Android/IOS tablets do not count when measuring PC OS market share - they are not classified as "personal computers" and cannot be factored in to market share statics.

Actually some of the various agencies do count them. They also seem to have some level of substitution effect primarily decreasing usage and thus increasing length of the buying cycle. But we are have also seen something like 100m mostly stop using PCs, getting their needs met by tablets and phones.

But that just shrinks the overall market, it doesn't much change who dominates that market.

There are essentially 4 measures of dominance that are commonly used:

a) Unit market share
b) Sales share (dollar weighted market share)
c) profit share
d) controlling the direction of the industry

(a) Android /iOS substitution is a serious threat. A huge number of people who would otherwise want newer PCs don't.
(b) Is rapidly collapsing while and Microsoft may fall under Apple soon in the non-server market
(c) Apple (OSX) has been dominant here forever ranging from 85-91% of profit share for $1k plus laptops and now has around the same margins for all end user PC sales.
(d) I think its pretty clear Microsoft has lost this and is thrashing.

I don't see dominance.

For a car analogy, saying Android/IOS tablets sales are dethroning Windows is like stating a surge in bicycle sales is stealing market share from Ford pick-ups.

No it isn't. The average price on an iOS phone for example is approaching double the average price of a Windows PC and the unit volumes are getting close to equal. The analogy is more like Ford vs. Dodge pickups.

All statistics that you can find on various sites show that each of Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1 individually hold more market share than all non-Windows OSes combined.

I don't know where you are getting that. Embedded Linux crushes Android and Android crushes Windows. iOS is getting close to Windows.

I can argue the Marlins are the dominant baseball team if I insist on only counting teams in Miami. But once I realize teams outside Miami play against the Miami team I have to deal with the complexity of the market. Windows right now is dominant in the niche of $250-700 keyboard based systems. Go either above or below price or drop the keyboard based and things look quite different.

I don't think that's true. Linux is a huge percentage of the x86 ecosystem. For example on Azure the cloud platform with far and away the most Microsoft depending on how you could Windows images are somewhere between 1/6th and 1/3rd of the total images. So even in Microsoft's own cloud they mostly sell Linux. An x86 standard that doesn't support Linux won't be an x86 standard. What it would be is a Microsoft hardware standard and that would at best fragment the x86 architecture. They remember how the Microsoft-Intel-Western Digital standard beat IBM's Microchannel, I suspect they don't want to make the same mistake.

So no I don't think its the laws.

Yes I think they would have. Enterprise users clearly use smart phones. They are heavy tablet consumers. They have lots of laptops. There is no reason that ubiquitous computing couldn't have been a superior model for them than buying lots of applications, data sharing, and worrying about compatibility as they undergo complex upgrade cycles for various devices:

Does version 6 of by web BI tool use the same data format as version 3.2 of my phone based BI tool, version 7.6 of my tablet based sales management tool and version 4.5 of my desktop tool? I want to upgrade my browser and that's going to force me to upgrade the web tool....

You can see how having one app across the board solves that. I think Steve Ballmer was absolutely right (heresy to say that on /. I know) in believing the alternative to ubiquitous computing wouldn't work for enterprise.

last line should read Microsoft is way ahead of Linux on thin client because of how naive X11 is about toolkits.

Many of the ideas are taken from XMonad which is also used by people who like it and at the same time is also an excellent example of how monadic window management works. LISP is like that, everything in LISP is just a DSL so it is scriptable.

You are right before that Linux is becoming professional. It has been far too successful in too many areas to want to keep the hacker culture that existed 20 years ago. Of course the BSDs still have that. But you like hacker OSes go with something much more interesting than a UNIX. House / HaLVM (also Haskell) are pretty cool extensions for the modern world.

As far as tiling window managers for Wayland they already exist and I'd assume will get more sophisticated with time: There is Velox which is a varient of XMonad and Orbment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It seems like as things currently stand most of the pieces to do this exist. X does remote display. PulseAudio does network audio (though I am struggling to make that work). There is USB over TCP/IP support in Linux but you have to go to the commandline and tell a client to share a specific USB device

Wayland does Audio and Video now and can keep them unified. usb device redirection is part of the protocol so GTK/Qt should be implementing controllers that work within their respective desktops.

