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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?"
based on â" surprise â" good acceptance for KDE 4.
Definitely agree there. KDE4 is going to dramatically improve very quickly. They've made a huge development investment in the underlying libraries, and that will come to fruition this year (and already has somewhat with KDE 4.1). My impression is that it's going to get better. Couple that with a maturing X.org, and you have the makings of a beautiful desktop.
No it's not predictable. I am not (well at least not trying to be) flamebaiting and/or trolling but given this is Linux we are talking about FLOSS and innovation, so we can't possible know.
Innovation wouldn't be innovation if we allready knew what is going to happen in three years, now would it?
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I hope there is better driver suport. Getting *nix to work with graphics cards and NICs is too much of a pain for average users (and even skilled users).
~ Mooga
Linux distros into one category.
In four years Distros made to be user-friendly like Ubuntu will probably be heavier on system requirements but nearing the ease of use of Windows (IE easier driver and plugin installs as some are still a bit touch-and-go)
Distros like Puppy will still be lightweight and have little change to fit on those old Pentium 2s you just can't bear to part with.
Distros like Gentoo will still be hardcore users only with every option available only after heavy config and compiles.
I think usability for the average user will improve on the "fluffy" side of linux, but a lot of the distros do exactly what they're made to.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
I hope it doesn't become a mess of binary drivers. Binary drivers are one of the worst things happening to Linux. They ruin the stability and the usefulness of hardware. As fas as I am concerned, they are not the pragmatic choice. I consider an idealist to be a pragmatist who thinks about the future. I have found that the "pragmatic' choice always comes back to bite me, at which time it stops being pragmatic.
Anyway, enough of that rant. On to CODECS. That depends on the patent systems in various countries. Currently FFMPEG has had a history of producing extremely find implementations of CODECS. They sometimes lag behind on the very newest ones, but their more mature ones suprass all others in terms of quality and speed. And they generally get better with time. Anyway, software patents don't exist everywhere and they are unlikely to do so within 3 years. So, it looks like codecs will remain free and FREE for a while yet.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
D-BUS: have you heard of it?
OK, I'll stop the sarcasm and just state the facts. D-Bus is now used by both GNOME and KDE. It can also be installed for any customized DE a user creates. The future for Linux looks like the past, but more so: some distros will go for ease-of-use without customization and others will go for customization over ease-of-use, while the whole system gets more and more modular and scripted.
Another 1000 days, more or less.
Have gnu, will travel.
...I think there needs to be a *LOT* of education of the Windows & Apple crowd to make them understand that Linux refers just to the core kernel whilst all the other applications around it are Open Source.
So hopefully, by 2012, they will begin to understand that by viewing Linux purely as an attack on their own OSes of choice, they actually do themselves a great injustice by completely choosing to ignore the basic fact that, by design, just about any piece of Open Source software does run or can be made to run on their OSes of choice.
And rather than parting with any of their hard earned money to pay for what is frequently overpriced & buggy commercial software, by holding on to their money & just giving a small amount of their time to trying out some of these applications without having to worry about changing their OS, they can play a positive role in ensuring that everyone gets a choice of using commercial or free software, whatever fits their needs.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I think Linux has gotten to a level of equilibrium where it's probably not going to improve vastly in any ways that will be obvious to users. There are some things that are just design decisions, and aren't going to change. E.g., for audio applications, it can sometimes be a problem that linux doesn't have a lot of real-time support; there are real-time patches, but they don't look like they'll ever make it into the mainstream kernel, and in any case linux was never intended as a hard real-time system like qnx. There are some things that aren't going to change because of economics. Currently, we have decent hardware support for many devices, but it's still often a hassle, the quality is often lousy, and the drivers are often binary blobs; even if linux increases its share of the desktop significantly in the next four years, it will still be a tiny niche compared to Windows, so we'll still probably have a lot of the same hassles. Similar situation for availability of more preinstalled systems through more retail channels -- 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.
Ease of installation is already pretty good, and I think the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. The vast majority of users will never be able to handle installing an OS on their own, and that's not going to change. I'm still experiencing problems like x.org not being able to handle odd-sized flatscreen monitors, and I kind of doubt that's going to improve vastly, because it's like whack-a-mole with the low-end hardware manufacturers in Asia who basically want to sell as many widgets as possible to Windows users in its 1-year product lifetime.
