Say Goodbye to Linux on the Desktop

@jacog:

My point is that how we define a desktop is key here. Can it be mobile? Does that mean it's not a desktop? And if so why?

The definition of a laptop and desktop are largely arbitrary labels.

I have a Macbook Pro in front of me now, but I use it as a desktop pretty much 99% of the time. I have the option of taking it home or using it on the move. I don't often, but I have the option.

It has 8Gig memory, 4-core i5 running at 2.8GHz. I can run multiple VMs on it (and do). I use an external monitor for 2-up usage. It's not as powerful as my home machine, but it's not far off it.

It doesn't have the desktop form factor, but it is ideal for my desktop-style usage.

What I'm saying is that gap between this device and something quite a bit smaller and handier is narrowing all the time.

The size of my Macbook is largely dictated by the screen, the battery, the keyboard and the DVD rom. I rarely use the DVD Rom drive. The laptop keyboard I never use. It's truly the most awful keyboard ever. I have an external "proper" one and a mouse that I keep at the desk. The battery is handy, but since the vast majority of my usage is at the desk, I hardly actually use the battery at all. Having the 2 large displays is nice, and I would be hard-pushed to go back, but I could have two monitors on my disk instead if the hardware allowed.

I have some personal work that I do at lunchtime and continue in the evening at home. I'm forever faffing around with different copies of the code on the different machines. I don't like to take my laptop home because it's so heavy so I copy my "stuff'" to a USB key then offload it when I get home. It's OK, but then I have some configuration to do to get the change implemented and get the environment right for my work.

It's easy to extrapolate what we have now to a near future where my (albeit largish) phone, could also double as my work machine and my home hobby machine.

In this future, has the desktop gone? No, but it has morphed into something more flexible.

There should very little disagreement about what a "desktop PC" is: it's a PC that sits on a desk and is not mobile. Very simple really. It doesn't matter if some other device you have works well as a substitute for that, the term exists in current usage to differentiate stationary personal computers from ones which are not stationary and have different form factors; trying to use the "desktop" moniker for other devices does nothing but create confusion, for no good reason.

In a nutshell: "desktop" - computer used for personal (i.e. one person at a time normally, whether for personal or business use) use, which normally sits on a desk, and is not really portable. It has a monitor (or multiple monitors), a keyboard, and a mouse on modern systems. A small number of such systems have the monitor and rest of the system (motherboard, drives, etc.) combined into one unit, the vast majority however have the monitor(s) separate from the "CPU case". Modern systems normally use "mini tower" cases, though there's more and more "small form factor" systems (such as the Mac Mini). Desktop PCs do NOT have batteries, with few exceptions.

"laptop" - computer which does the same job as a desktop PC for the most part, but is portable and has a battery built-in to allow computing without being plugged into a power outlet. Includes a keyboard and some type of pointing device (usually a trackpad), though an external mouse, full-size keyboard, and/or extra monitors can be plugged into USB ports or display ports or an optional "docking system".

"netbook" - computer which resembles a laptop in most ways, but is smaller. These frequently use SSDs in place of mechanical hard drives to improve battery life at the cost of storage space.

"tablet" - computer which resembles a netbook in some ways, but has no keyboard, and instead uses a touchscreen.

"smartphone" - computer which is handheld, has a touchscreen and usually no keyboard or a thumb-operated keyboard, and includes telephone functionality along with various other built-in peripherals such as a GPS sensor.

It's fully possible right now to make a smartphone that functions as a desktop, with a dock that connects it to a monitor and keyboard and mouse, but no one's bothered to do such a thing yet. But that doesn't make it a "desktop PC", that just makes it a mobile device that's serving in place of one.

It's probably also worth noting that there's real software differences between these systems as well; desktops and laptops and netbooks currently have OSes which allow users to install any software they want; smartphones and tablets generally do not, and only allow their users to install software from "app stores" and limit users' abilities in various other ways too. Basically, no one's running Android on a desktop or laptop, and no one's running OSX or Windows (the desktop versions, not Phone/CE/Mo) on a phone. There's a totally insignificant number of people running Linux (not Android) on a phone, though there's more running a special phone version of Linux (Maemo/Meego/whatever they're calling it now) which has different capabilities than a standard desktop/laptop Linux distribution.

Does this make it clear now?

