Year of the Linux Desktop: Stop Lying to Yourselves

There's some sort of delusion that's been going around the Linux community for years, called the Year of the Linux Desktop. The idea is that in some fanciful year, the Linux Desktop will finally be ready for mass consumption, and hordes of Windows and Mac users will finally see the light and convert. This event is contingent on some unknown value of Stability and Usability being reached in the Linux Desktop.

If that's all it were contingent upon, we'd already be living in the Era of the Linux Desktop. Linux is very stable and usable now. We've arrived. But the Year hasn't. What's missing? Raevol, if everything's so grand, why is everything so terrible?

I'll tell you why, dear reader. Applications. People don't use computers because of their nice desktop environments, pretty window managers, or convenient package management systems... they use them as solutions to tasks they need to finish. Word Processing, Web Browsing, Chatting... all of these tasks require applications. And Linux has some good ones, sure. But it's missing the most important ones.

Which are the important ones could be argued. In my opinion, we're missing a video editor, and games. And I don't mean crappy, half-assed games like Nexuiz. I mean real games, like Half Life, Guild Wars, and Age of Empires. There's some AAA commercial games on Linux, but not hardly enough, and not the ones that matter. And by a video editor I don't mean iMovie, I mean Final Cut Pro.

There's been some effort in the right direction, see Lumiera and 0 A.D., but these projects are moving at a very slow pace, and are not getting the attention from developers that they should be. These kinds of projects are important if Linux is ever to matter as a Desktop OS. The focus on Linux development needs to move away from territorial pissings over GTK vs QT, apt-get vs yum, and so forth. The Linux Desktop needs to provide solutions to problems, not just be a stable environment where nothing happens.

Next up: Why WINE is terrible and has no bearing on anything whatsoever.