As far as codecs ... well, you can already pay for codecs, so if you can pay for codecs in 2012, how does that qualify as a change? For mp3, decoding is already royalty-free, and as far as encoding it kind of depends on which patents you really think are valid and which are just trolls, but I've seen statements that encoding will be patent-free by 2010.
Apps? Firefox is already a browser, and in 2012 it will still be a browser. I think OOo has already long since reached a state of equilibrium in which the codebase is such a mess, and the developer community so closed, that there is basically no more improvement going on. E.g., users (myself included) have been begging for years now for better curve fitting, and better integration of curve fitting into the GUI; the result is that over all those years there has been marginal improvement in this area, but it's still way behind what my students are used to in Excel.
Find free books.
Base window manager is irrelevant. Users don't care whether it's KDE or Gnome. Behold the Cube! Behold the wobbly windows. Behold the 3D tiling! Behold I say!
Show potential Linux users a demo of that floating cube, and you will ship millions of Linux boxes. I have observed this effect, first hand. If you've got a business selling Linux boxes and you don't have such a demo set up in shop, you are wasting your time. You think OSX got where it is because of its Kernel features?
May the Maths Be with you!
Linux hasn't had any major changes in the past three years, why would you think it'll have any in the next three?
Because it hasn't had any major changes in the past three years?
"It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad."
Linux in 2012 will look a lot like Linux in 2002.
.
The OEM system install has been the gold standard in the home and SOHO market for close on to thirty years.
It has been demonstrated time and time again that the system that "just works" is what sells - and that there is no room at the bottom.
gOS at WalMart.com is being unloaded at fire sale prices - and the chain has effectively black-flagged the OEM Linux box as a do-little web appliance.
MS Vista at Walmart.com is priced from $350 to $1700.
The budget netbook to the 64 bit MS Vista Quad Core HP Elite with 4 GB RAM, NVIDIA DX10 graphics. Blu-Ray play, HDTV tuner and a tetrabyte of storage.
The very notion may throw the geek into cardiac arrest - but the "upgrade" to XP or Linux is utter fantasy when you look at systems with specs like these - and what is high-end for MS Vista today will be mid-line tomorrow.
No I doubt it. Linux is a server OS and I really think it is going to stay that way unless there is some huge change in attitudes among the FOSS Community.
Change one: Learning having more features doesn't make it better. Can linux do X... Most likely yes. However its defaults are not really setup for that.
Change two: Easy Drivers. Installing a driver should be as easy as drag and drop a tar ball, if it doesn't work drag it to the trash. It should be done via GUI alone
Change three: Make the command line last resort or if you really want to use it. Still there is a lot of stuff depending on the command line, Geeks like us have no problems but if you are use to Mac or windows and you get a blinking cursor what to type? beats me. For example for those who never used a VAX before login to a VAX terminal and try to move around without googling all the commands...
Change four: If you put it in make sure it works. I have seen many apps that just don't work correctly. If it doesn't work don't put it in.
Change five: Eye Candy is not a good GUI make. Yea it is fun for a bit then it gets annoying. Every eye candy element needs a good GUI reasoning for it.
Change six: Listen to complaints don't marginalize them. Yes yes you have invested emotional interest in Linux however people are having real problems with it, and just saying you are dumb or google it, or you google and give them a non working issue actually take it into account and see if you can fix the problem, or make it better. As well acknowledge it is a problem don't blame hardware for having closed source drivers if your open source one doesn't work. Just say it doesn't work or fix it or both.
Change seven: Learn other usage habits just don't copy your own. A software developer uses a computer much differently then a non-developer. You will be surprised how differently if you are willing to examine it. These people are not dumb they go the path that is most intuitive.
Change eight: Getting threw the boring stuff. There is fun stuff to code and annoying stuff. The stuff that is not really hard or easy just annoying. But it needs to get done to give it polish.
Change nine: Swallow you CS Degree pride. I am not saying make sloppy code but be willing to break the rules when it make sense. I have seen many apps that run very poorly because they try to make their CS Professor happy.
Change ten: swallow your pride, sometimes your ideas loose, embrace the winner and make the most out of it. Keeping you gopher client and adding new features is a wast. Or stop tinkering with the token ring driver in hopes it will kill TCP/IP in the future.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Whatever happens, there'll be more people using Linux-based OSes in 3/4 years. However, there's a long way to go before it can properly overtake Windows, IMO: there are several major problems that stop GNU/Linux becoming the ideal consumer desktop OS.
