BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES

If you were around Linux 15 years ago, you’d probably agree the ecosystem was quite different then. There was no systemd (for bad or for good). Microsoft was a strong opponent to Linux and open source in general; it has been only a few years since Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called it “cancer”. There was no Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox was slowly gaining market share from Internet

Explorer. Yet IE6 was still strong, which was making it much harder to develop rich web applications, something that Microsoft supposedly didn’t want to happen. The operating system you ran was a key factor to which applications were available to you, and we were continuously declaring the next year to be the year of Linux on desktops.

Fast forward to 2019. What do you see now? Websites became web applications, and sometimes it’s not easy to tell these two apart. Desktop applications are often web applications in disguise, thanks to platforms like Electron (which you may or may not love). The web itself is heading towards another monopoly: this time, a Google Chrome one. There is still no Photoshop for Linux, but with most applications essentially being cross-platform, I don’t remember the last time that I had to run Wine.

Is this a victory? Not as we envisioned it. However, advances in technology such as cloud computing and mobile made Linux a commodity. It’s still not very big on desktops, but at least is big enough for Microsoft to release the quite successful VS Code, open-source a good part of .NET and even contribute to the kernel. Boundaries are blurred.