> people rely less than ever on native applications, so it's much easier to move now;
I find it ironic that the GNU/Linux is the one that helped make the GNU/Linux desktop less relevant by fostering web apps. Anything that is able to run a recent browser is good enough.
Also the desktop fragmentation and FOSS culture, makes it almost impossible to sell desktop software to GNU/Linux users.
> almost impossible to sell desktop software to GNU/Linux users.
If you look at the engineering workstation segment, there are companies with hundreds or thousands of seats pooling FlexLM licenses of very expensive software, namely for microelectronics design.
Those seats are typically RedHat or CentOS. If you look up revenues for Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys, most of it is EDA software licensing (remainder is mostly IP and training.)
Not prime time news, but not pocket change either.
I find it ironic that the GNU/Linux is the one that helped make the GNU/Linux desktop less relevant by fostering web apps. Anything that is able to run a recent browser is good enough.
True, but it also boosts the non-traditional Linux desktop. Something like the Chromebook would be a flop 15 years ago.
I don't consider Chromebooks a Linux desktop, because normal people don't even know what is Crouton.
They only see a window manager taking care of Chrome instances, with ChromeOS specific APIs.
Google can release a Chromebook without any access to Crouton, replaced the Linux kernel by something else, and no USA school buying Chromebooks would notice.
Same applies to Android, specially after the Android 7 locked on linking to private shared objects.
I find it ironic that the GNU/Linux is the one that helped make the GNU/Linux desktop less relevant by fostering web apps. Anything that is able to run a recent browser is good enough.
Also the desktop fragmentation and FOSS culture, makes it almost impossible to sell desktop software to GNU/Linux users.