In short, devs need to really get their fingers out and concentrate on creating a truly kick-ass operating system that'll work out of the box on practically any machine you throw it at. This is what led Apple out of its slump in the mid-90s - if the FOSS community can do it now, when the popularity of FOSS is booming, it will truly be a force for Monkey Boy to reckon with.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
No, installing a driver should be as easy and checking a box. Drivers aren't something you download as tarballs; they're something that comes with your kernel. They are part of the kernel, not add-ons. You don't install drivers, you enable them (assuming they were disabled for some reason).
Installing drivers is so 1900s.
see all that fancy stuff vmware does with its VMs and hypervisors? I'm thinking much of that will be commodity in 3 years. linux will be the backbone a lot of IT companies due to it being the hypervisor to their windows installs.
With the way desktop software is heading, to get Linux on the desktop all that has to be done is for it to remain "free", as in "I'm free to do whatever I want with my computer".
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
...or is the author basically predicting that in 2012 we'll have the things we have now?
We currently have pay distros, free distros, and libre distros. KDE 4 already exists. There are already Linux netbooks, and major OEM preinstalls. In the future apparently we'll have Gmail and OpenOffice.
The author also MAGICALLY predicts storage costs will go down.
Linux will also be on servers, and support virtualization.
Will all this stuff happen before 2012?
I'd say so, considering it is all true today.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I see the start now with the smaller ASUS machines. What would be grat is pre-installation on all machines. If possible dualboot or at least the ability to select from either Windows, GNOME or KDE. Yes, also the ability to choose Windows. Choice is good.
The downside might be that one distribution becomes very dominant. The upside will be that it will be out there in greater and greater numbers, which means some serious decision for Microsoft to take (They are not going away) on how to work together with Linux. Hardware developers will write drivers and people selling software will write (closed source) software for Linux, like games.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Id rather take my chances with those two, then having to type my damn password every 5 seconds
sudo stores passwords for 15 minutes after each execution, and you can extend the timeout period in the sudoers file. Try a little Googling next time.
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
With the way desktop software is heading, to get Linux on the desktop all that has to be done is for it to remain "free", as in "I'm free to do whatever I want with my computer".
Remind me how well that's going for you again? Oh yeah, that's right - Vista has 4 times the desktop market share even though it's only been out a ninth of the time Linux has.
As long as mom and pop can go do their online banking, get their email and the kids can use iTunes, they don't give a flying fuck about anything you're on about.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Working, with sound and video, on a late-model iMac G5? That would be nice. Might save me a few grand.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Whether you like it or not, GNOME will be the big one, because nobody controls it.
That makes sense. Just like no businesses would ever use Windows because Microsoft controls it.
Trolltech never controlled KDE and Nokia can't either. Same as Novell can't control Gnome.
OMFG! I've been rooted!
...and if you really believe that, why post it as Anonymous Coward? ;-)
...'tis easier to blame than to improve.
You are most likely doing something terribly wrong if you frequently need root access.
Running as root allows any poorly written application to trash your installation. It also eliminates any need for a privilege escalation exploit in the event that one of the applications you run is compromised.
The desktop may ruin it... If their "open source expert" is to be believed "...command-line hacking for basic system configuration is a thing of the past"
Now, if you consider 'sudo vim /etc/apache2/httpd.conf' or whatever invocation you prefer/require as anything approaching "hacking" you may be in need of a little more learning.
If this guy is to be believed I'll be running unnecessary X sessions to start BIND...
...or maybe just a little, very simple text file manipulation is all that's required to get a service going the way you like it.
The shell will never be a "thing of the past" as it is (and probably will be) the most efficient way to achieve certain simple (and very advanced) things.
Whatever combination of distro and package code that enables PC gaming on Linux will BE the standard.
We can talk about standards being determined by an educated and enlightened board all we want, but people still code web pages to deal with IE quirks because most people us it - despite it NOT conforming to W3C standards.
Tell a gamer they can play any game they want on a free OS and make EASILY it work. You have the numbers you need to set the "social" standard.
Seconded. At least take a couple courses on C or C++. My friend started with Java, but a lot of the stuff he was doing finally "made sense" when he learned about C. Java hides too much of the actual machine's operation to make it a good learning language. Learn memory management. Even if you don't use it much, learn what it is and why it's important. Even Java needs hints from time to time. And that alone will make you a better programmer than 90% of them out there.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Four years from now an Xbox 720 or whatever will be indistinguishable from a PC.
