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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?"
1. Depends on the wireless NIC. Many are now supported out of the box. But not all, it's true.
2. Video card support is exemplary these days in ubuntu at least. What problems are you having?
Compositing is a bit iffy - compiz and multi screens is flaky as hell - but it's better than no compositing WM at all in windows.
My experience of late is that linux device support is actually better than the MS offering. I'll admit that when it doesn't work straight off, the steps to take to get hardware working are less than obvious.
Some on-line game my daughter is playing has the hero, a cute little girl's pet hamster or something, shooting love shots at penguins in one of the, what do they call those? game corners, maybe? and collecting the love-struck penguins in a line by the cute little girl.
I'd link to the game, but the wife is watching. (She hates computer games on principle.) And, if I remember right, you have to go through the candy jar (shades of Alice) and/or the album, so the link might not work anyway. Besides, my daughter would get mad at me if the site got slashdotted, and taken down or pwned.
The site has some other interesting alternative games -- cake baking class, ride the snowmobile to save the monkeys by finding them a new hotsprings, fly a broomstick through a snow storm and collect clouds like cotton candy, ... . I didn't like this one at first, because of the candy jar, but I must admit, it's better than the one my son found, where mounds of something that looks vaguely like poorly baked creampuffs engage in sumo wrestling matches in various villages. And that isn't as bad as the mario look-alike in javascript that lets you create and share your own games, and that is much better than the real mario, simply because you can create your own games, and, no, I'm not a fan of games either, just an addict to watching my kids play.