> they just never let down a rope to the consumer market

So this is a coded statement that I fear most people won't get, but it's pretty profound.

If I'm getting bigyabai's point, they are saying that people that are professionals at choosing operating systems have overwhelmingly chosen Linux, and it's really in the consumer markets, where folks don't have any special knowledge or judgment, that Windows and MacOS thrive. That's a good insight, because it's completely true. Both Windows and MacOS cater to audiences that, for the most part, don't care or want to care about how technology works, and this makes them vulnerable. Apple and Microsoft capitalize on this.

Your answer, and GP's reference to Debian, is highlighting the misunderstanding very precisely: Microsoft is not just an operating system vendor. If they stopped making Windows tomorrow, Microsoft would still exist and do well economically, because it's a hydra with a thousand heads.

Hence my point: The classical concept of "displacement" doesn't apply to corporations at that scale anymore.

Apple was a relativly small company on the verge of death and came all the way back to surpass Microsoft.

Indeed it did. Thirty years ago, when the world wasn't utterly dominated by giant tech companies like it is now. Back then Microsoft wasn't capable of buying a country if they so desired; they couldn't hold most world governments hostage, didn't have a product portfolio that covers almost any organisation globally, and didn't have a trove of petabytes (more?) of data to train artificial intelligence with.

The world is a different place now, and old rules don't apply anymore.

I actually think Microsoft was much more dominant in the 90s. There really weren't solid alternatives to Windows and that was their Cash cow. Now there's tons of alternatives to virtually everything they do

Are you referring to Android?

I think he's referring to the fact that, while everyone jokes about "year of Linux on the desktop":

In the last 30 years, we moved overwhelmingly from local workloads to internet workloads

We moved overwhelmingly away from desktop and to mobile

Android is the dominant mobile OS, and it's hand-in-hand with Linux at the kernel level

The internet, meanwhile, is powered overwhelmingly by Linux

So I tend to agree that just because normal folks think of "computing" as the Windows or Mac machine sitting in front of them, the world is now predominantly powered by Linux.

... GNU/Linux smth. ...

I generally appreciate the distinction, but I purposely did not use that distinction here because Android is only Linux if you don't include GNU.

The distinction is relevant here, because "year of Linux on the desktop" doesn't refer to Android. The philosophy of "Linux" is that the user has control. That applies more to BSD than Android. Also it's "on the desktop".

I fear we're talking past one another.

Oh sorry is it correct that you meant, that the "year of Linux on the desktop" doesn't matter anymore, because computing switched to mobile and servers and there the Linux kernel is dominating, while I understood that you mean that Android counts toward the "year of Linux on the desktop"?

Yep, exactly!