I never understood this. Why would market share of Linux on the desktop matter? I've always viewed Linux on the desktop as something for power users and developers, and thousands of said power users and developers are continually developing and maintaining multiple distros and thousands of applications. It's not like it's a stale and abandoned paradigm that's left to die.
Was gonna say exactly the same. People thinks that if it's not popular among the masses it's "dead". Totally wrong, since it covers a completely different niche.
The author seems to forget that some people actually enjoys configuring and hacking their systems in detail. Also there is the people who hates using the mouse, and wants to do everything with the console and keyboard.
I think it's because even power users enjoy doing "regular user" stuff sometimes and it's nice to be able to do it all on one machine without resorting to dual boots or VMs.
Having a bigger market share means that hardware/software vendors are more likely to consider supporting Linux to at least some degree.
For example I like to listen to music while programming, so it's nice that Spotify is available on my dev machine.
