 Tom here from Lawrence Systems, and I've seen this article by Eric S. Raymond. Are we at the last phase of the desktop wars? And I know right behind me. I've got, you know, Microsoft loves Linux, so that means they're embracing it. Therefore, if we're not going to extinguish it, maybe they're adopting it. And I figured I'd dive into this topic because it seems to get thrown at me a lot because as a fellow Linux enthusiast and someone who uses open source on the daily. I mean, I'm running PopOS here. I have, you know, my video editing I do on here. I edit the thumbnails on here. It's the latest version of PopOS, as you can see right here. And yes, I'm a big enthusiast Linux advocate, but I also live in a real world where people still use Windows and the primary function of my company isn't just network engineering and making YouTube videos, but also we provide Windows support for businesses. So I want to talk about the myth versus reality of when we're getting Linux desktop and what that's going to look like over time and kind of reference this Eric article because I think it's pretty good. Before we dive into that, let's first feel like to learn more about me and my company. Head over to laurancesystems.com. If you'd like to hire a short project, there's a hires button right at the top. If you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has, there is a join button here for YouTube and a Patreon page. Your support is greatly appreciated. If you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel, check out the affiliate links down below. They're in the description of all of our videos, including a link to our shirt store. We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out, well, randomly. So check back frequently. And finally our forums, forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel. Now back to our content. Now, if you don't know who Eric Raymond is or why people even listen to him, Eric is a fellow hot sauce lover and I've actually had a couple of good conversations with him about open source software while eating some hot sauce a few years ago at an event. But he's also a long time software developer and has some really good insights into the open source ecosystem been there since the beginning in the open source world. And his article, especially, I'll leave a link so you can read the full length of it, but it's not too long. But what he's getting at is since Azure is becoming a core piece of Microsoft's cash cow essentially, that's where more of their money is being derived and through services, through Office 365, Azure and the such, that selling Windows desktop licenses is kind of going away. But it isn't gone. And with Windows Susystem for Linux getting more enhanced than Microsoft doing code contributions to the kernel to make it a better experience, that at some point Windows will just become an emulation layer. And Linux will be the base of everything. While I think that may be some truth in that, the reality I think it's going to take a whole lot longer and no 2020 is not the year of the Linux desktop. The year of the Linux desktop for myself was around 2010 when I said I'm sick of Windows. I'm an enthusiast. I know there's probably a lot of enthusiasts watching this. I've talked about running Linux on the desktop from the enthusiast standpoint for quite a while. Many security researchers and cybersecurity people all run Linux. That's a very familiar space for them that offers a lot of tooling and for all the things that I need to do, including managing my business and my business is managing other technology for other companies, I can use Linux because so many of the things we have are web applications. That being said, the long tail of legacy means it's not likely to happen anytime soon because we still haven't gotten rid of Windows XP. There is always these old systems that there's no market pressure to move. And that's really what changes the dynamics of things. So it's not like we can say, well, Windows has got this and this levels of integration. And I think there's definitely some truth that Microsoft is well in some ways maybe tired of the cost center that is Windows, but they know that people use Windows. And as long as there's a demand for them to use it, Microsoft is going to keep selling the license. Now there's a lot of market pressures at force that are slowly moving things. And for example, if you're a startup, most startups are not looking at what kind of applications can be loaded on a desktop. They'll start with looking at cloud-enabled applications because that's an easier structure to manage, although it has a higher recruiting cost. Obviously, desktop applications, especially when they're existing, there's two different cost factors to think about one. If I'm not hosting it in the cloud, I've spread the compute power across my thousand workstations I have at my business and my handful of servers. Well, that probably has a little bit less cost because all the compute is happening locally. And the pressure of change, what happens with businesses when they go, hey, we're going to switch to this new fancy thing over here. Well, there's the loss of productivity because everyone has to get retrained. There's the transition. Anyone who's gone through changing out a major ERP system, some type of enterprise application that runs the business, that change causes disruptions, causes disruptions potentially in customer service, and has a big cost to do the switch. So companies don't. They will stay on what they do until there is some incredible market pressure to move them off of it. So it's kind of a dynamic. As we see these newer companies start up, we're going to keep seeing web applications drive them. We have some clients that are fully running Chromebooks because the web-based applications they have worked perfectly fine on Google Chrome. Simple as that. They don't need to log in anything. I've seen other companies, and I just talked to one actually earlier today, that runs on Macs and runs on iPads because the application they use, all web-based applications. So the computers are relevant. They said, hey, Mac works for us because we're kind of familiar with that environment, and we're not loading any software. Basically, they open it up, fire up the browser, and away they go. So while we'll see this with new companies, it still kind of pushes the desktop to be more irrelevant than it is a replacement going to Linux. Now, I do see, and Eric mentions this, we're going to see gamers who once again, they would like to probably run Linux, but let's extract that