What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

I loved reading this comment. Thank you for this long quote which contains few familiar thoughts. I've shared similar points during one of my presentations few years back.

Yet years passed and we in FLOSS world seem to be stuck in the same place. We're creating more and more overbloated-I-do-it-all-better software than to improve with small drop in solutions. We can see that the only integration efforts are done by replacement of small good tools with crappy rewrite inclusions. Not compilation and redistribution of original small but good software following good old UNIX pipeline philosophy.

Sure, the are projects like suckless keeping up the good work but there is no connection with more mainstream solutions like Ubuntu or KDE. Which instead of serving with experience about UX and stuff do their own rewrites according to their own APIs.

Writing independent GUI applications becomes more and more of a chore. So many different ways of doing simple things to support. Like multimedia keys or even a tray icon. Try to do it for multiple operating ststems: you do macOS, Windows and when it comes to Linux: Unity, Gnome, KDE and there is I think still at least standard X-window way of doing things for others which should work quite fine for other UNIX based open operating systems.

How many Linux distros and their many different GUI/UI variations have been listed here???

No wonder the Linux desktop was dead upon arrival. Too many flavors of developers to satisfy. But it wasn't about developers; it was about end users who just wanted something simple. No matter the changes that Windows has made, from 95 to 10, for end users, the changes caused relatively minor disruption, especially with everything moving to the web. Switch to Linux? Which one? Which packages to install and why? Which GUI to use? etc, etc, etc... Linux was the beginning of developers creating something for themselves to control and expecting the rest of the world to just simply fall in love.

I say all that because I genuinely like Linux and it's purpose, but not for desktop purposes. Maybe mobile???

What killed the Linux desktop? Not being preinstalled. For a bit of context from PC history, this is also what killed the GEM desktop, killed the OS/2 desktop, and damn near killed the Windows desktop until Microsoft put pressure on vendors to make a 386SX with VGA the entry-level option and ship Windows 3.0 with every unit.

Preinstalls are an OS's golden ticket to adoption.

Yes...that's the downside of LTS. You can't get the new features because they may break the old ones.

If by "LTS" you simply mean "more backwards compatible" well I agree and pray for the day.

These days you can get computers with Linux preinstalled. What you can't get is a computer that has both Windows and Linux preinstalled in some kind of dual boot or VM setup. That you must still do yourself. You can get the choice to preinstall Windows, or preinstall Linux; never both.