Speaking of bad UI decisions, I blame the tablets. Metro is the absolute worst thing Microsoft has ever made, but the latest Gnome, contrary to what SJVN claims, is awful.

Attempts to turn the desktop into some sort of "dashboard", whether its MetroPoop, (dis)Unity or Gnome, are misguided at best.

If netbooks are dead, [ARM-powered] tablets killed them, not cheap laptops.

The decline of netbooks preceded the current tablet craze. Cheap x86 laptops cannibalized the market, not anything from ARM.

I've never heard anyone complain about a laggy interface on a smartphone/tablet.

android laggy screen returns over 4 million results. It's been a problem from the beginning. Of course, if you're not running android, you probably don't have the same problems.

Or maybe I decided that my time is worth more than having to distro-hop because every distro eventually turns to crap, same as everyone else I know has abandoned linux.

You have a problem when people who have been defending you for a decade or more get fed up. Sticking your fingers in your ears and going "nyah-nyah-nyah-i-can't-hear-you" or otherwise denying that linux today isn't even where xp was a decade ago ... well, that's just fine and dandy.

Just like all those "WORKS_FOR_ME" and "WONT_FIX" responses to bugs. Keep it up, and one day you'll find that everyone else has either moved on to a mac, gone back to windows, or sideways to freebsd.

5 years from now, the only piece of gpl code in RedHat will be the linux kernel. Think of what that implies for a minute.

And yet Microsoft makes more profit in one day than all the linux businesses in the world combined in one year. Actually, Microsoft made more profit last quarter ($5.11 billion) than the total ANNUAL REVENUE of all linux vendors.

But even that paled next to Apple, at $11.6 billion in profit for the quarter.

Windows is only "niche" when compared to Apple, and even then it's a bit of a stretch to say so.

Now if you were to say that Windows 8 is the worst product Microsoft ever made, I would agree. But end users don't care - they'll just stick with Windows 7 (or even XP, even after it goes EOL on April 8th, 2014) and see if Windows 9 is any better. Or they'll buy a mac. Or an ipad. Or an iphone.

When netbooks came out, a single-core laptop with 512 megs of ram, 60 gigs hd and a cd-rom was $679.

Today, you can buy Core i5 2.5GHz, 8gig DDR3, 640gig hd, dvd burner, and 64-bit Windows for $30 less.

Price compression like that is why netbooks are dying. For less than $400 you can get a laptop that runs rings around any $300 netbook. People would for the most part rather pay the extra $100 and get a much more capable machine.

Hi, welcome to the Internet. It runs on linux.

And 20 years from now, it will be back to running on a variant of BSD. These things go in cycles. So what's your point?

You're still using a desktop? How cute

Thank you. Glad you realize that tablets and smartphones aren't nearly as flexible. They don't have twin 26" displays, they suck at multitasking, they can't just be left alone to do a job for days at a time, they are more limited in terms of storage, they have relatively crappy sound, and they tend to get lost easier.

Did you know that for some unexplained reason, linux is required to do everything that any other OS does in addition to having its own software? Weird, right? Most of the time this involves no support from device manufacturers or other software developers, and usually there's no money in it for the linux dev.

So change the license to a more friendly one, like BSD. Oops, you can't - so linux will reach a peak and go no further. It's already happened on the desktop, where linux went from a peak of 2.5% about a decade ago to 1% today (and most of that 1% also dual-boot into Windows, so it's really a fraction of 1% overall). It's only a matter of time before it also happens in every other market, because manufacturers just don't need the hassles of dealing with raving freetards like RMS - or have you forgotten about his anti-android, anti-gpl2 fud? And how he was trying to claim that Android and Linux should switch to GPLv3 (if Linux ever *did* switch to GPLv3, Google would release a FreeBSD version of the Android stack, just like they will if Oracle ever wins anything significant).

Contrast that to FreeBSD. Apple built Darwin atop it, and continues to pay FreeBSD devs for code (not to mention contributing back that code). People are willing to pay a premium for quality, whereas you can't even GIVE linux away. I know - everyone I gave it to, including other devs, has abandoned it. I was the last.

Really it makes so little sense that the best explanation for people using linux on their desktops is that they're experiencing a mass hallucination. I'm sure you'll agree.

Not a "mass" hallucination. Remember, linux desktop market share has dropped by 60% from its peak, while the FreeBSD derivative just keeps growing. And why you have to hide the linux fugliness from the end user with Android.

It's pretty bad when none of the latest linux distros is anywhere near as stable as plain old XP+SP2. SP2 was released in 2004. Here we are 8 years later, and no linux distro (not Debian, not OpenSuse, not Fedora, not any one of the others I've used over the last 15 years) is as fast or as stable.

And of course, the range of software (which is what it's all about in the end - without software, any os is pretty much useless) is much greater than linux.

the netbook phenomenon

Hahahaha.
...( gasp ) ...
Hahahaha.

Netbooks are a dying breed, and have been for years. This is 2012, not 2008. You can get a full-sized laptop for less than what a netbook went for then.

not to mention the inception of smartphones and tablet computers.

... and you ignore how those devices are getting cpu upgrades almost every refresh ...

Like how the iPad went from a single-core A4 to a dual-core A5, and the iPhone went from a single 412 mhz core to a 800 mhz dual core.

People don't buy these devices because they "want more CPU". After a certain level, the "CPU" amount is irrelevant and its practical effects are completely unnoticeable.
...
People actaully know that they can't notice it after a certain point, which was actually passed about half a dozen years ago

... so why do people complain about some smartphones and tablets having a "laggy" interface, or not rendering video smoothly? They'd certain wish they had a more powerful device.

