“Linux has been ahead in terms of desktop innovation and the others have been copying since the turn of the century. There are lots of reasons why Windows is and will likely remain dominant on conventional desktop systems but lack of a better alternative has never been one of them. The quality of the Linux desktop has been fine for more than a decade.
“With a new major Windows release just around the corner we have been treated to the usual slew of articles proclaiming the Linux desktop dead and the Linux market share as vanishingly small. I even saw one article claiming Linux desktop usage declined from 2.5% of the market to under 1%. Of course, no source was given for this ludicrous claim and no survey methodology was provided. As I pointed out in my 2010 article, numbers like this come either from deliberately parsing data in a way that is unfavorable to Linux or from wildly unreliable web counters. For example, if you want to claim Linux is unimportant you don’t use numbers from Forrester Research, who count both tablets and netbooks as part of the desktop market.”