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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?"
I'll go out on a limb here and guess that Linux will still look like a penguin.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
1998 Nope
2000 Nope
2002 Nope
2004 Nope
2006 Nope
2008 Nope
2011 YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
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?
Here be signatures
Will it be capable of, correcting grammar?
Sony ha
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 hasn't had any major changes in the past three years, why would you think it'll have any in the next three?
Wait ... are you saying that the Linux kernel will remain free in the future, but that people will pay for extras on top of that, including commercial software in some cases? That is just ... insane! What barking madman would even conceive of such a concept?
Incidentally, how do you go from what that article actually says:
Expect to see a three-way split among different versions of Linux. Not different distributions per se, but three basic usage models: ... For-pay ... Free to use ... Free/libre
...to "Linux forsaking its free usage model"? What are you, running for Congress?
Breakfast served all day!
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.
So THIS is what the Mayans have been predicting. Linux calls forth Armageddon in 2012. Wonderful.
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.
Sounds like somebody needs an upgrade.
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.
root@localhost:~#
They'll remove SMP support?
Why would they?
I can see linux being on a 2-4 GB flash card and the "computer" being the same size and the entire device running inside your tv, LCD picture frames, microwave oven, toaster, refrigator, dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, or your air conditioner. The price for the computer and storage will be like $2-5 on the bulk side so that cost has to be able to be hidden in the products. Linux'll be running all sorts of things that you never really figured even needed a computer per se or even 2-4 GB of storage. What the heck does my dishwasher or toaster need 2 Gb of storage for? Well, we'd find out when it's "cheap enough" to through in everything. Licensing and cost is what'll get Linux in the door and keep MS out. MS just can't afford to give away MS embedded edition.
Of course Linux will run on things like cell phones and DVRs as well, but you'll shortly find it running things like McDonalds' toys as well. What could a McDonalds' Toy use Linux for? I haven't a clue, but, once the hardware is cheap enough, we'll find out.
I find that Linux, and especially Ubuntu has much better support, and behaves better than Windows XP.
Mass Storage devices: just plug in, and they are ready to go very quickly. No need to install drivers if you plug it into a different port.
GPS: same, it emulates a serial device so that GPSBabel can handle it easily.
My odd mouse had drivers built into the kernel by Ubuntu, there was no "insert CD to use this mouse" stage.
And that is on an AMD64 Ubuntu computer. How is the driver support in Vista 64-bit?
Ubuntu on my HP/Intel laptop found everything just fine, and the Wifi even worked in the LiveCD installer.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
KDE is a desktop environment. It's in the name, for crying out loud!
This probably won't be an issue by 2012, but it will be interesting to see how linux fares when Linux and/or people like Andrew Morton are eventually forced to remove themselves from the day-to-day maintenance of the kernel. We saw what happened to ReiserFS when it lost its namesake. In that situation, it was easy to chuck ReiserFS in the trash because there were several other mature alternatives. If/when Linus dies/retires, does Linux adoption falter?
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.
Another 1000 days, more or less.
Have gnu, will travel.
Linux forsaking its free usage model to embrace more paid distros
The two are not mutually exclusive.
where you get free Linux along with (much-needed) licenses to use patent-restricted codecs
As if. Just because the US has a broken patent system. Or was that the whole world? Ih wait, the US is the whole world.
Also predicted is an advance for the desktop based on â" surprise â" good acceptance for KDE 4.
Whether you like it or not, GNOME will be the big one, because nobody controls it. With Nokia owning Trolltech, no other company (whose primary business is not Linux itself) will touch KDE. I know that's not justified, but don't expect large corporations to care.
Finally, Linux is seen as making its biggest imprint not on the PC, but on mobile devices, eventually powering 40 million smartphones and netbooks.
That's clearly the future. The question is - besides having Linux as the kernel, will the phone of the future be any different? Will free userspace triumph on phones, or are we going to see locked-down Linux? That's the interesting and harder question.
And what do you see for Linux in 4 years?
Let's see... a kernel that supports the latest hardware and runs the latest software?
The article is nonsense, but the discussion should be good.
It seems that if Linux were available as a free alternative in every PC shipped, it could provide a longer life to products that could be shared ( like hand me down clothes ) to younger siblings or new users to make the best use of the effort of creating machines and the least toxic landfill. I would think that it would be in everybody's interest to contribute to open source, like any system that exists to fill a need which is not commercial ( like Red Cross ) but serves a need of humanity.