Anyway, implementing all of this.. if remote support is fragmented across toolkits, possibly non-existent on some lesser used toolkits.. that sounds even harder than it has ever been!

No it is far far easier. GTK, Qt, wxWindows, Mono... all understand that USB and sound exist so no hacking. For example Gnome -> Gnome can pass off intelligent information about streaming and buffering so remote sound is both good and responsive even if the lots of jitter on the network. USB of course requires device driver virtualization and the toolkits, already support that. Etc... This all becomes almost trivial.

Once you start trying to use Wayland the way it is meant to be used this becomes easy.

I think there would be a lot to gain if thin-clients were to become more mainstream.

They are mainstream its called remote desktop. That is in 2015 people using thing clients aren't remoting the video but remoting the desktop. The reason is that is doesn't cost much to add some CPU and video to the local machine and it makes it much more responsive. So the local system has a thin base OS. It loads toolkit information from a server when it isn't being used. When it is being used the server just passes it specifics about what's running. This is the model that can go on top of RDP which is what Wayland is implementing.

Wayland doesn't make thin client less practical but rather makes it vastly more practical because you'll be able to thin the client down to something like an Android device and thus have the base OS built in. Microsoft is way ahead of Linux on thin client, because of how naive is about toolkits.

I suspect the big change we'll see trusted computing. Features like Samsung Knox but for PC. Microsoft was too chicken to go all the way and take all the heat when they were leading the effort along with Intel. This way Intel and Microsoft have just enabled it, there will need to be other 3rd party software but it will be the hardware OEMs that actually deploy it. Lots of pieces and no one but the security vendors doing more than enabling.

As far as the general fear of blocking other OSes, I doubt it. Microsoft has been generous, supportive and and cooperative with Linux vendors in terms of getting keys to work. Those vendors have been supportive with more open players.

How much does it rein supreme? The market has been falling in size in terms of units now for 6 years. At the same time another wave of APU falling is starting up. The upper end is firmly in the hands of Apple whose reach is expanding. The bottom end is being eaten by $75-150 Android tablets and by iPads. Mobile is decreasing usage as well. Losing ground rapidly above and below with the middle softening doesn't sound like reining supreme. That sounds like being rapidly displaced.

Your point is spot on. Apple wouldn't have cared and Linux would have done it both ways until people got used to the change. Microsoft's Windows 8 was supposed to be a transitional operating system with touch becoming an important and key part. All applications needed to have a reasonable touch mode. They ultimately have pulled back from touch which means they pulled back from ubiquitous computing ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) Windows 8 was there last chance to prevent themselves from being a niche: the standard enterprise desktop product. Now that's still a huge niche but moving from the default everything to just one particular submarket is a big loss.

Remember this thread started with a conversation about the cost of going to 1gbs. Customers that are having to move from say 30-200mbs to 1gbs+ are going to want more than 1-2mbs dedicated. They are going to want much more than 300gb / month total. Your numbers are way too low for connections that fast. For example residential traffic in the USA is becoming much more steady because of things like Netflix. Netflix needs about 7mbs and that's not including other traffic in the household. And that's all running comfortably on today's 50mbs type connections not for near future when Netflix is using 8x as much and people are pulling down multiple streams.

We know that home providers right now are underprovisioned. 7pm to 11pm they are only able to deliver 4mbs per home on average, while at times like 4:00 am they can do 18mbs / household and customers express satisfaction. And again that's with many customers buying as little as 10mbs. We know that 2mbs dedicated is less than 1/2 what customers are getting now in the worst markets.

My .2 multiplier I think is fair for good quality peak usage (what the original poster wants). But even if I am to high it is nothing like a .001-.002 as a multiplier. 1000x to one overprovision you just aren't delivering anything like 1gbs of bandwidth.

As for my house. I have about 8 copper lines running to my house. I have a switch box which connect the outlets to up to 3 of those incoming lines. I also have an older system using lead wires inside glass. 2 of those lines were setup for DSL. 0 of them are supported by the phone company today. All of that is abandoned infrastructure.

As for ROI... Remember where I started. 5 years to pay off the original investment (no profit) then Y years of profit. The goal of infrastructure is not to break even,. not to have an ROI of 0. Your $120 box is a perfect example. You are renting it at $5/mo which means a 24 mo breakeven point not 25 years. A 25 year payoff would be you renting the box for $.40 / mo, a 50 year payoff $.20/mo.

