Funny how he made it basically for his desktop computer.
33 years later, and Linux is dominating in every part of the OS world except … the desktop.
(I’m paraphrasing his quote – he said something like this years ago, can’t find it, though.)
(Edit: to be more fair with quotes, it might be the case that I “hallucinated” the quote. he might not have said that, or he might have just said part of it and other part would be someone else’s comment. This cio.com article is probably a better source on his position )
You might be thinking of this:
https://youtu.be/ZPUk1yNVeEI?feature=shared
Where he mentioned that the desktop is unique in that it has to support thousands of different devices for all kinds of people, and that most people don’t really care what their computer is running as long as it works.
Well, I was thinking of a quote that was much more similar to what I wrote (and it’s not in the video you linked).
I had such a trouble finding it that I’m starting to feel like it might be one of those “quotes” where the credited author never really said that, but I haven’t completely given up :D
Here’s one closer to what I paraphrased (but not quite it)–quoting an article from cio.com
While Linux pretty much dominates almost every walk of our lives, even on the consumer devices like smartphones and smart TVs, it has not had the same success on the desktop. What does Torvalds think about it? Is Linux a failure on the desktop? Not really. “The desktop hasn’t really taken over the world like Linux has in many other areas, but just looking at my own use, my desktop looks so much better than I ever could have imagined. Despite the fact that I’m known for sometimes not being very polite to some of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled. That’s why, to me, it’s not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it’s a really hard area to enter. I’m still working on it. It’s been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I’ll wear them down.”
I would argue that it does dominate the desktop now as well, just not by usage numbers.
If I was told I had to use a windows desktop these days at home I think I’d start investing in a very large book collection.
Without a distro to rally behind I’m personally somewhat skeptical. Ubuntu was the best shot we had but since switching everything over to SNAPs it’s on the slow side. With the number of Windows ads and early end of support for Windows 10 there’s a real opportunity for desktop Linux, but until there’s a well supported distro that genuinely doesn’t require using the terminal I can’t see there being mass adoption.
My grandmother ran Linux for a couple decades until her death at 101 years old. My 80+ year old mom has been running Linux for at least 2 decades. Yes, I’m tech support, but I don’t really have to do anything. It just works.
Any distro that ships KDE/Plasma as its default desktop should do the trick. I’m not personally using it right now but I hear OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is kicking a lot of rear end lately.
It’s not about the distro. Most distros out right now are pretty good. What you need is hardware that lots of people want to buy with Linux installed on it as the default choice. Normal people don’t want to install any OS, be it Linux, Windows, MacOS or BSD. Whatever comes by default, it’s good.
I’m pretty sure that right now the most popular Linux distros are ChromeOS and SteamOS. I wonder why
