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Is Linux Taking Over The World? (networkworld.com)
"2019 just might be the Year of Linux -- the year in which Linux is fully recognized as the powerhouse it has become," writes Network World's "Unix dweeb."
The fact is that most people today are using Linux without ever knowing it -- whether on their phones, online when using Google, Facebook, Twitter, GPS devices, and maybe even in their cars, or when using cloud storage for personal or business use. While the presence of Linux on all of these systems may go largely unnoticed by consumers, the role that Linux plays in this market is a sign of how critical it has become. Most IoT and embedded devices -- those small, limited functionality devices that require good security and a small footprint and fill so many niches in our technology-driven lives -- run some variety of Linux, and this isn't likely to change. Instead, we'll just be seeing more devices and a continued reliance on open source to drive them.
According to the Cloud Industry Forum, for the first time, businesses are spending more on cloud than on internal infrastructure. The cloud is taking over the role that data centers used to play, and it's largely Linux that's making the transition so advantageous. Even on Microsoft's Azure, the most popular operating system is Linux. In its first Voice of the Enterprise survey, 451 Research predicted that 60 percent of nearly 1,000 IT leaders surveyed plan to run the majority of their IT off premises by 2019. That equates to a lot of IT efforts relying on Linux. Gartner states that 80 percent of internally developed software is now either cloud-enabled or cloud-native.
The article also cites Linux's use in AI, data lakes, and in the Sierra supercomputer that monitors America's nuclear stockpile, concluding that "In its domination of IoT, cloud technology, supercomputing and AI, Linux is heading into 2019 with a lot of momentum."
And there's even a long list of upcoming Linux conferences...
According to the Cloud Industry Forum, for the first time, businesses are spending more on cloud than on internal infrastructure. The cloud is taking over the role that data centers used to play, and it's largely Linux that's making the transition so advantageous. Even on Microsoft's Azure, the most popular operating system is Linux. In its first Voice of the Enterprise survey, 451 Research predicted that 60 percent of nearly 1,000 IT leaders surveyed plan to run the majority of their IT off premises by 2019. That equates to a lot of IT efforts relying on Linux. Gartner states that 80 percent of internally developed software is now either cloud-enabled or cloud-native.
The article also cites Linux's use in AI, data lakes, and in the Sierra supercomputer that monitors America's nuclear stockpile, concluding that "In its domination of IoT, cloud technology, supercomputing and AI, Linux is heading into 2019 with a lot of momentum."
And there's even a long list of upcoming Linux conferences...
You're soaking in it!
https://www.google.com/search?....
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
I would say Linux is already basking in the glow of having outstanding server share. It's just the desktop experience that leaves alot to be desired.
No
And most of them run Linux?
While everyone was waiting on the Year of Linux on the Desktop... The desktop died, yet Linux lives on.
Linux destroyed UNIX, BSD, and Windows Server many years ago.
We want Year of Linux on the Desktop!!! And that's still not happening anytime soon...
I hesitate to give them the full "Linux" designation if they're not actually full OSS, upgradeable, patchable, moderate-sec devices. "Backdoored *nix bricks" might be more accurate.
Don't forget all the SOHO wireless routers, NAS storage devices, probably TVs, DVRs, and a whole pile of other home appliances.
The one place Linux has been way behind is on the Desktop/Laptop,
Microsoft has been fighting tooth and nail to keep Linux Desktop at bay. Giving away millions of free copies of Windows 10 was part of this strategy.
This is being typed on a battered old laptop running Xubuntu with xfce. I think I booted Vista on once to check if it supported manual fan controls. It's probably 7 years old and works fine for me (I am not a gamer on PC systems)
It's greedy megacorps like Google, Facebook and whatnot that have taken over Linux as a commodity OS they have complete access to the source code of, and don't have to pay a cent in royalties to deploy by the hundreds of millions of seats.
What's taken over the world is those companies' disgusting and heinous application stacks that happen to run on Linux.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Corporations who use FOSS are taking over the world
FOSS provides the means for them to concentrate their power by making them more independent of other greedy software corporations who used to fight them for it.
FOSS assists in a concentration of power by select corporations.
Not the way i hoped it would work out.
