What is a semi-geeky blog without considering this question of a January?

I was listening to the excellent-please-send-me-a-free-gift-cheers Tux Radar podcast on the way to work this morning, and they were discussing just that topic. Thankfully they said straight away that the question was becoming ever more clearly a stupid one, and possibly irrelevant. A few years ago it meant toppling Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop PC market. It meant Linux being installed on more home computers than Windows is. Recently it has become clear that we are no closer to that occurence than we were five years ago, although Linux itself has come on in leaps and bounds (it’s become a bit less geeky, a bit less snooty about being purely open – in general that is, with specific exceptions which are all well and good).

But this will be the year when we truly discover what ‘Linux on the desktop’ really means, and how it will happen alongside MS’s continuing dominance.

Google Chrome OS will bring the Linux Operating System to a mass audience, but they won’t know about it. They won’t know it’s Linux, and I don’t blame them for not caring. But they’ll be using it in it’s niche of low-powered netbooks, and possibly tablets. It will succeed greatly where Ubuntu has been making small inroads in the past 12 months. It’ll be on BBC.co.uk and in your favourite geeky mag. It will become the obvious choice for such mobile devices where Windows 7, despite its fans, will look slightly ridiculous and over the top.

Chrome OS is the most recent, and most publicised, example of how Linux is increasing its inroads into consumer electronics and embedded systems (mostly phones, DVRs etc), and I think that hopes for a critical mass of Linux installations on the desktop are becoming increasingly remote.

But that is not to say we should worry about this. We all know by now that cloud computing is becoming increasingly important, and 90% of everyday applications have open source and/or Linux versions available. They’ll have to be available once Chrome gets a foothold, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix and similar continue to expand on smaller devices.