Here in the tech community — as in so many others — declaring the birth or death of an era is a tried-and-true path to social fame. For that reason, proclamations to that effect are pretty dang common. Those of us here in the Linux community are pretty accustomed to such announcements by now — just witness the never-ending “year of Linux desktop” and “death of desktop Linux” rotation that seems to besiege us year after year. Yet there’s no denying that the bearer of such messages makes a difference.