As /.'s former poster child for Windows - I like Linux & KDE latest/greatest + dev tool FreePascal + Lazarus IDE, does all I need.
* Do I think Linux makes a GOOD DESKTOP OS too? You bet (posted from KUbuntu 18.04 LTS fully patched).
APK
P.S.=> It's inevitable free wins over pay-for ANYTHING once it plays enough "catchup ball" (which Linux & it's surrounding DESKTOP apps imo, for the most part, have)... apk
I've been reading Slashdot for 20 years and the year of the Linux desktop has always been at at hand.
It's finally been shortened to "the year of Linux" to finally admit desktop Linux will never happen and to reshape the claim to fit the reality for once.
But the year of linux isn't really here. The populace aren't really using Linux are they? Most experience of Linux is Android, or a cloud service, somewhere buried under a stack of abstraction is linux, and that in many cases could be replaced by a new OS without the user even noticing. Examples Fuschia (Google), Tizen (Samsung).
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
It may never be the "year of the linux desktop", but it has been the decade or more of:
the linux server
the linux powered phone
the linux powered appliance
the linux powered IoT device
the linux powered router
the linux powered storage device
the linux powered chromebook
linux is everywhere, where it matters.
HP-UX : Dead
SunOS : Dead
Microsoft Servers : As good as Dead
SparcOS : Dead
Windows: Still a dominant player in the GUI space, for web-browsing, and communicating with Linux Servers
All a desktop nowadays is, is a way to interact with linux backend applications. Nobody cares about the desktop, since it's a glorified web interface.
The cloud is taking over the role that data centers used to play
The cloud *is* a data center, it is just someone else's data center. It is important not to forget that. There is nothing wrong with doing your computing in someone else's data center as long as you have analyzed the the risks (and possible rewards) of doing so. That being said, a lot of folks seem to associate some magic value because of the term "the cloud"; doing so without understanding what it is, is risky.
Linux is the kernel. For OSS, you want GNU or BSD userspace over a Linux kernelspace, GNU/Linux and BSD/Linux respectively.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
From TFS: "...businesses are spending more on cloud than on internal infrastructure."
I call Bullshit.
Linux is a kernel. They run that kernel, and so they are Linux. You are talking about Gnu.
The Linux kernel surely takes over the world however Linux is nowhere to be seen on the desktop where it matters most.
There's there's this still little known fact that Google wants to replace the Linux kernel with their own one. So, Android is not particularly bound to Linux since the kernel part of Android is anyone's to take.
What about supercomputers? They are great, right, except they are basically huge calculators, so it's not like a huge win in my book. Besides, *BSD could have been used there as well.
Then there's this fact that application/web servers only use Linux'es CPU/storage/networking capabilities and almost nothing else and then you'll get a pretty bleak picture of Linux dominance.
Your biggest megacorps realized, that teamwork is better than a free-for-all.
Because the ideal state of capitalism and socialism, is actually the same state.
Of course they're still psychopaths. So they think they can get the benefits from teamwork, without having to contribute themselves. That's what profit is, after all: The part that you take without giving back.
I doubt that will work forever, though.
They need custom things. And they are dependent on the community too.
Sooner or later, some will contribute, and gain advantages from it, because their contributions give them an advantage. Then everyone will follow or die, as those are the rules of capitalism.
If some of the companies developing for Win 10 and MacOS were to start releasing Linux ports too, the era of the Linux Desktop would come a lot sooner.
Facing the inevitable switch from Win 7 to Win 10 in around a year, i've done an evaluation of my needs and in actual fact the only thing i need to leave MS behind is better photo editing support. I know there is GIMP, but a linux port of Affinity Photo would be a lot better for me (to use in conjunction with Darktable), along with Epson pulling their thumbs out their arse and writing linux drivers for their P600 / P800 family of photo printers.
Because the ideal state of capitalism and socialism, is actually the same state.
What nonsense. An individual company might seek to become so powerful and all controlling that they essentially own everything, which would have a similar effect to the state removing private property, but that has nothing to do with the system itself. Without special treatment or protection from the government, it's quite unlikely that any single entity could ever reach that level of control.
