Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think Linux will ever take the desktop, per se. The only opportunity is to leapfrog over the whole paradigm. Android is obviously that. And the upcoming transition to conversational UI (not just voice but stuff like news feeds, Snapchat, etc) and also VR will I think be the end of the desktop paradigm. I realize this is often overstated blah blah blah. But both mobile and VR are still kind of operating in a p…
> I think be the end of the desktop paradigm. Think about how today's businesses generally use their employees: let's not beat about the bush: they're using Microsoft Office for producing documents and spreadsheets, doing research with Chrome, and (if applicable) creating business value using either line-of-business software ("Bob's Car Repair shop database in MS Access") or specialised content-creation software (Pho…
Well, the command line is already more powerful, if less accessible. Piping streams together, writing code. These are very powerful things that would give you superworkers if your staff could do them. People stopped developing command line UIs because there was a gold rush on WIMP, so command line usability stopped getting funded. It's also just proven a hard nut to crack. People in academia have been trying and failing a more usable command line for a long time. Seems like just a matter of time to me though. It's only been 20 years.
Mobile is interesting, not because it is particularly better at anything, but just the opposite: there's no space on the screen, so it forces designers to reconsider more stream-based UIs. I.e., return to the command line paradigm and pick up where we left off in the 80s. WIMP and big screens give designers a bunch of idioms to rely on, and lots of space to fill up and they get lazy.
VR doesn't inherently do a whole lot more than a rectangular screen in terms of productivity. I think most VR UIs will be things you could make a rough approximation of on a desktop screen, minus immersion. But it's a playground in which to explore interaction ideas that will become the fundamentals of AR....
AR is where there is a new idea, which is that you can leave things lying around in space. A desktop is a window, and a relatively small one at that. You have to keep tidying it up. You waste a lot of time context shifting. Most workplaces are much larger than the few square feet a desktop provides. The killer feature of AR is basically just "spread out".
So, combine those three things... stream-based UI, with programming features (iteration, DSLs, pluggable objects), and then spread that out into space and I think you get something that will make desktops seem quaint.
Lots of human-computer interaction PhD dissertations between here and there though.