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.
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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!
By 2012, Linux will pass the critical "100 different unpronounceable text editors" criterion, where adoption will begin to accelerate at a geometric pace as the common person forgets about all the useful Windows-based software and hardware at the store and entertains themselves solely by writing new window managers.
~
People who use "desktop" computing, your days are numbered... I just have no idea what that number may be. ;)
With this interest in cloud computing growing, I predict that specific-purpose devices will be used and linked in through various networking technologies (mobile phones, wi-fi, bluetooth, ethernet, something that hasn't been thought of yet, quantum link networking, whatever) to personal servers. These personal servers will be without a direct user interface although us hackers will still have terminals to connect to them to do our hacking and developing, but our personal devices will all link to our personal servers using whatever means is available to do so that is appropriate and capable for the application we're using. The fact that our personal servers will run Linux will be irrelevant to most people... it'll just work or not work.
All of our personal devices will be from various manufacturers using a similar pool of networking technologies that, hopefully Microsoft will not have patented or controlled in some way, and serve our purposes accordingly. For most people, they will simply have their TVs, phones, mobile phones and gaming consoles linked through our personal servers and the public network infrastructure. The rest of us will continue using laptops and desktops because we're busy developing, hacking, analyzing and all that sort of thing.
Business apps will continue to follow similar models of client/server because business cares where their data is stored and what network channels are allowed to access it. I don't care how "non-evil" Google is, they aren't going to store my company's data. They just AREN'T.
But it is because Linux works SO well in dedicated devices (especially hand-held) this is where Linux will grow the most. I find it difficult to predict whether or not it will be proprietary and/or restricted protocols that will interconnect our devices to our personal servers, but I can only hope the protocol will be open for all to use without being worried about getting sued and crap like that.
I predict an environment where it will be the device that is important to users, and not the OS that runs on them. This will make the OS a bit less relevant to all but the gadget-hackers. Microsoft will be a player in this scheme, and they will likely their their interoperability monkey-wrench into everything they can... business as usual for Microsoft... but as long as they don't buy laws that restrict people from making stuff compatible with Microsoft's crap, then, like Samba, we'll all be fine in the end. (But then again, there's the lords of copyright to interfere with this notion... technologies "forbidden" to work with like DVDCSS on our personal networks... who knows.)
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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.
And the US Supreme Court will rule that software is not patentable, software is copyrightable but EULA's are 100% unenforcable. And DRM will be outlawed.
And Microsoft, the RIAA, and most of the telecom industry will be broken up for various illegal activities, and forced to reform as smaller non-profit organizations with strict oversight.
Maybe I'll even have a date by then.
100,000 packages in Debian.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Configuration still handled with text files, with front-end tools that try to conceal them but never quite do it all.
Just one observation. I agree about the flakiness of some of the GUI front ends for text file configuration but the fact is there are countless web pages, man pages & sample configuration files around that will guide you through a lot of this stuff if you do a bit of reading first.
No, configuration is not necessarily easy - but moving that configuration somewhere else, or backing it up, is a piece of piss. A text file is easy to read, easy to edit and once an application is installed, just copy the file somewhere under /etc (the man page will tell you precisely where) or into the user's home directory.
I don't know if you use (or even care about) Windows but try moving configuration settings between machines or users & invariably that involves mucking about in the dreaded Registry, even if it's possible to work out what bits of the Registry needs to be moved where.
Get a text file wrong in Linux and the worse that happens is the application won't run or crashes out - get a Registry setting wrong in Windows and the whole machine can be bricked.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
What will be hot regarding linux by then?
- Usability: will be one of main objectives for developing things for it, including new widely available devices like multitouch screens.
- Mobility: cheap and powerful for today standards cellphones based on linux (Android, LiMo, whatever) probably will be the most used. Not sure if will be market for tablets/subnotebooks/etc or cellphones will take that role, in any case, probably linux will be the most used core OS for those devices.
- Embeddable: It happens now, it will happen far more then. Internet will be the main reason for this.
- Security, linux will be more attacked, specially in preinstalled computers, cellphones and devices.
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.
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.
...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.
Actually, SQLite is in cell phones and PDAs. It's a modest-sized shared library. And, unlike text files, there's indexing. For example, if "getpwnam" uses the database, instead of the current linear search, it speeds up from O(N) to O(log N). So there's a big win on scaling.