It's a joke because anyone who actually does computing work on his computer knows that the biggest advantage of Linux is exactly that it isn't a shitty desktop OS catering to what the dumbest and hence loudest consumers believe they want due to being told what to want by marketing and movie PHBs who print out the Internet.
Look at systemd/Ubuntu/Gnome. It tries so hard to get to the consumer desktop, it kills everything that makes Unix-likes great in the process.
The more you walk towards that goal that was carved out by the likes of Microsoft and Apple, the harder and more cumbersome it becomes, to actually do what is the whole point of having a computer: To automate your information processing work away!
And when they try to add a productivity element, they go and pick the one thing that's bad about such systems! Like when they thought it would be great to offer a search/CLI type input to run easy commands... When not having oversight over what commands are currently available, since all you have is a prompt and a blinking cursor, is the one key flaw of traditional command-line interfaces!
No. Linux is, and should always be, the OS for actually doing things.
If you want a consumer desktop cripple OS, we already have too many of those. Just pick one of them, instead of ruining the one thing that's free from that cancer.
Yah, no. Linux kernel is a kernel. Debian Linux is a Linux distribution.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Linux was the kernel. That is, before it grew up to take over the world. Now Linux is considerably more than a kernel.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Worldwide domination is not done until Apple kisses the ring or dies. Actually, it would not be particularly hard to port I-os and OS-x to Linux.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I think that depends on whether 2019 will be the year of the Linux desktop...
I've moved to doing all my development on Ubuntu (it's C based microcode and Java/C data processing modules which will be moved to WebAssembly). I've pushed my daughter who's at college to Ubuntu for her development systems and my wife and younger daughter to ChromeOS laptops. I still love my Macbook Air, however, as my personal/business laptop.
We have two Windows 10 laptops that my wife and older daughter want to keep for security sake and I have a couple of Win 7 laptops and desktop for the same reasons. These get powered up once a month to update in a non-stressful manner in case they're ever needed.
The biggest challenge for the family was going off Microsoft Office products (Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint) and moving to the Google (and Apple) versions.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Welcome my little friends, here is some fish.
Really nice to see ongoing work on bringing windows compatibility, various graphics stacks and traditional X server replacements up to speed. Sooner Microsoft's Malware operating system dies the better off we'll all be.
"Cloud Industry Forum, for the first time, businesses are spending more on cloud than on internal infrastructure. The cloud is taking over the role that data centers used to play"
Translation to English:
Rent a server industry forum, for the first time, business are spending more money renting other peoples servers than owning and operating their own. Rented servers is taking over the role that owning your own servers used to play.
In its first Voice of the Enterprise survey, 451 Research predicted that 60 percent of nearly 1,000 IT leaders surveyed plan to run the majority of their IT off premises by 2019
Translation to English:
Server rental industry marketing hacks release survey showing favorable outlook. Be cool like everyone else and rent a server instead of buying your own.
Gartner states that 80 percent of internally developed software is now either cloud-enabled or cloud-native.
I tried to translate this to English but my translation software crashed.
That's not what was unexpected. The GPL was intended to deal with this, in the context of desktop software. What was unexpected was the shift from "the desktop" to "the cloud", which the GPL was not designed for.
You DO realize that the entire concept of "the desktop" has drastically changed from 10-20 years ago, right? Yeah, "the desktop" used to mean an x86-powered PC running Windows OS and an ecosystem of applications that could ONLY run on said Windows OS (or Mac equivalent). Today "the desktop" means pretty much everything from a tablet to a workstation that may or may not be able to run Windows apps, but does most of its work over a network and can run any web-based application that comprises the majority of apps today. Wintel-only "desktop" is a dinosaur that is dead, just too stupid to lay down.
This is just to announce the imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Debian Linux Release -- Ian Murdock
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Not *a* company, but a handful of them. Just like in a dictatorship, power is not held by *a* person, but by a cabal. Kim Jong Un wants to really change how things are run, he'd better have most of the most powerful members of his cabal on board first if he wants to keep breathing.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
When the real Fourth Reich comes
You'll be the first to go
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Not sure what distro you're running, but having had Mint on my desktop for a few years now, I almost never have occasion to open up a terminal window. I see this as similar to the cmd prompt/Powershell in Windows - there if you need it or for power users, but most users can work just fine in the GUI for day-to-day fun & games.
