[lugm.org] What killed the Linux desktop

[bbnadim]

Hello,

At home I have Mint (Maya 13) on my PC + my 5yr old son 
has ZenWalk on an old P4 laptop (he loves Linux rather 
than Windows - according to him, Windows is for girls, 
i.e. his mama)

At work I have CenOS6 - I need a GUI to run NetBeans, etc 
+ the machine also acts as my local web server and also 
it's easy for me to create / destroy OpenVZ containers for 
testing (MyISAM v/s InnoDB for example, among many other 
tests).

On Windows, it's a pain in the ass to install all the 
tools needed for professional web development - a simple 
WAMP is not enough. A Mac is not cheap. So for a 
professional web developer (and a poor one like me), Linux 
Desktop is still alive...

I have everything I need on my Linux boxes (Mint & 
CentOS):
- Accessories : Calculator, Character Map, Tomboy Notes, 
Wammu, ...
- Games: ...
- Graphics : GIMP, InkSpace, Simple Scan, ...
- Internet: All browsers, Thunderbird, 
Deluge/Transmission, KGet, Dropbox, Teamviewer, Skype, 
Pidgin, XChat, FileZilla
- Office: OpenOffice / LibreOffice
- Programming: Netbeans / Zend Studio, SmartGit, SmartSVN, 
MySQLWorkBench, ...
- Multimedia: Brasero / K3b, VLC player, DeVeDe, Istanbul, 
...
- Others: Picassa (on WinE), PDF-Shuffler, xCHM, ...
- Extras: VirtualBox, ...

Why do I need an OS other than Linux, especially not free 
/ cheap ? I believe vendors should promote Linux. They are 
the key people. Perhaps they prefer Windows because they 
can't provide Linux support ? Do they get a commission for 
installing Windows OS on each PC they are selling ? Also I 
feel the public is not "affected" when their Windows stop 
working, etc. - here, they can get it re-installed for 
Rs1000 !

Recently a firm in Grand Bay migrated from Windows to 
Linux simply because they can't afford to buy new 
equipment + the old ones were getting slow. Installing 
Linux on old laptops / PCs was the solution for them - 
they needed an Office suite to prepare reports, a browser 
to surf internet, plus an email client to send and receive 
emails.

BTW, Linux Desktop is not dead. In fact it is growing - in 
smartphones. And it's called Android (as Avinash said). 
And I quote someone's post in a forum somewhere; i can 
recall it like "the naysayers have been claiming the death 
of Desktop Linux every year, and every year they've been 
wrong"

Nadim