Will The Linux Desktop Soon Be Irrelevant?
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
via: Christopher Smart – www.linux-mag.com
Meet my needs
The popularity of services from the likes of Google and Facebook shows that users don’t care about their own privacy (perhaps they don’t yet know its value). So that’s really a non-issue. As an example, people use web based email systems like Gmail because they work well. You can access it from any computer with a web browser (if browser != IE6), your work machine, your home machine, a laptop and even your mobile phone.
If companies like Google can do the same for a suite of what are traditionally desktop applications, what’s to stop people from using them? And once they use them the desktop they use becomes irrelevant, but the right environment becomes important. You could access these services on a full blown desktop machine with Windows, Mac or Linux. Or you could get the same experience on a mobile phone or 10? hand-held. As users realise they have less and less need for a desktop, they’ll start buying other things – like a Linux based iPad-like device. It won’t matter, because it will be an appliance (and let’s face it, Linux as an appliance reigns supreme). One that just works, and gets them where they want to go, fast.
Just take a look at what to expect from HTML5 and the sorts of things that are possible. Also check out what you can already do with Javascript. Who knows what the world will look like in ten or twenty years!
So really, the main piece of the puzzle is a massive online market of web based applications. A central account with a provider where users can subscribe or buy access to a photo editing program, online music player, whatever else you would currently use a desktop for. No doubt it’s coming.. Take a look at the amazing amount of products Zoho offers for free. Even traditional programs like Quicken are moving online (and you can even something for free), so there’s no need to get it running under Wine.
Games are the obvious exception to the rule where desktop is likely to remain king, but moving these online will be possible one day. Even if not, once everyone has everything online, perhaps we’ll also then see the death of the gaming PC and where gaming means console. Even so, we’re not talking here about killing the desktop, merely transforming it. A graphical shell environment with basic functionality such as mounting removable media, sound, video and printing (although who doesn’t “print” to PDF these days?). There’s nothing to say that it can’t also play games.
The future?
The idea of a “desktop” is old and fast becoming irrelevant. At least, what we think of a desktop as – a thick client that does all the heavy lifting. That’s still the current trend and it’s not going to change any time soon. Users today still want to purchase a machine with something familiar. In the not-to-distant future however, when the only ones buying computers are the Web 2.0 generation (yes, I made that up), could the “desktop” well be replaced by a shell operating system, a few interfaces and a browser? Quite possibly. Then, whether you’re running a cut-down version of Linux underneath, or indeed even Windows or OS X, won’t matter any more.
We’re not there yet, primarily because the complete array of services required to replace a desktop haven’t yet been developed. That’s changing. HTML5 will someday be ratified, some amazing stuff can already be done with Javascript (and browsers don’t crawl to a halt processing it), and toolkits like that from Google help to make the web an easy place to centralise and deploy applications. Don’t be surprised that if by the time Linux even manages majority market share on the desktop, it simply no longer matters……
