GNOME’s Ambitious 10x10 Goal Failed 10 Years Ago
Ten years is more than just a decade if we’re talking about things related to IT. With innovative technology disrupting the markets so regularly and new things replacing old things so rapidly now, ten years feel like a lifetime’s worth of gadgets and toys.
And yet, despite all this progress, the “Linux Desktop” is still not a reality. At least not with the marketshare envisioned by GNOME ten years ago.
The suggestion of the eventual success of the Linux Desktop comes up every couple of months and the forums and subreddits radiate with ambigious feelings when that happens.
Regarding its 10x10 goal, GNOME looks arrogant in retrospect, naive at best. But at the time (around 2005–2010) there was indeed an opportunity for alternative desktop operating systems to make a dent in the established markets. It was at that time that those numbers were not set in stone anymore.
In 2007 Microsoft had created the Windows Vista debacle for itself (besides other things) and Apple was focusing most of their efforts on marketing their iPhones (2007) and iPads (2010).
The desktop was not a priority.
And the GNOME project had seen this opportunity, but sadly, as we know roughly ten years later, instead of making the classical desktop great again™️️, all…
