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It's nearly impossible to sum up an entire year of developments in something as large and nebulous as the world of desktop Linux, especially in a year like this one which has seen some the best releases that projects like Mint, Fedora and openSUSE have put out to date.
At the same time the distro that's closest to being a household name, Ubuntu, has been nearly silent since 14.04 arrived in April, hard at work on the mobile version of Ubuntu.
To paraphrase Charles Dickens, the past year of Linux releases has been both the best of times and the worst of times.
At the very moment that Linux desktops seem to be reaching new levels of sophistication, polish and "just works" ease-of-use, the entire future of the desktop computer (by which I also mean laptop) feels in doubt.
No, the desktop is not dead yet, but it increasingly feels like, for the general use case anyway, the mobile device offers most of what the user needs.
A tablet may not be top of the holiday wish list for self-professed power users, but for most it's enough to check email, browse the web and upload some images. Combine that with better battery life, smaller, lighter form factors and you can understand why Canonical spent the better part of year working on its mobile interface.
The good news, for those of us not likely to be ditching the desktop/laptop any time soon, is that the past year has seen the Linux desktop achieve a level of polish and sophistication that quite frankly, well surpasses what's available from Windows 8 or OS X Yosemite.
Naturally that's a very subjective statement, but go download Ubuntu 8.04 (the gateway drug, if you will, for many of today's desktop Linux users) and install it alongside Mint 17.1. Suffice to say that these are great days to be a Linux user.
Perhaps it's fitting that just as it would appear that the days of the desktop PC as the device of choice for the home are numbered, desktop Linux finally surpasses its closed-source competitors. Bug number one is closed and no one cares it would seem. Maybe this is the way it was destined to be all along -- the only people around for the proverbially just out of reach "Year of the Linux Desktop" will be those of us who've been having our personal year of the Linux desktop for decades, if not more.
Still, the final days of the desktop seem to be producing an embarrassment of riches at least. And I'll take it.
It used to be that when I sat down to write one of these year in review pieces I would talk about how Ubuntu had continued to refine the desktop Linux experience. Then it'd be a struggle to find something else interesting to comment on.
This year Ubuntu is just one of half a dozen distros that put out amazing new desktop releases. In fact, Ubuntu is arguably one of the least interesting releases of the year.
It's not just distros either, the variety of great desktop environments continues to grow as well. It used to be that there was GNOME and KDE and then everything else that sorta worked, sometimes. In the last couple of years though that's changed and it really became noticeable this year with great new releases from Cinnamon, MATE and Elementary OS's desktop. At the same time old stalwarts like XFCE and LXDE have evolved to the point that they're every bit as user-friendly as the rest.
This year saw Linux Mint turn out version 17.1 with an updated version of Cinnamon which offers an amazing experience. Elementary OS Luna is brilliant as well (though only a beta, proceed with caution). GNOME 3.14 still feels slightly incomplete, but Fedora 21 manages to put together a very useable desktop with it anyway. And the often over-looked KDE project has put out some great updates this year as well, which, for my money, look their best in openSUSE 13.2.
It's not here yet but Debian's upcoming "Jessie" is looking great as well, unless you're really really opposed to SystemD, in which case, hey, there's a fork for you.
Then there there's Ubuntu. 14.04 was a very solid Long Term Support release which can serve as the foundation for not just Ubuntu's future, but that of Linux Mint as well. Then came 14.10, which felt like perhaps it would have been more appropriately released as 14.04.2, but Canonical never had big plans for 14.10 anyway because somewhere in the Aeron chairs of the Canonical offices the future is being written. Literally.
Forgive me if you've heard this one before, but 2015 could be the year of the Linux mobile device. Or at least the year of <em>a</em> Linux mobile device. Provided of course Canonical can convince one of its hinted at hardware partners to produce an actual device. Bq? Meizu? Anyone? Bueller?
If nothing else at least the longstanding "Year of Linux" turns out to have a mobile addendum which should keep the joke going for a while yet. Thanks for that at least Canonical.
Still, even if it is easy to poke fun at the idea of mobile Linux devices, it sure would be great if Canonical pulls it off. I have been critical of Canonical in the past, but I really do look forward to seeing what it can produce in the mobile space. If for no other reason than opening the market for others to follow suit.
Canonical is hardly the only company trying to bring a Linux-based mobile device to market. Jolla, makers of Sailfish OS recently raised $1,824,055 USD on Indiegogo with the promise of a Sailfish OS-based tablet. That's 480 percent of the $380,000 goal. If nothing else there's at least a large market of Linux enthusiasts clamouring for a Linux-based device.
The real question is, when will we get it?
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