the desktop] is the
easiest and most attractive option? I 'm a little bearish about that being
soon._

I used to be, but I'm coming round to the view that with all of the big
commercial players, now including Microsoft, pushing heavily towards services
and "the cloud", the decay of their traditional desktop offerings will create
an opportunity for a Linux-based (or other OSS) platform to become
_relatively_ attractive a lot sooner.

This is partly about the operating system itself, but it's just as much about
the applications. Building a direct competitor to MS Office is something few
sane people would consider attempting, given market conditions and the effort
required. Implementing a native desktop competitor to a typical on-line
"office suite" today is something a small team of smart people could do,
reaching functional parity within months, and there is nothing close to a
dominant incumbent in the market yet, nor is the user experience for these web
applications anywhere near as polished.

In short, as they lower the barrier to entry and open up the market, they make
it easier for Linux-based applications to catch up. They also make it more
attractive for someone to invest significant resources to polish up those
applications as a commercial venture.

~~~
Pwnguinz
With the rest of the world moving on, if you have a relatively attractive
solution to an obsolete problem, what's the point?

~~~
Silhouette
I don't think the rest of the world _is_ moving on, at least not for long.
Full cloud has too many fundamental drawbacks to become a universal solution.
It's the buzzword of the moment, but it's taken a very long time to get there
by tech industry standards, and it's still underwhelming even today.

With execs at the big publicly held software firms looking to the next
quarterly financial call, they're all going with the hype anyway. That creates
an opportunity for a disruptive movement that shifts the market instead of
pandering to it. My guess would be that private clouds, software-defined
networking and a bunch of tools that better support things like remote working
and BYOD will steadily push full external cloud solutions out of most large
corporations, and smaller scale tools based on the same basic ideas will
emerge to support SMEs.

And that brings me to my big question: What is the only operating system in
the world that is already demonstrably a credible platform for all of server,
desktop and mobile computing?

------
mwcampbell
What alternate reality are these guys living in? When my mom, an accountant,
buys her next computer, it will almost certainly run Windows, because the
accounting software she uses targets that OS. The same will be true for many
other categories of software for a long time.

~~~
hnriot
it's the same waffle we've been hearing for years. I am running Ubuntu 13.10,
but leaving OSX aside, there's no way in hell Linux is going to make a dent in
the desktop market. It wont be linx, it will be some future OS, possible
Android that replaces Windows. I know Android is linux underneath, but in much
the same way OSX is BSD underneath - to the point that to the user, it doesn't
matter much.

~~~
shawnz
> in much the same way OSX is BSD underneath

The difference is that Linux isn't, and doesn't claim to be a whole system.
For example, Android isn't Ubuntu, but Android and Ubuntu are equally Linux.

EDIT: I am not trying to make the "Linux is just a kernel" point here. Android
is by no means a "traditional" distribution of Linux, but I just don't see why
that makes it "not Linux". Busybox is available for it (Android is designed
for embedded systems, after all) so what's the difference?

~~~
mercurial
Yeah, "Linux is a kernel" and all that. Except, for many of us, Linux is also
an ecosystem, and the Android ecosystem is definitely not that ecosystem.

------
mratzloff
This is just PR for their Chromebook partnership.

Intel pushing Linux has nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with the
fact that Intel long ago decided to focus on speed over energy efficiency and
were caught with their pants down when the future of computing turned out to
be low-power SOCs (systems-on-a-chip).

With both Microsoft and Sony choosing AMD x86 over Intel for the next
generation of video game consoles and Microsoft and Apple clearly moving to
ARM for all their digital appliances, what does Intel have left?

------
kyberias
Let's discuss how Linux is only a kernel. It'll be wonderful.

------
KeepTalking
The next best story for linux has been enterprise linux. A stable kernel,
easily configurable(and free)toolset and a growing engineering pool has driven
this market. In terms of dollar value this market is nearly (if not the same)
as large as the handheld/portable linux market that android has conquered.

------
radmuzom
And yet, in 2013, I had to search in Google for hours, read a lot of
documentation and tweak a lot of settings in order to 1\. get AMD / Intel
switchable graphics working in Ubuntu 2\. stop the CPU fan from making too
much noise!!

Windows 8 got both this right even without me thinking about it.

(Machine: Inspiron 15R Special Edition)

------
sliverstorm
The increasing market share of Linux in the tablet, smartphone, and cloud
(server) business signals the year of Linux on the _desktop_? Well, I've had
my laugh for the day.

