'The world is really changing': Why Linux on desktop is taking a sudden leap forward (TechRepublic)

Personally, I think Linux was always the most stable option around. If you're old enough to remember, think back to the early and mid 90s. Windows was garbage, and rebooting randomly was considered "normal". Think about Mac of the time and the spinning wheel of death. In comparison to anything else, Linux was always the most stable thing around. Weeks or months or years of uptime. Linux was always an industrial grade operating system.

What has really changed is that tech has become the most visible industry, and the number of people programming and doing data science and doing AI research has increased to a point where there is more demand for Linux. Windows has become an even bigger pile of flaming garbage. Catalina completely ruined the progress OS X had made and phones home constantly. It also killed all backward compatibility. macOS had really taken a lot of the developer world, and now it sucks. No one cares about Safari or IE. Office is in the cloud. Valve and Lutris have made gaming on Linux a thing. At the same time, Linux is free and there are 40 million unemployed people in the USA alone.

Most of the time, technologies emerge and become dominant when surrounding technologies are up to it. So, you couldn't have cheap computers until the materials science and theory were present. You couldn't have Linux until both hacker culture and the internet were present. You couldn't have Linux become dominant until people cared about operating systems in some way and Linux had to have the hardware and software support people are looking for. It's a confluence of events. Personally, I am happy to see Lenovo ship Linux, but I don't think that any increase in the use of Linux has anything to do with vendor offerings.