Ever since the mid-1990s, pundits have predicted that the Internet and the desktop would merge. However, exactly what that means has taken time to emerge. Today, the most common vision is that the desktop will be reduced to the launchpad for online applications, which is the premise for Google’s Chrome Operating System.
But, unperceived by most people, another possibility is now being defined in the KDE 4 series of releases: a vision of desktop-oriented computing in which individual applications are enhanced by Internet resources without being dependent on them, and all online interaction is not funneled through a browser. This vision of the merger of the Internet and the desktop seems a far healthier alternative than accepting online applications — so much so that I believe that which of these visions wins out could directly determine the survival of free software…
