Every year someone says that this is the year of the Linux desktop. It is never the year of the Linux desktop. There are many reasons for this. Drivers. Games. Adobe. Microsoft Office. Battery life. The thing where you close the lid of a laptop and open it again later to find that it passed into the good night. These explanations are all correct in the small and unsatisfying in the large. They explain why a person did not switch to Linux last Thursday. They do not explain why the desktop, as an institution, will continue to belong to Apple and Microsoft. And now there is a new and more depressing explanation. The future computer user is not a person. Or at least not only a person. The robots are coming for the desktop. The interesting part is that the ramps were already there. They were called accessibility APIs. If you use a Mac and open the Accessibility Inspector tool that’s built into the system (you really should try it), you can see a second version of the computer, hiding inside the first one.…