Fragmentation has put paid to the dream of Linux ever being bigger than Windows
Comment Recently, The Register’s Liam Proven wrote tongue in cheek about the most annoying desktop Linux distros. He inspired me to do another take. Proven pointed out that Distrowatch currently lists 270 – count ’em – Linux distros. Of course, no one can look at all of those. But, having covered the Linux desktop since the big interface debate was between Bash and zsh rather than GNOME vs KDE, and being the editor-in-chief of a now-departed publication called Linux Desktop, I think I’ve used more of them than anyone else who also has a life beyond the PC. In short, I love the Linux desktop. Many Linux desktop distros are great. I’ve been a big Linux Mint fan for years now. I’m also fond, in no particular order, of Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and MX Linux. But you know what? That’s a problem right there. We have many excellent Linux desktop distros, which means none of them can gain enough market share to make any real dent in the overall market. It’s been like that since people first started talking about Linux stomping on Windows on the desktop. But dream as we might of a true year of the Linux desktop, it won’t happen. As Forrester senior analyst Andrew Hewitt recently pointed out: « Overall, just 1 percent of employees report usage of Linux on their primary laptop used for work. That’s compared to 60 percent that still use Windows. It is very unlikely that Linux will overtake Windows as the main operating system.
