大多数软件和硬件领域不太会通过这种快速Most software and hardware domains don't usually go through this kind of fast progress and things happen at a slower pace, but things have been wild even for people who have a better insight into the industry. It's hard, if not impossible, to pinpoint a certain moment or a certain event, but Linux development exploded and changed exponentially in the course of just a couple of years.
There is no single authority which can decree that the year of the Linux desktop has arrived or that it has passed. We can only try to deduce it from what we've seen until now and it's actually up to the users. Some are more conservative and not too many things have changed for them, and others are more progressive and they just can't get enough. It really depends on what your outlook is.
The spark that seems to have put everything in motion appears to be the launch of Steam for Linux, although we've seen some important movement of the Linux gaming scene before that became a reality. In any case, Valve is probably the catalyst of the resurgence of what we're seeing today.
The Linux desktop has been in a kind of slow evolution in the past decade and nothing really changed. There have been a lot of innovations for sure, but the market share has remained almost the same. No matter how cool the desktop became or how many features Linux had well before anyone else, things have remained largely the same, and that includes the participation of companies making proprietary software. They largely ignored Linux.
Now, more companies have shown interest in the Linux platform in the past year than they did in the last 10. Maybe it's a natural evolution and Valve had nothing to do with it, but Linux has finally reached a level where it can be used and understood by regular users, not just people fascinated by open source.
The drivers are better, game studios are porting games now on a regular basis, applications and middleware that we never thought we would see on Linux have started to show up, the Linux kernel development has an incredible pace, the installation process for most of the major distros is usually trivial, and all of these are just the tip of the iceberg.