Ah.. but I thought remote access was a niche application, no longer relevant enough for developers to care about?

That's a bit much. I suspect what you are hearing is that Network Transparency is a niche application.... Remote access while vastly less important than it was 20 years ago is still used. Which is why Wayland supports it and supports it better than X11. This is what I keep saying you cannot confuse remote access which is far better with Wayland and X11's specific methods of remote access. BTW we know KDE and Gnome are going to support remote because they have been working with Wayland already.

I use Stumpwm along with the pager from Lxde.

LXDE is in the process of becoming LXQt. It fully intends to support remote using Qt's system. As per the June 2013 announcement Hong Jen Yee (PCMAn) is waiting on the freedesktop guys to tell him the messy details are worked out, right now they've told him what not to use in Qt 5 if he wants to easily be on Wayland and along with Razor they are making sure that LXQt doesn't use that stuff some of which is being backported to LXDE. I suspect that LXDE will never be native Wayland. I do know they are ripping out X11 dependencies from the LXDE codebase to make such a port easier if they choose to go all the way but they don't intend to.

However getting to your use case: LXDE right now works beautifully with SOC configurations. That's why it is exist. So the kind of lighweight dumb system you are asking for now that you want it for LXDE become much easier. These are sold all over Asia using LXDE based distributions and they are cheap (generally under $200, often like $125). I'm not sure if they include additional languages or even test against English but even if this is not a "just go out and buy this" it certainly is a proof of concept. So there you go: If you want to use LXDE you will have terrific support and get an upgrade.

As far as Stumpwm none of the X11 windows managers will work with Wayland. Window management for most is a rewrite from scratch. You can use Stumpwm for X11 on Wayland of course. However Stump isn't really a window manager as much as a programming exercise demonstrating how to do windows management in LISP. So in theory you got lucky while someone is going to have to port it to Wayland, it very well might be pretty easy. However to complicate this under Wayland the display server, window manager and compositor are complied into one process there is no abstraction like there is in X11. So Stumpwm while getting to run native on Wayland is easy to do anything useful with it it is going to need to be hard paired with a display server and compositor. I don't see any evidence that Stump will go there. So let's assume Stumpwm as an end user product is gone even if it still exists as a teaching tool.

Moreover I'm not sure the culture is going to allow you to be able to just casually change window managers under Wayland. For example LXQt will only be tested against its own compositor which will be tuned to LXQt. You can run other applications but when you run LXQt (again the version of LXDE that will exist on Wayland) you have picked your GUI.

This BTW is where you get huge advantages. You LXDE top to bottom can be compiled for the SOC hardware (the way Android works today) so you will see huge increases in battery life and much better performance.

By texting I mean SMS. You have something that lets you do that from your computer?

Yes. There are many solutions. Apple's built in Messages application does this. http://mightytext.net/ works for Android.

Why keep upping the hardware requirements when we have a working solution already? Aren't the landfills full enough?

We don't have a working solution already. X11 doesn't work. New OSes / features up hardware requirements. That's the norm.

But i'm not even sure you are being environmentally sound. Even on the kind of crappy hardware you are probably burning about 3GB / hr of network for remote X usage assuming this is all wired (wireless is more) or about $.03/hr in electricity over a WAN (wired LAN is close to 0). Or about $.25 / day ~ $50 / yr. The landfill is less environmentally destructive than all the electricity you are using by consuming all that extra bandwidth to have everything sent to you post processed instead of storing the bulk locally and just getting instructions.

OK... it certainly is the case that Wayland remote will work worse with dumb terminal type setups. Wayland is assuming the the box remoting into is smart. A phone is plenty smart to run Wayland, and if you kept your applications light (i.e. about 10 years old) would be able handle the toolkits. So for your lapdock type setup you could actually run your desktop applications in a way that is comfortable over mobile data and not chew up insane amounts of data. Again as is usual for the actual use case you are describing Wayland is likely far better than X11. Not far better at doing things the X way but far better at doing the same function as long as you are willing to not cut against the grain.

As far as security goes the receiving machine can have an unwritable filesystem (or unwritable from the OS running Wayland) or be virtualized and just blow away and restore the image after use.... You can achieve the same security with smart as you do with dumb.