Do you really believe that the cpu from the original iPad 2 years ago could power the new iPad just as well, with 4x the pixels?

Your assertion is dissociated from reality.

Srsly?

Linux distros have, in the last couple of years, gotten worse, not better. Breakage on updates, never mind upgrades, has become too much of a problem. After 15 years of using linux as my main (and often only) desktop, after Opensuse crapped out on an upgrade - repeatedly, then switching to Fedora 16, which became so unstable after several updates that the computer had to be rebooted multiple times just to load the OS, fresh install and update repeated the problem, Debian not handling the display OR the keyboard properly, Slackware ... well, any OS that goes for 2 months with no patches or bug fixes is dead, a few others, I dug out the old XP disk and the computer has been working flawlessly for a month - and it's much faster than it ever was under Linux.

Bonus - my "linux" printer works. And I can actually play SimCity 4 or anything else if I want to just "zone out" for a while.

Even if I valued my time at the minimum wage, linux turned out to be way too expensive.

That's why I now tell people to go back to using FreeBSD for servers (upgrades go much better), and if they can get a Mac, more power to them; otherwise, Win7 is okay. Linux? Every one of my former coworkers has also abandoned it, for the same reason - it's not stable, hardware support too often sucks, and who needs the hassles? If you miss the terminal and command-line utilities, just download cygwin.

Linux distros collectively have reached the unsingularity - every new feature either introduces a new bug or takes away functionality elsewhere. No thanks.

On mobiles, plenty of people don't want more CPU. Unless that extra CPU comes with no cost on either battery life or weight, what is not the case.

... because Intel never improves their instructions-per-clock-cycle rate, or comes out with a lower-power version of any cpu, and nobody ever developed a better battery technology, or lighter components, a more energy-efficient display, less power-hungry SoC, or made a better compiler, or software that was less bloated and more efficient ...

... okay, that last one might be a bit of a stretch ... ;-p

You keep mentioning the software stack. MOST people with computers dont have $1000's invested in windows software

I guess you're talking about pirates. I know I have thousands invested in software.

games being the notable exception

That's a pretty big exception, don't you think?

We have seen the end of windows as the de facto standard, its time you start realizing it.

Please call me back when my colour laser "windows, mac and linux" mfp actually works under linux ... and when, after I finally get it to work, the next upgrade doesn't hose it for a year.

Ditto my camcorder.

Ditto my 4-video+audio-stream real-time hardware mpeg encoder.

BTW, how's that video driver thing working out for you again? And all those DirectX games?

I'm not going to jump for about it, but the fact is that Microsoft and Apple are a duopoly on regular computers, and Apple and Android on mobile. Those are the de facto standards today.

I fundamentally disagree. People want a computer that works. Ever increasing power is a dead end. Average people have no use for the supercomputers we have under our desks NOW

Average people DO have a use for the "supercomputers" under their desks. Otherwise, everyone would still be buying sub-gigahertz semprons. But software continues to get more bloated, and "managed code" imposes even more of an overhead.

Could you run, say, the latest Fedora or Suse on a p266 with 64 megs? That was a hot machine at one time ... but things change.

Dual core processor in the consumer space is because the chip companies couldnt go faster so they went wider,

... which kind of disproves your first statement - since there was a demand for more power, and they couldn't go faster on one core, they went to multiple cores.

It's about what people are willing to pay for. People aren't comparing the $20 ARM against the $100 x86 - they're comparing the whole package. So an x86 that is even 25% more useful is worth the extra bucks, because of what it brings to the whole package. Not to mention that ARM is still struggling to get any significant number of 64-bit chips onto the market, and that's not going to change for several years; with ram being so cheap, plenty of people have 6, 8, 12, 16, even 32 gigs of ram on their desktops. That, plus multi-core goodness, increasingly lets them run VMs.

The article misses an obvious fact - the small market that arm will take is all on the no-profit, low-end, first-time notebook buyer.

Anyone who already has an x86 laptop is going to stick with x86, just to maintain software compatibility. Ditto for anyone with a legacy application. Ditto for anyone who wants to run games (and everyone wants to run the odd game here and there).

So, who's going to buy this? People who used to be called the "netbook" market.

In other words, cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel, almost-no-profit and few needs.

In other words, they'll take sales away from an already dying market, leaving Intel the higher-margin / higher-priced market.

That's the same strategy Apple has used for years.

It really is about the ability to run existing programs, otherwise we'd already have the Year of the Linux Desktop.

ARM won't take anything from the server or desktop market, so the only current Intel market left is laptops.

Nobody's going to junk hundreds or thousands of dollars of software just to save $50 by buying an ARM laptop instead of an x86.

So who's the market? People who don't have any legacy software (so forget business users or anyone who already owns a computer). Even they will mostly stick with Intel, because let's face it, almost everyone who has a computer has at least one application/game/whatever that needs Windows on x86.

It's why we haven't seen the Year of the Linux Desktop, and never will. OTOH, we *might* see a Year of the Android laptop sometime this decade ... which could be interesting.

ARM still has a ways to go before getting any 64-bit cpus into the market. That's not good, not when you consider that most consumers consider 4 gigs as the minimum nowadays for a half-decent laptop.

Ultimately, the incremental cost of going Intel is not going to be enough to offset most people who are buying their first laptop, and most of the rest are already locked in to x86 for the foreseeable future. Just try to take an x86 macbook away from it's owner.