It doesn't matter what you do on whatever system you have. We have terms to describe different things so that there's no confusion. "Cars" are used to go to the mall, commute to work, etc., and "trucks" are used to haul plywood and loads of gravel. Lots of people use their pickups to commute to work, but that doesn't make them "cars". Some people haul plywood on top of their cars, but that doesn't make them "trucks". And don't ask me which one an El Camino is, because no one knows the answer to that.

Yes, these labels are arbitrary, but ALL labels are arbitrary. The entire English language is arbitrary. Most people try to use commonly-accepted terms for things so they avoid confusion, instead of using different terms for things and annoying people when confusion results. Those terms may very well change over time (look at the word "telephone", which used to mean a giant wooden box on the wall with a handcrank, later a device you rented from Ma Bell, later a device that operated over radio but interfaced with the existing telephone system, and now a handheld touchscreen computer), as language and terminology evolve, but at any point in time, there generally are commonly-accepted definitions for various terms and it's best to follow those.

@Khamul:

Hah, very good Khamul. Yes I do know what those terms mean and spelling them out was totally pointless. I'm glad that the point of my post went sailing right over your head.

My point wasn't that we have specific designations for things. That is glaringly obvious.

My point was that the whole debate about Linux breaking into the desktop is rapidly becoming moot because the range of things that we might call desktop, (or maybe not depending on what your perspective is) is diversifying.

Here's a question for you. What is a PC? Does it have to be x86-based? The original IBM ones were (broadly speaking of course). What about Arm-based desktops? Are they PCs? If not, why not? Or is it any desktop machine which a similar architecture? Does that include Microchannel? PCI-E? ISA? VL-BUS? What about laptops that have same architecture? Are they PCs if they have the same architecture? Or are they something different because they have a battery?

My point is that when people started talking about "PC"s years ago, it meant something very narrow and specific. These days, the term hardly means anything at all, the form factors and architectures are so varied. There is a broad range of hardware that is compatible. But is a rack-mount server a PC because it has a PCI-E-type architecture?

Yes we have arbitrary labels for classes of equipment. But they are marketing tags. They are a way of selling stuff.

But when we see articles talking about the demise of the desktop or discussing whether or not Linux has "made it" on the desktop, it has certainly made it on my desktop...which happens to be a laptop that spends 100% if its time on my desk. If I took the battery out, would it become a desktop as you understand it?

What if the thing that spends 100% of the time on my desktop is very small? What about a Mac Mini? Is that a desktop? If I took the battery out of my mega-powerful mobile phone, is that a desktop if I plug into it a keyboard, mouse and monitor?

These designations are all illusions. We categorise things because that's what humans do. Unfortunately, it also prevents us, at times, from thinking out of the box and daring to conceive of something a little different.

I'm trying to think of another clearer way of saying what I'm trying to say.

I'm not trying to be patronising, I just sometimes find it difficult to articulate what I'm thinking. And sorry if I sounded a bit rude above.

We have a spectrum of categories at the moment and they are broadly defined by their use-cases, but also they are compromises formed by the limits of our current technology.

The spectrum looks like this at the moment:

server - desktop - laptop - tablet - netbook - mobile phone

One of the things that you might notice is that they have different power levels, highest at the left, lowest at the right.

What people use as desktops at the moment is largely defined not by the fact that it is a big box that is permanently sat on or under the desk. It is defined by the processing power that we need for the job we are doing. Most of us here need as much power as we can get, me included so the desktop is what we use. However, in my case I use a laptop. It is not as powerful as my home machine which is a bit of a monster. But as a software developer it is fine. It runs Linux and on top of that I have a Windows Server 2008 VM. It had run perfectly acceptably with 3 VMs running concurrently. It gives me no problems whatsoever. About 10 years ago, it would have been unthinkable that I could do what I'm doing now. I could have used a laptop, but it would have been unsatisfactory and I would be forced into compromises all the time.

I see developers like us being more and more able to do what we do with machines towards the right. We have seen products on mobile phones running up Ubuntu. Slow probably at the moment, but how long will it stay that way? I see the movement fairly slow and evolutionary but the movement is there for anyone that cares to look.

Let's take a flight of fancy for a moment.

Mobile phone's processing power is limited primarily by the capacity of the battery. The CPU has to run fairly slowly and efficiently otherwise, you would get 1/2 hour life before it was dead. OK, how about a dual CPU setup? A slow CPU for phone usage; a fast butchy multi-core one when it is plugged into external power. We already have GPUs that do this in desktops. Or a single CPU with two modes. What about storage? When we plug it into a ground station, perhaps there could be a fast PCI-E interface to external storage via a special purpose dock. Perhaps the external dock could contain a GPU processor for taking the graphic load from the phone?