~~~
gngeal
You never laid your Android tablet on your desk? :)

------
api
This wolf's been cried about many times, but I do think there is a hole in the
market right now: Right now Microsoft is the only option for affordable really
high-end desktop/laptop computers.

Contrary to the current hype, mobile is _not_ going to replace the
desktop/laptop except at the low end. If you want to do anything compute-
intensive you need a "real computer."

You have Apple of course, but Apple gets unreasonably expensive for many
applications. The Mac Pro is not cost-effective for power users. Their laptops
are a tad better but not great.

~~~
vidarh
> This wolf's been cried about many times, but I do think there is a hole in
> the market right now: Right now Microsoft is the only option for affordable
> really high-end desktop/laptop computers.

Regardless what I think about that claim: That market segment is miniscule.
One of the reasons Apple has done so well is that Apple has managed to capture
the relatively price-insensitive part of that market segment, and as a result
their average revenue per unit is north of $1000.

The average price per unit for PC's on the other hand has been steadily
declining to the ~$500 level.

> Contrary to the current hype, mobile is not going to replace the
> desktop/laptop except at the low end.

So 95%+ of the market, in other words. The PC vendors have been in crisis for
years as PC's got "fast enough" that consumers started prioritising low price
rather than maximizing performance within their budget.

> If you want to do anything compute-intensive you need a "real computer."

Most users don't do anything more compute-intensive than Facebook and Youtube
on their PCs.

------
dgregd
Microsoft thinks that mobile is their main enemy.

Sure, tablets will replace PCs in many places. However that war they cannot
win. In meantime core PC users are switching to Linux. They can do this
because so many great apps live inside browsers now.

------
programminggeek
Wow, how far has Microsoft screwed up their decades long partnership with
Intel that Intel would throw public support behind the Linux desktop is pretty
stunning. It doesn't matter because Windows will obviously outsell on
desktop/laptop PC's from major vendors like HP and Dell, but still. Microsoft
has really fallen these last few years.

~~~
pavlov
Intel has been supporting Linux for a long time. They've even had their own
Linux distributions and UI framework development since at least Moblin, which
came out back when netbooks were all the rage - around 2008?

If anything, Intel seems to have had remarkably little success considering the
amount of effort they've put into Linux. Moblin was merged with Nokia's mobile
Linux Maemo to create Meego, and that floated in the market like a rock tied
to a solid block of concrete.

Since then, Intel has been doing Tizen with Samsung. It's a closed-development
mystery OS that seems to be meant for everything, with every kind of UI, but
still isn't shipping anywhere with any kind of UI anytime soon.

~~~
kyrra
Even beyond using linux as a desktop OS, Intel has had an internal Linux
distro for a much longer time (if I remember right, they were still stuck on
Linux 2.4.x back in 2007, as re-writing a lot of their custom drivers and
kernel changes would was taking them a long time to move up to 2.6.x). A lot
of their new CPU testing (for development and QA) is done with Linux. It just
gave them the control they needed to test new CPUs, chipsets, and other
components.

------
mratzloff
By the way, who is the market for the Chromebook Pixel?

------
peterwwillis
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Linux#Year_of_Desktop_L...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Linux#Year_of_Desktop_Linux)

------
dsego
Nope.

------
jmcintyre
>"has seen Chromebooks race to a quarter of all computer sales and one fifth
of all new PC school deployments."

Are there any hard numbers on Chromebook sales apart from nebuluous things
like "being on top of Amazon" etc.?

I find it really hard to believe that quarter of all computer sales are
Chromebooks. Does anyone have a source? One would expect Google to announce
real shipments if they were that good.

Web usage metrics from a few months ago showed that Chromebooks are used even
less than Windows RT.

[http://www.zdnet.com/first-real-world-usage-figures-
suggest-...](http://www.zdnet.com/first-real-world-usage-figures-suggest-
chromebooks-are-struggling-7000014102/)

Also, I find it strange that SJVN likes to promote Chromebooks, which are even
less "Free" and open compared to Windows machines and force the user to upload
everything to Google's cloud.

[http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/why-
th...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/why-the-nsa-
loves-googles-chromebook/)

One of the SJVN's articles reads like PR straight from CDW and Google.

[http://www.zdnet.com/cdw-to-offer-enterprise-chromebook-
supp...](http://www.zdnet.com/cdw-to-offer-enterprise-chromebook-
support-7000010875/)

Not sure why that is posted in the "Linux and Open Source" ZDNet blog when it
is all about taking even more control away from the user.

>Outside of the community, most people don't see Linux's impact. Linux is
usually invisible. When you go to any large Web site--Google, Facebook,
Twitter--you're using Linux."

>It's not just that even the most die-hard Windows users are invisibly using
Linux every day

Does that mean that programmers who claim to have gotten rid of
Microsoft/Windows products are really using Windows without knowing it
whenever they click on a Stack Overflow link? :)