But if you want actually dumb, then you need to virtualize your screen. Then you talking something like VNC. Wayland makes use of smart so doesn't support dumb as well. Smart is the more common situation today....

Availability of choice is something that has made Linux great for a very long time. Will there be no future development in this area? Is it going to be QT/GTK forever?

Any toolkit can have Wayland remoting. That's going to be a standard part of writing new toolkits in say 10 years.

Providing network support at a layer between the toolkits and what Wayland provides would be fine by me so long as it meant that this layer was what the toolkits or applications are coded to talk to, not Wayland directly.

In theory Wayland supports that. In practice it isn't going to be what's going to happen so I don't consider it particularly relevant. In practice it happens at the toolkit level and applications pick up their remoting from their toolkit unless they want something more complex.

But... if I don't have my lapdock on me remoting the phone to a computer would be a handy way to handle long-winded text conversations.

That's session sharing. What's better is not remoting the conversation to the computer but that the computer syncs with the phone and has a copy of the conversations at all times. Many messaging systems already provide that. I do that today. No reason to remote just push the data.

I see something like moving the remote support out to the toolkits as making this dream far less likely.

I disagree it makes the dream far more likely. To actually be remote you need good WAN behavior on high latency connections, like a cell phone. That's unfixable not available with X11. Everything else is just using a secure potentially unwritable image for remote machines (VM...) and enjoy. Yes when your main OS changes toolkits (something like KDE 5 to 6) you will need to update your dumb images to match but that's not hard in your scenario.

Server I think is trickier. Let me throw out a hypothetical for say 2028.

Samsung releases a 1024 core SOC which is cool enough it can be used in a blade. Intel is using 16 core Xeons that require a full 1U. The Samsung cores are say each 1/2 as fast as the Intel cores. Everything needs to be custom compiled for the hardware but Samsung has their own fully supported distribution which supports cloud foundry, open stack... The complexity of the x86 makes Intel emulating these designs impossible.

Now that I think could do it.

You are relying on every author to care about this issue. I don't think that even a majority will.

I'm relying on the author of every (or most every) toolkit to care. Once the toolkits remote you have better remoting on a per toolkit basis than you do under by X. Your hypothetical application author has to have chosen an obscure modern toolkit which doesn't remote. If they choose a common one it is going support Wayland. If they choose an old one it is going to support X. You are talking well under 1% of all applications and those likely designed not to remote.

How bad is the latency going to be anyway? Today's cable modems are much faster than the LANs where I first learned to 'love X'.

I think you are confusing bandwidth and latency. Latencies on LANs are probably slightly higher than they were 25 years ago. Latencies on WANs aren't remotely close to LAN latencies 25 years ago, and are slowly creeping up not decreasing. Internationalization and additional layers of servers are mainly to blame. SIP has a hard 150ms barrier. This used to be no problem now with international especially to the 3rd world even 200ms variants aren't slow enough.

Moreover we don't have any solution to latency. While we might be able to half them through technology and better engineering to go beyond that we either need to shrink the planet or increase the speed of light.

A local Gnome? A local KDE? My main purpose for running remotely is to NOT have to install and maintain all that baggage in multiple locations.

I'm starting to think you are constructing your objections to be difficult. If you are an end user what do you care what sits on the hard drive? You install a mainstream distribution you install the standard toolkits, done. There is nothing to maintain beyond running Linux. You mentioned cut and past in earlier posts. The X-Server doesn't support any interaction beyond plain text, like clicking on applications starting the appropriate support libraries without those toolkits being installed. So you are doing this now. You are contradicting yourself on your use case. You can't have this being a feature you use in the last post and then in this one want to run without local toolkits. You don't have that now.

You are going eventually be able to construct a use case where X11 is better. I will freely acknowledge there exist possible use cases where X11 will be a better fit than Wayland. Say 1% or users. But by the same token I can easily construct a 100 use cases where X11 is terrible for every use case that exists on which Wayland introduces a slight problem. So those arguments don't do much. When you choose X11 you choose all those problems for other people. You need to argue that X11 is better than Wayland not that Wayland is imperfect. My opinion is that X11 mostly sucks at everything. It has been a disaster for Unix, forcing Unix to emulate hardware configurations that no one has used for two decades. In today's world X11 doesn't do anything well, and does most things far worse than any of the other mainstream competing graphical display systems.