Manufacturers *are* pushing the boundaries and challenging our preconceptions about what we think about form factors. The Transformer, or different tablets that can be converted into laptops. Fancy docks for our laptops and tablets for desktop use.

They are having a varied amount of success partly because we have quite set ideas about what we need and partly because many of them fail to satisfy our requirements because they are difficult to use or the technology isn't quite there.

We are seeing the exact same thing happening from the other end of the spectrum. We had MP3 players, mobile phones, GPS devices and a host of other electronic stuff. I have a mobile phone that is powerful enough to do all of that now and it is a fairly cheap one at that. These devices are seeking each other out from both ends of the spectrum because the technology allows it to happen and I don't see the rate of the progress slowing any time soon.

We label object to describe what they are or do. We give computer devices labels for either to define their physical characteristics or functions. The problem is, when these labels are used, we really don't know exactly what is meant by it. It really is dependent on who created the label, who is using the devices, and in what function.

Vendors give devices they create labels to mostly designate and describe the physical characteristics of a computer. Users use the same designation to describe their function, even though some times their function is different from what they are labeled. For instance, a desktop can be used to function as a server, a laptop as a desktop, a netbook as/is a Laptop, a tablet as a laptop. Etc...

So @Khamul is correct in his definitions, they describes what OEM vendors use. As customers however, we use in different ways than the labels OEMs describe them. that doesn't matter since we are not the originators of the equipment.

Several years ago (around 1998), I was working for a company that has refineries in the Mid-West and along the East Coast. We used mid-size VMS servers (4000) to auto-control the refinery process (APC - Advanced Process Control) to optimize production. That brought in about $10 million more a year as opposed to manually controlled process. Equipment was getting old and it was time to upgrade the systems and we needed 5 systems. $40,000 for a server is peanuts compared to the revenues and the company had no problem upgrading. Being the fugal IT guru at the time, I decided to use simple workstations instead running VMS of course since the software only runs on VMS. Instead of using costly mid-size server, and the software doesn't need all the resources that comes with it, I elected to go with Alpha Evo 250 workstation. Since it was a total hardware & software upgrade, I had the luxury to build everything from scratch without impacting the running systems. Done that and proved its reliability and robustness, the production department had no issues at all. We ran it for a year and didn't have a hiccup until headquarter asked us to do the same in the east. When I sent the plan and specification, they blew a stack. We debated and they ended up contacting Gartner (Yes that Gartner) and they were told, yes desktops can be used as server but don't recommend it since vendors do NOT give them the attention and QA as legitimate server hardware.

Well, they did what was recommended to them and we kept ours. We had better recorded uptime than they did and the equipment was still running up till a year ago when vendor discontinued their old controllers hardware and moved to Windows with new controllers. That is another story to be told.

The complete spectrum should look like this at the moment: server – workstation - desktop - laptop - netbook - tablet - mobile phone

To me, PC (Personal Computer) is any device that functions as a computer no matter what the hardware or software are, and owned, managed, controlled, used by a single person at a time.

Server: Stationary multi-user multi-application shared computer.

Desktop: Stationary Personal Computer (PC), require monitor, keyboard, mouse & battery (can have VoIP)

Laptop: Mobile PC with its own attached monitor, keyboard, mouse & battery(can have VoIP)

Notebook/Netbook: Small, limited resources laptop. (can have VoIP)

Tablet: Laptop with touchscreen interface without keyboard or mouse. (can have VoIP)

Smartphone: Miniatured tablet with phone capability

@Fettoosh: Actually, at this point, I'd consider the "workstation" moniker to be dead, or at best a rarely-used synonym for "desktop" (but more clearly denoting the kind that isn't mobile). Years ago, it used to mean something; it meant a Unix system that sat on a desk rather than in a server room somewhere, and was used for high-end tasks, usually graphics (since those couldn't be done on dumb terminals). SGI was famous for making high-end workstations for instance. Now with Sun and SGI gone and that role replaced by either Linux running on commodity ("PC") hardware which is far more powerful than those obscenely-expensive workstations ever were, or by Macs or Windows, the term is close to dead.