Three years can do a lot. Remember what Linux was like 3 years ago. Be patient and if you want it to improve, CONTRIBUTE. If the majority of games can work on even one distro out of the box, the other distros will lose users. It is the simple model of evolution at work - the other distros will adapt to suit the environment they are in. Open source will make sure the knowledge is shared.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Four years from now will gaming still be on a PC platform, with the success of the Xbox 360 and other current generation consoles?
Because the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are the first ever consoles yes?
The same thing was asked when the paint was still wet on the PS2 and original xbox. Consoles are much more powerful now than the last generation, and not as powerful as the next generation, but console games are not PC games. The two are different, and appeal to different people.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Why do people continue to insist that PC gaming, which is only done by a small percentage of computer users, is so important to Linux. It would be a simple matter to capture 90% of the PC market without ever having a single 3d driver, let alone anything more than the casual games Linux already has.
Hell, before Aero was announced, most systems had almost no graphics (and thus gaming) ability anyway.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
I can't think of any M$ product from inception in '70s that was anything but below sub-par, frought with bugs, hard to use and way overpriced.
No love for Microsoft Flight Simulator?
MicroCrud will disappear from the world o' desktop because they've pissed everybody off on this planet. The sooner they're gone the better.
You think so, don't you? Keep dreaming. Most big corporations aren't ready to drop MS on the desktop yet - although it doesn't look promising based on Vista adoption rates.
My Sysadmin Blog
(Before I go further, I want to note that I am not trying to start a flamewar.)
With all due respect, I think you're forgetting a few things thing. Let's start with what's the biggest for me: a distro that handles the install properly. I have tried many distros over the last few years, and while they've all moved forward with leaps and bounds, none of them "just work" out of the box.
Let's use Ubuntu as an example. It's far better than it was even a year ago, but it's still not perfect. For example, on Saturday, I started the quest of installing Ubuntu as the primary operating system on an older PC. The install seemed to go fine, but after doing the updates, I suddenly had no sound from my SB Live! I managed to resuscitate it after a bit, but that's the sort of thing that just shouldn't happen. Also, earlier today, BMPx randomly stopped working. I had closed everything and put my computer to sleep, and when I came back three hours later, BMPx refused to start.
You make a good point with your video comment: it's pretty easy to play video on Linux now. Will pretty much any video play? Yes. Is it blindly obvious as to how to play an encrypted DVD? It's getting there. Audio's the problem now. People seem to be focusing so much on video now that information on installing support for such things as WMA audio (c'mon, do you really expect people to rerip everything that they most certainly own? :P ).
And then there's the ubiquitous gaming comment. Thankfully, Wine's making progress, but contrary to what Linux zealots want us to think, it's not actually perfect! Support for games using OpenGL is pretty good, and as someone said earlier today in another comment (forgotten where, sorry), so is support for programs that were actually written the "right" way, but it's still far from perfect.
So, I guess, to sum up: these days, Linux is pretty (or at least, not butt-ugly as it used to be), user-friendly (once it's all working properly), and there's a wide range of utility programs out there. It just needs better gaming, easier-to-find information on installing support and codecs for protected audio formats, and it needs to just work (and keep working!) out of the box.
--- Mr. DOS
I would bet you that 90% of the nerdy guys who know how computers work, support the average user working at helpdesks and IT shops, and sell things to the average consumer at best buy play (or have played) games.
I am one of these nerdy guys. I learned how to use linux when I was a kid to run bots for an efnet channel and bsod windows clients and stupid shit. I liked it because it was robust, I could do things without a GUI, and everything worked off of C, which I knew enough of to get around. So, I imagine I am about as willing to use linux as the average nerd. The thing is, I haven't touched it since I was 16 because it doesn't run games.
I think it's great, but would I be comfortable installing it on a friends' or a coworkers computer? heck no! I don't have the years of experience supporting it that I do with windows based systems, so when they ran into some strange driver error or something, I wouldn't really be able to help.
And again, I want to emphasize that the only reason I don't have this experience is that Linux doesn't support the games I play, so I have no lasting motivation to switch my OS.
When I think about how many people I know who feel pretty much the same, and work in similar positions supporting end users, it's really wholly apparent how important gaming is to the Linux movement. If you truly cared about Linux, it seems to me you would do everything in your power to bridge this divide.
So what knowledge of computers will be gleaned from learning Linux? Will you learn how to write the microcode that a processor uses to create an instruction? Will you learn how to perform loading analysis to determine if the processor can drive the other digital components? Will you learn how use logic gates, counters, etc.