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"
Let me rephrase that, then: all you need to do is install ntfs-3g if it isn't already and specify it as the filesystem. Many, if not all Linux distros come with it pre-installed. That doesn't negate your basic premise, and I agree with it. However, more and more, Linux does just work, more than Windows does. When was the last time you had to install special Linux drivers for a thumb drive or a digital camera?
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What I've seen of KDE4 so far, anyone who doesn't know how to do all that on a Mac just hasn't been using the Mac.
I may change my mind, but, right now, I'm not really impressed with Fedora 9, either. Too much pseudo-innovation intended to make it easier for newbies, but missing the point. Maybe a little back-swig from sugar?
(Nothing against sugar. If they can get it to work, it's probably the best way to present Squeak as a platform for general users, although I wish they had gotten the Squeak licenses straightened out first so they could have been focusing on other things than re-inventing Squeak in Python.) But Sugar is not appropriate when super-imposed over Fedora.
Here's a conversation I found from a fedora discussion:
Non linear ogg editor/ screencast helper
Status: Proposed
Summary of idea: Still we are missing a good non linear editor for ogg videos. This can be a simple GUI based application to do non linear editing of ogg. Like cutting, mixing the videos. Adding still frames to the video etc. Though this is not a project to be finished within 2-3 months, but we should be able to have a basic application running to do simple edits. May be having feature of upload videos to fedoratv or integrate itself with recordmydesktop to get screencasts directly. I am looking for more ideas on this.
Contacts: KushalDas kushaldas AT fedoraproject {NOSPAM} DOT org
Notes: Recommended choice of language is Python or C
ValentTurkovic: I have 2 suggestions; First is to try and resurrect Diva Project who started as GSC project in 2006. Second is to work with Pitivi Project because it is on a good path and has ogg editing functionality and easy enough interface. To get an overview of this Diva Project rise and fall please read these two posts. UPDATE: There are two projects that look promissing: saya-videoeditor [2] and myvideoeditor [3]
So between these and Cinelerra's successor, Lumiera, I'm sure 4 years will be more than enough to have an actually usable professional Video Editor for Linux.
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.
(And don't get me started on WINE, these guys are advancing fast!)
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.
Three years down the road, Linux will still be suffering from too many distributions and continuing to think that is an advantage.
X-Windows forever.
Why not? I admit, it's not a perfect solution, but it works. And it seems Apple and Microsoft keep trying to copy it.
Configuration still handled with text files, with front-end tools that try to conceal them but never quite do it all.
No, most front-ends do a good job. Which ones are bugging you? And text > database. I just love the way the windows registry works, don't you?
Ugly icons.
More like stupid distros. Have you seen Tango icons? They're very nice.
Inconsistency between GUIs of applications.
Your fault for using random applications.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.media/vista.png
Everything is beaufitul and consistent in Windows land, right? (don't even get me started on OSX. there's an image floating about for that too. and I mean, wood and chrome?? what the fuck?)
Too much need for the command line.
You're trying too hard to find it. =/
Even more kernel bloat.
Become a kernel maintainer?
Libraries should live in /Library or something like that, users under /Home or /Users, and end-user applications (like OpenOffice.org) in /Applications or /Programs.
/Applications or /Programs? That's what I thought /opt was for: add-on application software packages. For instance, a tetromino game called Lockjaw could install into "/opt/Lockjaw/lj".
in the end, users don't give a damn whether or not they can 'modify' this new driver they're installing to get compiz to work.
Ubuntu's restricted driver installer explains one benefit of Free drivers other than that the end user can modify them: it's that the developers of Compiz have the ability to trace into the driver to discover, work around, and report defects that they find in drivers.
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".
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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*.
>If the majority of games can work on even one distro out of the box, the other distros will lose users.
It's called *WINDOWS*.
>It is the simple model of evolution at work
Indeed.
>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.
The Linux kernel<->user ABI is stable, and has been since 2.0.0. Any userland code (the kind that normally makes calls through glibc) that made its own syscalls directly to 2.0.0 will work fine with zero changes on 2.6.26. Many programs written for Linux 1.x will also work fine, as the 1.x -> 2.0 change was to do with binaries being ELF instead of a.out by default. The syscall interface did not change, or if it did, did not change significantly in that time.
It's only the kernel internals (including drivers) that are not stable, but you don't actually want them to be stable. You think you do, but you don't.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?