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Every year is a bit more the year of the Linux desktop. I realize that when my barber knows what I'm talking of when I tell him I use Linux as my main OS on my two PCs. And my barber is not at all a computer nerd like I am. He's just a normal citizen who's telling more and more people are becoming aware of the presence of Linux.

Now, if 2008 is going to revolutionize the Linux presence on desktop computers, I don't know, we'll see :-)

From time to time Linux development confuses me. Current Linux distros have GPU accelerated effects on the desktop. When I plug in an external hard drive, it works immediately, but when I add an additional internal hard drive, I still have to edit /etc/fstab manually.

When I switched the graphics card in my Linux PC a few weeks ago, I had to reconfigure Xorg from the command line, because the driver from the older graphic card failed to load (obviously, as it's different hardware). Xorg didn't load the "radeon" driver by itself, even though it was installed. At least it could have fallen back to the Vesa driver.

I'm experienced enough to use the CLI. For me it wasn't really a huge problem. But I wonder about the development priorities from the Linux distributors. Why do they pay people to write compiz etc. to produce eye candy effects, when changing/adding internal hardware components is still a bitch? Do they think that eye candy is more important to common users than getting a system to work? Do they think that common users never change internal hardware after the initial Linux installation that it isn't needed to use the hardware detection techniques used during installation at a later time?
AFAIK many operating systems work like this: During boot a small program launches to check if the hardware configuration changed. If yes, the best driver on the system is loaded and the new hardware configuration gets saved.

To be fair, I didn't try every Linux distribution out there. I did, however, made above experiences with current releases of Ubuntu (7.10) and openSUSE (10.3).
My personal "year of the linux desktop" will be the year when fstab and xorg.conf are no longer needed.

"""
Its the year of the Linux Desktop!
"""

Indeed it will be. I fully expect to see evolutionary improvements in quality and capability, along with modest increases in usage share on corporate desktops, and to a lesser extent, home desktops. Just as we have seen every year.

I've been watching and waiting for 11 years. And if it takes another 11 I can accept that. These kinds of sea changes don't happen overnight. And in the end, I envision a more mixed, multiplatform landscape, and not one in which any one player, even Linux, dominates. I do not want or expect to see Microsoft obliterated. Only tamed.

Edited 2008-01-01 18:39

Good one. Been coming here for about 3-4 years and every year seems to be same.

The distance between the "Linux desktop year" (f) and any year (Y) is defined as the following function:

f(Y) = 1/Y

I predict that will happen at least sooner than the year of the Windows server.