a little bit further. Most people don't care about what operating system they run. Gamers will choose Windows because the games they want to run run on Windows. If all those same games ran on Linux, they would be, okay, whatever, we're moving over to this. The driving force is really the application market. And until that market shifts, until there's enough business pressure to do it, and there's enough cost associated with moving over, that's when this change will finally happen. Because for a company to say, let's gut and replace, like I said, there's the cost of change. The same thing with the gaming community. There are all the different tools they use, sometimes aren't available in Linux yet. So until they fully become available, and of course the games themselves, we're going to see a slow adoption there. So while I don't think it's the year of Linux desktop, I wanted to throw this out there because a lot of people say, why don't you push as an open source enthusiast, solutions like the Linux desktop like I have right here for your clients. And it's just not realistic for most of their application uses. It's not always realistic to get their printers working, although Linux printer support has gotten much better. From a day to day management standpoint, there's still a lot of challenges. I don't really see Linux in the short term at all becoming the desktop of choice of people outside of the enthusiasts and security professionals. But it is a slow change that we are seeing as more applications are being cloud enabled. And that's specifically true because well, when you look at the marketplace and what people are going to school for, they're not going to school develop the next Windows application. They're usually looking at developing another application that's going to be worked in the cloud. Look at the tooling that works in the IT industry. More and more of it is server side tools that we run that have a web interface on them. That way we don't really have to use a locally loaded application. This is what actually what enables me working as an IT professional to manage all these tools such as the tools we use in SolarWinds. They don't require desktop applications for the majority of the tooling. Therefore I can just open up a browser and my operating system becomes irrelevant again with a few couple exceptions to a couple remote tools that I need to take control of people's computers that do need Windows. For the most part though for my day-to-day it's not a problem using Linux. Now the one exception is this is being recorded on a Windows computer and why haven't I switched? Well, this little box right here that allows me to do this fancy switching at the press of a button once again works better in Windows so Tom still does run Windows because it's needed. That's part of living in the real world. I always start with can we do it with open source but that answer isn't 100% yes all the time. I know people who are the hardcore enthusiasts and the purists in this market go you if you like Linux you have to be one of those completely crazy all-in everything has to be Linux open source top to bottom. It is a preference I start with but as a business owner as someone who's worked in tech for 25 years as someone who does outside IT support I have to go with what works for my clients and support that solution as much as I don't like running Windows. Also I will throw out there the dogfooding as it's called I have to use what my clients use is one of the dumbest things that I believe too many techs argue against that Tom your clients run Windows so you should run Windows not at all. I don't even think that's a good argument because the reality is they don't care what they run they only run Windows back to the reasons they need for the application therefore if there's a better solution and I can switch someone off of it I'll do so but if there's not they're stuck where they're stuck and the people who think about that stuff are always tech enthusiasts people work in the industry like us certainly not the end users business owners look at it from a much more practical standpoint what are the tools I need to pay for and what is the maintenance on those tools that is something they incorporate into the costs of their business and that's even how I sell my services because these are the components it takes to run your business and the applications you need so your primary business function if it's hauling freight if it's being a medical professional isn't thinking about the operating system and underlying stuff that is still what we think about as technical people but that is the way you want to put this all together and this is the way you have to look at it and why it takes so long for technologies to change and especially the Linux stuff despite me being an enthusiast and talking about Linux desktops it's not something that's practical to push to clients but you know hey I do like the perspective and like I said I'll leave this link over here he's had some insights over the years especially if you're familiar with Eric Raymond at all you may have read the Cathedral and the Bazaar talking about the kind of the different approaches to software development I may reread that it's been a while since I've put a thought to it and of course if you're also maybe familiar he was in Revolution OS and you know we thought Linux and I gotta admit back then I was probably a little bit more optimistic it would change and I still feel change is possible I'm just much more realistic about it that's why I made this video to kind of throw my thoughts out there on it so no it's not the other Linux desktop but it's slowly inches towards being Microsoft's well less relevance on the desktop which of course is kind of better for all of us because even Microsoft dragging all this legacy code that's been full of holes I mean like don't get me wrong my business model is you know trying to create support programs that are very good around that we all know as IT professionals anytime you see a Windows update all the problems with it you're just like yeah that's just part of our job is dealing with how many Windows updates in 2020 spent a particularly rough year for large vulnerabilities in Microsoft so from a threat model that may be another market force that pushes all this a lot faster as the threat models the way to close them is kind of looking at more web applications so you can narrow the threat surface the more you can reduce the threat surface the better we all are all right and thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time