Like Windows, Linux is an OS with abstractions that have very little to do with "conceptual knowledge of how computers work".
Four years from now Linux will be doing whatever non-Linux applications are doing two years from now. But you'll still have to compile it with all the right switches.
Seriously, reread that post. If you think he's serious about "4 years will be more than enough to have an actually usable professional Video Editor for Linux" is serious, then you must be new to software, and open source software especially.
>And I think that these 4 years will give Krita and GIMP the time they need to become full-featured and more user-friendly, respectively.
Yeah, GIMP, which was started in *1995*, just needs another 4 years to be not such a piece of shit.
Do you guys get it now? It's *funny*, *laugh*.
>They are part of the kernel, not add-ons
No, driver's are not part of your kernel, because if they were, then you would have to swap out your whole fucking kernel every time someone comes up with a new piece of hardware.
Oh, *you do* have to do that? And you think it is a *feature*?
Thank you anonymous coward for you contribution to this discussion.
Why do people continue to insist that PC gaming, which is only done by a small percentage of computer users, is so important to Linux. It would be a simple matter to capture 90% of the PC market without ever having a single 3d driver, let alone anything more than the casual games Linux already has.
That's absolutely right. I used to play games on PC for a long time, but somewhere down the road I got tired of destabilizing an otherwise solid OS installation with tons of games and their dependencies, in addition to always having to keeping up with the latest hardware to get acceptable frame rates. This was the point where I switched all of my gaming to consoles (PS 1-3, Wii), which so far saved me a lot of money, time and hassle, not to mention the overall better game experience thanks to playing on a HDready TV set.
Back to the point, I think gaming on Linux is the least of all things to worry about. If Linux can become the default choice for standard office work as well as on mobile devices, hardware vendors and game programmers alike will become much more inclined to develop for Linux.
A bit more support from companies (especially the big hardware vendors) should help Linux immensely, too.
I am not devoid of humor.
And you, my friend, have summarised exactly why the majority of people find Linux unusable. Consider this situation:
1) Johnny buys computer and installs Ubuntu
2) A couple of months on, Johnny gets a new sound card. The drivers are in the kernel, but kernel 2.6.28, and not the kernel with Ubuntu
3) He can't easily install the new driver (or rebuild the kernel), so he has to wait several months for the next Ubuntu release (and upgrade his whole OS just to get his sound card working)
You're hilarious. Go to any Linux-newbie forum on the net and you'll see that this is a major problem. But you choose to ignore it, and Linux desktop adoption goes nowhere. You're insane.
MindPhlux, I found your comment quite interesting and thought I'd share my experience with Linux and how it eventually made me completely shift off M$ for the post part. In my younger years I spent most of my time tinkering and modding PCs. At one time I had 5+ PCs at home running Windows (something), Redhat, Gentoo, Debian and a couple other distros. Setting up Gentoo from scratch was such a learning experience...and then came Ubuntu \o/... Since 2001 I started studying at University and I wanted an OS that I could rely on for the most part and decided to give Apple ago and their PPC based machines were an improvement over Windows since I could run all my favourites thanks to Fink and X11...but I still couldn't have Linux running at the same time. Fast forward to 2008, I only have two computers - a MacBook Pro and an iMac both running Intel procs and I can run Ubuntu inside Parallels when I need it. I have managed to ween myself off 'Word' to use LaTeX and all my emails are handled by Gmail. I find myself looking to use a lot more GNU implementations of software these days that I did previously but most would criticize that going Apple is no better than running M$ stuff. Gaming? Don't get me started - I used to buy a new graphics card and re-spec my PCs every 3 months just to keep up with the latest games. I've now stopped gaming on PCs and enjoy playing on the 360, PS2, PS3, and Wii. I can keep my work, entertainment (oh yea, I love VLC!) and gaming more or less independent of each other. Mac OS X has been my primary OS since 2002 and for the time being I am not looking back; that said I have *NOT* shifted to Leopard as Tiger (10.4) does everything I need.
The ship has sailed. While 100,000 of us spent the late 90s grousing on /. about how next year would finally be the year of Linux on the desktop, a company named Apple went out and actually built the thing. Unix on the desktop has been done and done right. Linux had a huge window of opportunity in the early part of the last decade, and blew it. Draw whatever conclusions from that you want about the free software "movement." Mark my words: barring a direct meteor hit on Cupertino, Linux will never, ever be a major player in the desktop market.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.