The Year of Linux on Everything but the Desktop
Don&#x27;t really agree with the claims in the article. I myself and dozen of my friends and colleagues have been trying to get linux as a desktop OS all the way back when the Tango &#x2F; Gnome aesthetics emerged as a counter to the glossy 3d aesthetics of XP and OSX.<p>The thing is... It just didn&#x27;t work. There wasn&#x27;t any available software for it. The open-source alternatives such as OpenOffice, Inkscape and Gimp were lacking to put it mildly. Games were out of the question. But that isn&#x27;t the worst part.<p>The desktop itself, and by extension the OS as a desktop OS didn&#x27;t work.
Getting hardware video acceleration to work was almost impossible. Time to edit xorg.conf again and run the glsl demo. Maybe it won&#x27;t crash the xserver this time.
You want your microphone to work? Time to download and compile some obscure ALSA forks.
UTF-8? Here, have some EN-US whether you like it or not. God help you if you have a USB device which isn&#x27;t a mouse or a keyboard.
And then there were the crashes. I still remember typing `startx` regularly as the GUI would crash all the time.<p>I really want linux to succeed as a desktop OS, but I don&#x27;t see that happening ever.