I feel obliged to note the "desktop is dead" post by way of reference and respond with a few stats:smaragdus wrote:Windows is a dying platform and this site is dying too- it seems no one is interested any more- there are no discussions any longer, there are 3 to 5 regular posters left
- According to this website, our traffic is admittedly down over the last few months. However, even the lowest estimates I could find still give us North of 4,500 visitors a day. That's roughly 1.6 million a year!
- Windows was recently eclipsed by Android but it's very far from dead. There is no plan for medium or low-end Mac/iOS option to compete with Windows and Google's platform is far from indestructible.
- According to Google Trends, "Portable software" is less searched than it was back in 2009-2010.
- Android and iOS are a rat's nest of bad software, poorly labeled and shoved through a terrible "app store" interface that seems to only seems to get worse with time. As soon as Android turned off the AppBrain folks I knew it was going down.
- Linux is getting better but still doesn't have anything happening on the desktop.
- MacOS freeware is a joke. Just try watching Softpedia's MacOS freeware section for a few days.
- Non-portable Windows freeware has too much adware/bundleware.
Finally, for my part, I've had my time and energy divided recently due to circumstance but I'm coming up on 10 years here and still haven't lost interest in the topic. I want to work on something that's actively solving problems for people and at least once every few months one of my friends tells me about a program here that saved them an entire afternoon of headaches. I have little doubt that's the case for at least some of those 4,500 people who drop by.