It's 2010, But A No-Go For GNOME's 10x10 Goal

[phoronix]

Phoronix: It's 2010, But A No-Go For GNOME's 10x10 Goal

Way back in 2005 a GNOME 10x10 goal was created by Jeff Waugh at a conference in Stuttgart, Germany. The GNOME 10x10 goal was stated as "To Own 10 % of the Global Desktop Market by 2010." Well, it's now 2010 and sadly this goal did not come to fruition for the GNOME project or even the Linux adoption rate in general commanding not even close to 10% for desktop PCs. In some specific geographical regions Linux may be controlling more than 10% of the market or for specific devices (e.g...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Nzg1Mw

[d2kx]

Part of the reason could be that there have been no changes to Gnome since the goal was discussed in 2005.

Alright, before this will lead to a flamewar (it will do so anyway), I know that this is not entirely true, *but* really there's not plenty of major improvements either. Look at how KDE developed from 4.0 to 4.4 in just two years. It's full of major improvements with every release.

[thefirstm]

Part of the reason could be that there have been no changes to Gnome since the goal was discussed in 2005.

Owned!

(stupid 10char limit)

[Apopas]

There are improvements but the vast majority are invisible improvements, so a new user can not really see them.
At least with Gnome3 we are gonna see a lot...

[panda84]

Part of the reason could be that there have been no changes to Gnome since the goal was discussed in 2005.

It's much more simpler:

• you can't really see with precision where you will be in 5 years from now (in the IT world), there are too many variables;
• throwing out random estimates really doesn't help in any way.

[Smorg]

Pff who cares. Why would we make it a goal to absorb more idiot users from M$? We're not in this for profit.

10% of the computer using world does not want to RTFM - the minimal requirement for using this platform. Most people are perfectly happy driving to the Mac store and exchanging their money for proprietary DRM software.

We don't need to attract more people, we need to attract the right people, and Linux does a very good job of filtering out who those people are.

[gforum]

this article, like many others, is ridiculous.
there is no REAL way to measure anything related to pc-os usage, or even further, window manager usage... geez, thats way out of it.

my personal assessment though(because that is ALL you can ever have...), is that linux is probably about 10% or more right now. but like i said... we'll never know, until its over 50% and its clear that we're there.

phoronix keeps surprising me.


cheers.

[Hoodlum]

This is actually worse than the article suggests in terms of Linux adoption. As his estimate of the number of people with pc access in 2010 is massively lower than the number of people with internet access in 2008/2009 by about 300 million. Then factor in the people with PC access but no internet and Linux is not looking so good.

KDE 4 actually looks visually acceptable to mainstream users and Gnome 3.0 is looking to promise the same, video editors like Kdenlive & Pitivi are finally taking up that particular challenge, OO.o is really maturing now. We're starting to get free 3d accelerated drivers, audio seems to be slowly becoming more usable, a lot of webcams and fingerprint readers now work. These are all laying the foundations we need for mainstream use but there is one area where we have made almost no progress - Games.

I still think it largely revolves around games. They make many times more money than the movie industry now - a large amount of people play them (and the people who do are generally more technical than other users) and / or their kids want to play them. This is no longer "optional" if we want to grow in desktop use. Yes, in business too. Home use would give us incredible mindshare in general. I don't mean indie games. I mean the Modern Warfare 2's of the world (which ironically runs single player in wine but wont run multiplayer - the important part - according to wine's appdb).

We either need:
A) A much more effective Wine
B) A fully effective 3d accelerated virtualisation solution (which needs to be made easier for a normal user) or
C) Native games.

Thanks to steam wine is a lot more effective than I would have previously thought (avoids the hideous SECURom rootkit in favour of VAC in most cases) but it's still nothing to write home about. If microsoft manages to sucessfully push Games for Windows Live as the standard we will have nowhere to go.

Maybe it will take a huge paradigm shift before people switch to Linux in much the same way the GUI shifted people onto Windows...

[d2kx]

There are improvements but the vast majority are invisible improvements, so a new user can not really see them.
At least with Gnome3 we are gonna see a lot...

Let me say that I like KDE and definitly think it is the future. Still, I was kind of excited about Gnome 3 at first, but the biggest problems will remain: there won't be a lot of changes for the actual Gnome applications. Rhythmbox/Banshee will still not be on par with Amarok and Empathy is a joke compared to Kopete etc. and the second problem being that

GTK is left further and further in the dust and sucks and I wish it would die.

[Apopas]

@Hoodlum
While the video games industry runs a period of ascent. The PC game specifically do not. The future of games lies to the consoles and not to the computers.