Chronicles of Desktop Deaths Foretold

Now that September has arrived at last, life has taken on a different tone here in the Northern reaches of the Linux blogosphere.
After all, just around the corner now are crisp and cool days, Halloween, and the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot as nature prepares for its long winter sleep.

It's perhaps no great surprise, then, that many thoughts seem to have turned to death and dying in this season of decay. No longer confined to a few heavily air-conditioned bars and saloons, bloggers have begun to lift their heads and ponder the end of things -- not just in the natural world but in technology as well.

Death All Around

"The end of the OS is nigh," read one headline not long ago, for example.

"Desktop computers changing, not dying" insisted another.

And again: "Desktop: 'The report of my death was an exaggeration,'" read yet another.

There's been a distinctly morbid focus in the Linux blogs lately, in other words, and Linux Girl wanted to learn more.



'The Desktop Is Here to Stay'

"What is 'death' here?" mused Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project. "It seems to me that what people are saying is not that we won't use these things, but that they won't occupy the central role in our lives that they have in the past. In all cases, we are talking about trends that are exaggerated."

Desktops, for example, "will always be extremely handy forms of computers," Travers told Linux Girl. "Nobody is going to stop using a desktop just because they now have a series of mobile devices. Desktops are too useful in business and at home for that to stop, and they are far less expensive than even laptops of comparable power and reliability."

In other words, "the desktop is here to stay," he asserted.

'The Browser Is More Important'

Same with the OS, Travers added. "While a lot more may run in the browser, that hardly makes the OS less relevant. Something has to provide the base services to the browser."

What's actually happening, then, is that people are simply less attached to the OS, he suggested.

"What the author is actually saying is, 'the browser is more important, so I don't care about the OS anymore,'" Travers concluded.

'My Desktop Has More Power'

"The desktop just isn't trendy anymore," consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack agreed. "First the laptop was supposed to kill it and now it's the cell phone and tablet? Bad idea."

Mack himself has a desktop, a laptop, an HTC Desire Z cellphone and a work-provided Galaxy Tab, he told Linux Girl.

"Care to guess which one I use the most?" he asked. "It's the desktop. My desktop has more power than the rest of my devices put together, the keyboard is at the proper typing height, and the monitors are on an ergonomic stand to keep my neck from being strained."

Desktops dominate Mack's workplace as well, he said.

"We would be totally screwed if the desktop went away," Mack concluded, "and I doubt many other offices are different from ours."

'Dying, Not Dead'

Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza didn't dispute the desktop's ultimate demise -- just how soon it would happen.

"The desktop is dying, it's not dead," Espinoza told Linux Girl. "These things don't happen overnight."

People are finally "getting their hands on quad-core phones with HDMI output, so now they have a feasible desktop replacement for the majority of purposes that they carry around in their pocket," he explained. "Since these devices are now in the hands of the public, they may begin to meaningfully supplant the desktop as the primary computer for getting things done."

'Overpriced Toys for Boys'

It's actually laptops that continue to dominate the market, according to Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot who goes by "Tom" on the site.

"How can they not when the local big-box is selling name-brand 15.6-inch quad-core laptops with 6 gigs of ram and a 750 gig hard drive for (US)$400?" she pointed out. "With this sort of value proposition, laptops are killing desktops and netbooks, as well as giving tablet manufacturers headaches by making tablets look like overpriced toys for boys in comparison."

As for the operating system becoming a commodity, that's just what it's supposed to be, Hudson asserted. "The real question is how long before all applications integrate with the Net seamlessly? Games have been doing it for decades."