On Mar 22, 2012, at 12:32 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
The mitigating factors are:
a) the desktop market could be considered unlikely to literally _die_.
What may happen instead is it could become much more of a niche - in
fact, very similar to what it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. There
could always be a small amount of people who actually need or want a
desktop computer, and these people could be rather close to the
self-same ones they were in the 1980s and 1990s: people whose use cases
intrinsically depend on large screens, keyboards, and significant whacks
of power.
I use Photoshop, Lightroom, work on multi-gigabyte image files, as do my customers. I
intrinsically depend on a large screen, a keyboard, and occasional whacks of power. I
haven't owned a desktop computer in 6 years.
The desktop form factor will die eventually, although the "desktop user" need
will remain. Whether the need will be met with more powerful tablets and shared resources,
or more efficient form factors that aren't so ugly, power hungry, and space
inefficient - or a combination. We'll have to see. It depends on how much and how fast
that market shrinks, but it will shrink.
I get along just fine without a literal desktop computer, have for 6 years with just
laptops/ I will eventually ditch the laptop also. Just a matter of time. I do own an old
smart phone. I do not own a tablet or pad.
And I'm not unique.
I'm just saying that broad sweeping generalizations about The Market are
well and good, but it's probably a good idea before deploying them to
stop and think about whether they're exactly applicable to the Fedora
project, or if maybe they could use a little modification first.
People's needs, expectations evolve. Even developers, content creators, and geeks.
Surviving projects will survive because they adapt to people's needs. Neither the
market, nor its ideas, will adapt to Fedora.
Chris Murphy