And I'm including remoting in that. X11 doesn't even have a security layer or traffic shaping. SSH which is the dominant security layer breaks 3rd party traffic shaping. I'll start throwing out examples of non-fringe use cases where traffic shaping is needed like international or congestion and X11+Security will collapse.

So if you want to be remoting on a LAN not WAN, have a not quite dumb terminal but a Linux box that for some reason has enough of the toolkit installed to support the X-Server versions of applications but not the X-Client versions of those same applications, and want to run lots of applications from different sources then X11's remoting will work better. With a use case that important I'm shocked that the Wayland project hasn't been cancelled already. The reality is that what's going to happen is you will change one of those parameters the easiest being: install the full toolkit which is what you probably are actually doing now and everything will be better than it is now.

As for mobile apps with keyboard and mouse. Other than mobile development, why would you do that? And why would anyone want to remote that? Again that just seems like needless nitpicking use cases. You want to use a mobile application, download the virtual image and run it locally. The hardware is being emulated anyway, what difference does it make which CPU the emulated mobile runs on?

To do both of what? Display both kinds of applications remotely?

Have a display system that both shares and doesn't share buffers. And as far as remoting to properly the same remoting strategy. One is designed for strategies the other doesn't support and vise versa.

If a different method of getting the display data from one place to another works better then why would I be against changing it?

I don't know you tell me. Wayland is a different but better method of getting display data from one place to the other and yet you object to changing it. So why?

just give it a default implementation that may not be the most efficient but at least works. If the application or toolkit programmers don't care about remote access then it falls into that by default

It works that way for applications but not toolkits. Toolkits have to care. Do you know any toolkit authors that don't care?

My point being that you never know how people might want to use something. That's what made Linux great.. you had the choice to make it do things whether the original authors thought it was useful or not. Now it's just becoming another Windows or Mac OS jail.

Really? How do I move make sure that video and sound stay in sync remotely, to do something fringe like watch a video, even though the X11 authors didn't think that was useful? Tell me how Linux allowed people to do things it wasn't engineered to do.

Of course if the dominant player cut their margins they can preserve their position with their least profitable, least demanding customer. That's always the case with disruption from below. Microsoft did precisely that with netbooks almost a decade ago where they allowed netbooks to:

a) drive down the price of OEM Windows
b) not allow them to raise the specs for years and thus made the XP -> Vista upgrade less advantageous while often equally painful.
c) by forcing Microsoft to focus down market created a bigger opening for Apple at the top of the market. ....

Absolutely if Intel choose to go after the ARM business they could. But Intel just turned Apple down on a fabrication deal. Intel wants their margins more than they want marketshare. Intel's least demand, lowest margin customers are ARM's high margin most demanding customers. That's how ARM slowly moves upmarket. That's how disruption from below works.

As for SOC for laptops. Here we disagree. The x86 market today has standardized hardware. Intel, Microsoft and Western Digital created a hardware / software standard that's lasted for a generation. But that hardware / software standard doesn't need to hold, and obviously wouldn't be holding if x86 is being replaced. I can easily imagine a future generation of SOC for systems with keyboards as much as they are useful in today's tablets. That doesn't mean today's SOCs are good enough, today's SOCs are barely good enough for Chromebooks. We know that the bottom rungs of laptop users were able to replace some or most of their usage with the current generation of iOS/Android tablets, if we picture SOCs 3x as functional...

I'm thinking of ARM as a classic disruptive technology: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

i) ARM comes in first and takes customers who have requirements that x86 couldn't possibly satisfy: done
ii) ARM takes those customers who could be on x86 but gain tremendously from ARM: done
iii) ARM takes the least profitable least demanding customers from x86: happening with Chrome books -- in progress
iv) ARM takes over people core to x86 (laptops): not happening yet
v) ARM takes over more demanding users x86 desktop, server... : not close
-- this results in x86 becoming a niche product for the most demanding users
vi) ARM takes over the most demanding users extincting x86: not close

I'm saying I can see step iii becoming step iv. Of course ARM this year is not ready for step (v). But that's different than what the situation might look like 10 or 15 years out. If neither Windows nor Linux were tuned for x86 as the primary platform its dominance in server would be in more danger. If ARM vendors were moving $100b+ / yr in CPUs (double Intel's entire revenue) the server would be in more danger....