@skelband: The "PC" term has become so generic now that it's mostly meaningless, IMO. Years ago, like "workstation", it used to mean something specific: a computer with IBM-compatible architecture. So Macs didn't count, nor did Unix workstations, nor did anything else that looked similar but couldn't run software which IBM PCs (and their descendants) could. That's all evolved away, and I don't see the term being used that much; when it is, it just seems to denote a computer that isn't a mobile phone or tablet, and somewhat resembles how a "PC" was used (i.e., monitor, keyboard, mouse). There's probably some die-hards who'll insist that anything that won't run x86 Windows can't be a "PC", but I think that's fading fast. But you're not going to find anyone calling their smartphone a "PC", and I think most people will just call their laptop a "laptop" or a "computer", though I could be wrong.

A lot of these terms' meanings are changing quickly. Remember, only a few years ago, a "tablet" computer really didn't exist outside of research labs or sci-fi. Sure, they had been tried before several times, but like the Apple Newton, didn't really go anywhere. I think I remember MS trying to make one years ago, and pushing the term. It wasn't until the iPad that they really caught on. Now all of a sudden, everyone and his brother has a "tablet" and is using the term (sometimes, more often they use the term "iPad").

However, I have to totally disagree about the usefulness of these terms. Suppose your spouse is in another room, and your computing devices are in there with her: a laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone. You want her to bring one of these devices to you, but not all three; if you don't have different terms for them, how do you communicate this? Obviously, you need separate terms for them, even if these terms may mean something somewhat different in 5 years. Oracle's license BS is a red herring; we're talking about casual conversation here, not legalese, which isn't even English. It should be self-evident that their license terms are garbage, and any reasonably intelligent judge should strike down that clause; if that doesn't happen, it's not a language problem, it's a problem with a failed judicial system. Why is it that Americans have such a fetish for legalese and courtrooms anyway, as if everything that goes on in a courtroom is more important than anything else in society?

When I retired from the Army, I moved back to Phoenix and enrolled at Arizona State University in Tempe. I had something like 9 credits to finish my BS in Psychology. There are definitely two parts to that town...the campus and surrounding area then everything else. It can be like on Fringe...stepping into an alternate universe as easily as crossing the street. I actually lived in Mesa, another "burb" of Phoenix but even back then in the mid 90's it was hard to tell where one began and the other left off. If you didn't see the "now leaving" and "you are entering" signs, you'd never know you had entered another municipality. My friends now report that it's almost impossible to tell where you are because Phoenix has spread out so rapidly, you have to buy something and see what the tax rate is to know where you are.

But onto the topic...

What I see when I am out in the field is basically pads being used as couch surf boards. Kids are using them for social stuff but to get their homework done they use their computers. For some, the novelty has worn off and many of them sit on their dressers or on the coffee table for days without being used. I do see baristas now carrying them as order pads but they are the droid-based ones that are easily networked...so there are some workplace applications for them. I know they are a hit with day traders too. Maybe more professional uses will emerge.

But from what I read, this is just another alarmist foretelling the doom of the desktop.

Won't happen in my lifetime...there are just too many restrictors built into the pads. And no USB ports on the Ipad? That's about as brain-dead as any Jersey Shore episode.

@helios: A lot of college towns are like that; there's campus and then everything else which has a distinctly different flavor. I saw this in the small college town I went to school in in Virgina. The problem in Tempe is that it really plays up the university and downtown and tries to make itself out as a nice, quirky, progressive place to live, but after you actually move here, you pretty quickly find out the reality is nothing at all like the image they project, and it's actually a rather undesirable place if you don't live on campus, and not too different from downtown Phoenix (which is a pretty horrible place).

Mesa is a rather weird place, with different sectors that are very different from each other. Some of them are pretty run-down and horrible-looking, others aren't. But after being fooled by Tempe, I'm not going to make too many judgments about it since I haven't actually lived within its borders. I have lived in Chandler, however, and that place isn't too great either; honestly at this point I'm anxious to just get out of Arizona altogether. I'm hoping to move to the Pacific Northwest. Your friends are mostly right; it can be hard to know where borders between cities are if you don't see the signs. One exception I know is the border between east Tempe and west Mesa: the Tempe side has some professional office parks (mostly medical I think) with green lawns, but drive across the 101 highway into Mesa and suddenly you're surrounded by check-cashing stores.

As for the iPad and USB ports, it may seem brain-dead, but there sure isn't any shortage of lemmings lining up to buy them even though they can't plug a simple USB drive into them, so I guess Apple has their market figured out well.