It made me think back to ten years ago, back when os x wasn't out just yet, and many hackers (including myself) were using desktop linux as a windows alternative. There were competitors such as BeOS porting to any x86 machine, and a slew of company-backed linux distros advertising themselves as the way to go.

Microsoft won the whole battle at the time because:

1) MacOS X was just shipping, and was sadly limited to PowerPC computers.

2) Linux distro vendors weren't investing much in providing a great user experience. They were at most (and still are) skinning Gnome or KDE and calling it a day. Doing any investment required creating X, which would be expensive for a post-internet-bubble company to undertake.

3) Microsoft shipped windows XP. It's ugly by today's standards, but it's surprisingly the most prevalent OS ten years later.

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Now, after 10 years we come to a crossroads again. The gold is currently developing for smartphones and webapps, and the pickaxes for the most part don't need to run windows.

How WebOS will make desktop linux finally viable:

1) Last I checked, WebOS is based on the linux kernel. This is attractive for folks tired of juggling and making ports to BSD. The great interface to HP is partly a sunk cost due to it's development for the phone already.

2) WebOS on the desktop needs to quickly attract a crowd of developers. While they've made a great js-based platform for their smartphone apps, they need to go one step further for native desktop apps. My guess is that they're going to do a similar step to what sony was attempting to do recently and have some form of an openstep implementation. This is to attract the macos developers to quickly port desktop apps.