That's what the article said too, that (as has been said before, over a period of many, many years) desktops are going away and laptops/tablets/handhelds will take over. Maybe that will happen someday, but not any time soon. There's still a thriving market not only for pre-assembled high-performance desktops but also for motherboards, cases, desktop CPUs, PSUs, video cards, and other components. Gamers prefer desktops because they can upgrade the CPU, video card, etc. quite easily which is difficult or impossible in a laptop. Many home theater/entertainment system enthusiasts like desktop computers that have a video card capable of full 4K resolution (and I read that 8K is now a thing) and easily-expandable storage for their media collections, while HDDs thin enough to fit inside laptops are currently limited to 1TB due to the number of platters: higher-capacity drives are thicker due to having more platters and won't fit inside most laptops. Businesses and governments use desktop PCs because they're cheaper than laptops, they're less likely to be stolen, and their components are modular and easily replaced by IT staff so downtime due to component failure (i.e. coffee spilled on the keyboard) is a lot lower. They only buy laptops (usually with docking stations) for those employees who have a particular need for one, such as the Big Boss who attends lots of meetings and travels frequently.seaken64 wrote: ↑Mon Aug 12, 2019 8:28 pm I'm not sure what was meant by the author as to who "the masses" are. The way it looks now there will be less and less desktop users and more and more mobile and cloud users and enterprises. In any case, I don't think there will ever be a majority of users who will know anything about the OS they use. They will use what is handed to them.
It depends on how you define "the average user" but I think you're probably right. I suspect a few more will switch to Linux after support for Windows 7 ends but probably not all that many. They'll either lower their expectations and upgrade to Windows 10 or keep using 7 even though it's no longer supported or updated. There are still people who continue to use XP and even Windows 98 or Vista.Now, if he meant the "masses" of geeks who install their own operating systems, then Linux is already doing a pretty good job. But the average user will never react well to "here's a free OS you can install yourself on your own equipment". Linux will always be an obscure thing to most users. But they may use it anyway, unknowingly.
Some hurdles against adopting Linux are:
1. For those who know little or nothing about computers, the installation. Windows probably came preinstalled on their computer so unless they've had to reinstall it themselves they've never installed an OS before and that can be intimidating.
2. They associate "free" with "low quality" or the idea of downloading an ISO and burning it themselves with, I don't know, piracy or something, or else they just don't know how so this requirement is one more barrier.
1 and 2 would require a Linux "Elmer" to help and assist the Linux newbie in getting a distro installed and configured then helping them over the initial rough spots for a while.
3. The biggest hurdle is probably just that the majority of apps and games that they want to run are Windows-only due to the fact that Windows has had such a stranglehold on the OS market for so long, so it's kind of a Catch-22 situation: Windows controls most of the desktop/laptop/tablet OS market share, so most of the desirable apps are Windows apps, so people don't want to leave Windows which guarantees its market control continues, so not enough people switch to Linux to make it worth the app devs' time to make Linux versions, so people don't want to leave Windows. The trick would be to somehow break that cycle. Maybe a really fantastic new game that everybody was talking about and that's Linux-only? Some huge new breakthrough in Wine that allows it to run absolutely every Windows app there is with no problems at all? (I know, dream on.)
(Edited to correct typos and grammar as I wasn't fully awake when I wrote the original reply.)