~~~
phaemon
That's an interesting reply, with links to several different articles to back
your point. Also, an interesting comment history.

Do you, or a company you're employed with, have a financial relationship with
Microsoft? A simple "Yes" or "No" will do, thanks. I'm very trusting and will
believe you.

~~~
jmcintyre
No, and never did. I am actually working on NetBeans/PHP/Drupal(gah!) on the
other monitor, though I am primarily a C# guy.

And even I did work for MS, how does that invalidate any of my points? If I
worked for Microsoft, does that suddenly mean it's okay for ZDNet to claim 25%
of all computers being sold are Chromebooks? Interesting that no one is
questioning SJVN's ulterior motives, if any! I do believe it's just to garner
clicks though, Ed Bott will probably reply with an article debunking this one
and ZDNet and its "journalists" will laugh all the way to the bank.

~~~
phaemon
"No-one"? I don't represent "the whole planet other than jmcintyre", so don't
worry about it.

I've found that Microsoft shills won't answer that question directly, which is
why I honestly believe you. I wanted to ask you: why is it that you spend time
defending a multi-billion dollar corporation, for free, when they actually pay
people to do this?

I can understand volunteering time to a community effort like Linux, but I
don't understand why you'd exert the same effort for a company that pays
people to do the exact same job?

Can you explain your motivations to me?

~~~
jmcintyre
It's something like being a devil's advocate, plus being a fan. Spreading
mistruths actually hurts things. When people say things like "Windows 8 won't
boot without secure boot enabled", it's no longer opinion(like "MS sucks and
is dying") but an objective fact that can be checked.

It's not effort expended per se, since it's more like debating merits of phone
OSes at the water cooler rather than work. If they're paying people to do it,
then they're doing quite a shitty job. I don't feel the need to "defend" other
companies, because companies like Apple and Google already have plenty of fans
who point out inaccuracies in stories or comments even before I even get a
chance to comment.

Imagine an article which erroneously claims Windows Phone has "25% of the
phone market" and that "Android is declining". Now imagine the HN comments on
it and how karma might be distributed on those comments. Do you really think
the equivalent to the following comment which is currently on top would still
be on top?

programminggeek> "Microsoft has really fallen these last few years."

Or would it be a comment accusing the author of being a "Microsoft shill" ?

The moderation on here is pretty brutal even when pointing out objective
facts, I have seen people get hellbanned by getting downvoted for making
comments that people don't want others to see, but are true.

~~~
phaemon
Ok, that makes sense when it's factual matters. But I have seen people whose
entire comments history is comprised of defending a corp, whether that be MS,
Apple, Google, or other. And I mean literally all their comments: no jokes, no
random asides. Everything is supporting "their" company. I guess they must see
it like it's a football team they support.

And there is no "if" on whether MS are doing it (employing paid shills). It's
a fact that they are. They may well be doing a shitty job, but they're hired
all the same. Of course MS are not the only ones; other companies do exactly
the same thing. That's pretty much what "Social Media Consultants" are.

Thanks for the reply!

------
giardini
Sorry, Intel. The year of the Linux desktop will never arrive until I can
watch Youtube videos with the goddam Flash player (or anything else) in Linux.

Signed,

\- No-flash Giardini who cannot watch Youtube videos on his Linux box.

Sorry, for an Internet user, life w/o Youtube is like being a blind man with a
white cane.

~~~
computer
Flash works just fine on Linux. Even out of the box, on many distributions.

~~~
giardini
And those would be?

