[Dr. Sivana]

Personally, I don’t see the 200+ distros as a problem. Business has already settled on SuSE, Red Hat and maybe Ubuntu. More importantly, a lot of software is running on Linux in the Data Center even if it is being fed to a Windows front end on the users’ laptops.

My biggest problem with Linux for an end-user is application software. Base is awful, and there will never be a desktop version of Claris’ Filemaker Pro (there is a server version, NOT the same thing).

[z3n]

I have found that Linux has a lot of nice software available, but when it comes to running 3rd party applications, games, and software, it’s often not supported (written for Linux).

In fact, I could be wrong, but it seemed like 5 or 10 years ago you saw Linux install versions for many games and apps more than today.

Is that because it’s difficult to write software to support all the distros, or simply because it looks like the future promise of a Linux hay day has come and gone?

[Tell It Right]

The lack of centralization is part of the charm of Linux. Everybody likes having their own flavor. So that means no one distro will be dominant like Windows is.

You can't have it both ways.

[BiglyCommentary]

“but really it will just be a smart terminal hooked into a Windows 365 Cloud PC”

There is no way in hell I’m going to have my main Windows systems sitting out in some cloud.

I love a lot of things that Linux has such as the ZFS filesystem. You can’t get a filesystem comparable on Windows unless you are running the very expensive versions such as Workstation or Enterprise. And like you said, the problem is always the big apps. Many just aren’t available on Linux.

[tahoeblue]

I'm able to run most Windows-only things on a Windows VM, while getting my real work done on the Linux host. That's been a great way to not be forced into one solution or the other when you constantly need to do things on both.