Is It Finally the Year of 'Linux on the Desktop' ?

'"2019 is truly, finally shaping up to be the year of Linux on the
desktop," writes PC World's senior editor, adding "Laptops, too!"

But most people won't know it. That's because the bones of the
open-source operating system kernel will soon be baked into Windows 10
and Chrome OS, as Microsoft and Google revealed at their respective
developer conferences this week... Between lurking in Windows 10 and
Chrome OS, and the tiny portion of actual Linux distro installs,
pretty much any PC you pick up will run a Linux kernel and Linux
software. Macs won't, but it's based on a Unix-like BSD system that
already runs many Linux apps with relative ease (hence Apple's
popularity with developers).

You have to wonder where that leaves proper Linux distributions like
Ubuntu and Linux Mint, though. They already suffer from a minuscule
user share, and developers may shift toward Windows and Chrome if the
Linux kernels in those operating systems get the same job done. Could
this fruit wind up poisonous over the long term? We'll have to see.
That said, Linux is healthier than ever. The major distros are far
more polished than they used to be, with far fewer hardware woes than
installs of yesteryear. You can even get your game on relatively well
thanks to Valve's Proton technology, which gets many (but not all)
Steam games working on Linux systems. And hey, Linux is free.

Normal users may never be aware of it, but 2019 may finally be the
year of Linux on the desktop -- just not Linux operating systems on
the desktop. '

-- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/05/13/0336224

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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