Ten Years Past GNOME's 10x10 Goal, The Linux Desktop Is Still Far From Having A 10% Marketshare

[Britoid]

Let's be real, there's no "Linux desktop", thus the year of the Linux desktop will never happen.

You have the GNOME Desktop and the Plasma desktop as the two primary desktops that can use Linux.

[uxmkt]

With all the UI stunts GNOME did (especially during the 3.x series), I would not be surprised that the 10% goal was missed.

[perpetually high]

I cannot customize my desktop at all. Where is that "true freedom"?

You can't? Isn't that literally what extensions and themes are? I don't understand this.

As a side note, Joe Rogan was making fun of us the other day and I was dying of laughter.

Link to exact part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOT7UCaCJHY&t=18m18s

You can't help but laugh, it's funny, and that's just gonna be the stance of a lot of people. We're a small minority and are likely going to stay that way (p.s: the word Joe was looking for was "rooted" I'm pretty sure)

I have an iPhone, Apple Watch, but my notebooks/desktops all run on Linux, and I don't expect to ever run any other operating system. GNOME is my perfect desktop as corny as that sounds, so I'm just glad it exists.

[240Hz]

The gnome UI was built at a time when it was believed that there will be a convergence between desktop and mobile but it never happened, so everyone else abandoned it when they realised that people don't want a tablet interface on the desktop.


even Microsoft had the wisdom to abandon the terrible windows 8 UI. Gnome devs on the other hand are too arrogant and embarrassed to admit their mistake so instead they double down on it.

[240Hz]

You can't? Isn't that literally what extensions and themes are? I don't understand this.

As a side note, Joe Rogan was making fun of us the other day and I was dying of laughter.

Link to exact part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOT7UCaCJHY&t=18m18s

You can't help but laugh, it's funny, and that's just gonna be the stance of a lot of people. We're a small minority and are likely going to stay that way (p.s: the word Joe was looking for was "rooted" I'm pretty sure)

I have an iPhone, Apple Watch, but my notebooks/desktops all run on Linux, and I don't expect to ever run any other operating system. GNOME is my perfect desktop as corny as that sounds, so I'm just glad it exists.

Terribly written JavaScript hacks which bloat the desktop or don't work with new versions of gnome is not a solution.

[Britoid]

The gnome UI was built at a time when it was believed that there will be a convergence between desktop and mobile but it never happened, so everyone else abandoned it when they realised that people don't want a tablet interface on the desktop.


even Microsoft had the wisdom to abandon the terrible windows 8 UI. Gnome devs on the other hand are too arrogant and embarrassed to admit their mistake so instead they double down on it.

GNOME certainly isn't a tablet interface. Just because something doesn't copy Windows and have a taskbar doesn't make it for tablets.

[blackiwid]

Well the reason they failed or failed at least that hard has one name "Canonical".

There are 2 ways you recruit new Users:

1. selling Hardware with preinstalled OS, some advancement is reached here but it takes maybe another 5 years to take off really.

2. People that have a reason to switch, like they don't like the new Windows 8 Gui or they hate the new privacy shit in Windows 10. Heck even a new version of windows in itself, because at least they have to install/upgrade a OS anyway. So they can't be lazy and have to become active.

So and what happened when windows 8 came out? Canonical thought it's great to start a big Desktop War inside Linux. So 2011 Canonical started switching to Unity and 2013 Windows 8 came out.

So the people that hated Windows 8 and were willing to look at alternatives what did they see ohh linux, which Distro should I use which desktop? before that the answer was clear every beginning should use Ubuntu and Gnome period that was a complete answer.

Now, ohh Canonical goes nuts/evil and does it's big revolution without any reason. People in their own webshop gave worse ratings for Unity then gnome.

So not only did they NOT send patches for gnome to make it faster better they also created fragmentation. So when somebody wanted to switch he had to start looking into 50 Desktops to pick from and 10 distros which then many thought, ok to difficult I stay Windows or go to Apple.

Windows 10 then came out and the situation was still bad because of Canonicals horrible move (and don't forget about this Mir Debacle) so if Canonical would not have done that we would be at least at 4% maybe even more. Not because Linux became so much better very fast, but because Windows had 2 big shitstorms and Linux would have profited from it, and less fragmentation would have means better quality of the Linux desktop aka Gnome.

The point that today people even asking the question if Gnome is the default desktop is also thanks to Canonical 10 years ago that was only a hand full die hard KDE Fans that would asked that question, but mainstream it was clear that gnome 2 was Standard (thanks to Canonical, you can hate that but that is the truth.).

I digged in the numbers and you can make a case that XFCE has more Users maybe, at least google trends it get more searched, but nearly nobody would install XFCE as First distro, maybe cheap people that have pcs from 2005 or older but XFCE seems to me more for people that are in Linux since at least 20 years or a acquired taste. Nothing you start with in most cases.

So the failure of Canonical funny enough mentioned in this article is not another example but the causation of Gnome being not as successful as they wished.

[Volta]

That said, the systemd/Linux desktop market share as a whole has certainly risen. Just now shared out between all three pretty crappy desktop experiences (Gnome 3+, KDE 4+ and Xfce).

Nice work FOSS! XD

They provide the best experience. Unless you're running them on your crappy bsd.

[240Hz]

GNOME certainly isn't a tablet interface. Just because something doesn't copy Windows and have a taskbar doesn't make it for tablets.

Have you even used gnome? Its definitelly a tablet/phone interface.

[kpedersen]

GNOME is my perfect desktop as corny as that sounds, so I'm just glad it exists.

Oof, all I can say then is enjoy it whilst it lasts. Gnome 4 is going to be *very* different (more like Gnome 2 infact).