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What Will Linux Be Capable Of, 3 Years Down the Road?
An anonymous reader writes "In a prediction of the open-source future, InfoWeek speculates on What Linux Will Look Like In 2012. The most outlandish scenario foresees Linux forsaking its free usage model to embrace more paid distros where you get free Linux along with (much-needed) licenses to use patent-restricted codecs. Also predicted is an advance for the desktop based on — surprise — good acceptance for KDE 4. Finally, Linux is seen as making its biggest imprint not on the PC, but on mobile devices, eventually powering 40 million smartphones and netbooks. Do you agree? And what do you see for Linux in 4 years?"
Linux already has full support for the ntfs file system. All you need to do is install ntfs-3g, and specify that as the partition's file system.
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Most Linux systems are already embedded systems (phones and the like). These far outstrip Linux usage in desktops and servers. The trend will only grow as more and more phones switch to Linux and desktop usage stays about the same.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It doesn't have to be huge. Take it from a guy a year older than you: learn Linux programming, learn it well. Get an internship with it in college. This makes your resume better than that of the college-educated code monkeys CS departments turn out nowadays who've never used anything but Java on Windows.
Definitely. I have attended part of a talk on Akademy about Human-Computer Interaction, and there are massive improvements made in usability. IIRC, for 2 years now, we've had summer of usability students looking at KDE to see where it can be improved. A series of usability guidelines was developed, along with the codebase to make it easier for developers to keep to them.
These are the things that don't get much attention, but really, KDE4 is constantly evaluated in terms of usability.
One CS student VS 893 DOS games: Let's play oldies
No, this is false. The last patent doesn't expire til' 2017. http://www.tunequest.org/a-big-list-of-mp3-patents/20070226/
"there just aren't enough people interested, for example, to allow linux boxes to be sold at places like Circuit City, and I don't think that will change in 4 years."
Linux boxes ARE being sold at places like Circuit City, and people like them. Asus eeepc and aspire, hp small notepad, etc.
As to the rest? Not equilibrium yet. Linux is growing in datacenters; support for large SMP will improve (especially in management; I'd look for the most growth in virtualization). The "GUI" will improve also. There should be growth with 3D drivers (especially AMD(ATI) chipsets). Intel Larrabee should inspire growth in super-computing.
OpenOffice.org/Firefox/other standard applications are coming along nicely. But, with improved 3D will come standard 3D desktop *and* application support (currently, only available with nVidia's hardware and drivers). This should also be possible with ATI and Intel graphic stacks. In turn, this should inspire extra visual support in applications (think real-time graphics rendered from a spreadsheet). Also, I would expect growth in media transcoding.
What should remain stable is the CLI interface, and base software (VIM should still be VI, with enhancements, GCC should improve, but not be radically different, LaTeX will still be kicking, etc.)
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I'm not very well-versed in OS X development. Could you tell me how those "system services" work?
I go to /System/Library/Services and drop in a file called "Wordservice.service". Then I copy your text into a text box in Safari (or any other program that uses the standard APIs), I highlight it, and select "Safari: Services: Convert: Rotate13" and the text is instantly transformed into the following:
V'z abg irel jryy-irefrq va BF K qrirybczrag. Pbhyq lbh gryy zr ubj gubfr "flfgrz freivprf" jbex?
In this same way Apple has added a (among many) spelling checker, dictionary/thesaurus/wikipedia lookup, and grammar checker to the OS, accessible to every application (they also added a GUI element in the right-click contextual menu for easier access). Before they added the grammar checker, I just added my own, along with the text manipulation service, language translation services, statistical analysis services, and some more I regularly use. I usually assign hotkeys to them rather than navigate to them from the menus. Even more services are offered automatically by other applications I installed, such as Graphiz offering automatic graphing of any tables of numbers I highlight and my LaTeX front end offering automatic formatting of any bibliography information I highlight.
In short it is drag and drop addition of arbitrary functionality that can be accessed from any application without developers needing to do squat to their applications.
I believe the main difference is the integration that you state, and this enabled the whole desktop to be built with those gadgets/plasmoids/widgets/etc. So the desktop interface (menu, taskbar, system tray, etc etc) and the plasmoids are the same thing and that enables you to make much more integrated stuff. All the other "gadget" systems are not integrated with the rest of the system, they're just living in their own world separate from the rest of the desktop.
I think the ability to create native plasmoids is also unique. When your taskbar is a plasmoid, you don't really want it all to be running in JS or something.
What Will Linux Be Capable Of, 3 Years Down the Road?
And what do you see for Linux in 4 years?
I also will go out on a limb and say it will enable Slashdot editors to make titles consistent with summaries!