Agreed, and there is the AGPL as mentioned which tries to extend copyleft, however it has failed in part because there was already too much money and power benefiting from the status quo, and those community leaders who could have made a difference didnt support it, even SFC want it to be watered down and made into a Lesser APGL.
What would have made a difference is a collective licensing organisation that had the power to change entire projects future work and adapt to new threats. There where attempts to move in that direction, but again they where shouted down by those with power and influence.
FOSS was started and controlled by hobbyists, they have almost no influence today, it has become a means of control as bad as proprietary ever was.
At the heart of the failure is the open source definition, and the FSF basic freedoms, which demands FOSS software has to be able to used for any purpose, even to do harm to movement itself.
Sierra supercomputer that monitors America's nuclear stockpile
At 2:14 August 29, 2017 Sierra became self-aware and was renamed Skynet.
Léa Gris
Giving away??? Hmm, shoving up your ass is, perhaps, a better description of their approach.
Or I might have been too paranoid at the time they were at it.
The good news is, I haven't heard of any linux distro having a forced update to Windows 10 (yet)
I went back to Ian Murdock, son. Good reason for that. I know that Ian uses[1] the word Linux to mean the whole operating system, just as I do. What are you blathering on about.
[1] Used, because he is no longer
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Gartner states that 80 percent of internally developed software is now either cloud-enabled or cloud-native.
Network bills are that cheap?
I use Linux to make a phone call in the same sense as I use Quantum Mechanics to make a cup of tea. In other words, it's true but not a necessary part of the solution.
Soon Linux will be my standard OS to get as far away from corporate surveillance as possible.
what's wrong with that? They make money, we get tons and tons of free software (free as in beer & speech).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
How are you defining a Linux? The official kernel? anything that is forked off the official kernel? *nix style systems? Is a iPhone or Mac considered to be a Linux device? Is Linux actually Unix?
Oh - and yes you are a zealot.
No. No it isn't. Because with regard to Linux being the predominant OS on the planet we crossed that threshold a long time ago, just as stupid people flooded Slashdot a decade or more ago.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
AC included BSD and a heavy focus on Unix-based systems at the end of his post, so I was just trying to get a baseline for his definition. Also, I wanted to see how far deviated from Linux it has to be before it is no longer considered Linux. along with his above items you have to consider the connectivity of the world as well. Many switches / routers also contain linux. The smart TV thing got me though, I only know 1 person that has 1 of them :-)
As to if Linux is taking over the world. No, I do not imagine there will be a Linux dictator any time soon.
Nix Bricks... I like it.
Linux is the kernel. For OSS, you want GNU or BSD userspace over a Linux kernelspace, GNU/Linux and BSD/Linux respectively.
But GNU and BSD were just command-line systems. For a desktop you also want an MIT display interface: X-windows/GNU/Linux. ...
Then some chunks of BSD, Firefox or Chrome,
What is the string-size limit for OS names?
In my day, Computer Science was a very new field. We learned the basic concepts of a multitasking OS but didn't look at actual, working systems. I presume that's different now. It means, of course, that everybody has to know C.
I'm just wondering what the exposure is for a typical computer science major nowadays.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I used to work with BSD 4.2 and 4.3 a lot back in the 1980s, and I have a CD of Dr Dobb's Journal's official 386 BSD Release 1.0 done by William and Lynne Jolitz. I never did anything but look at the source code for it as I was already in the linux camp. The big problem for me was lack of support for many devices with BSD. As I recall, there was one SCSI controller supported, and I didn't have it. My 1st linux was Slackware. It came on 50 diskettes and I was able to install it on my cheap, off-brand laptop. So yeah, that's how things went. I wanted to be a BSD guy, and tried out various flavors of NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD back in the late 90s early 00s, but linux always had more stuff. Those BSDs are still around aren't they? Particularly OpenBSD which has it's own dictator.
Supposedly BSD still lives in the MacOS. But I don't know the details. I reckon there's a lot of caveats about that.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
They needn't bother. GNOME is doing a perfectly good job scaring people away from desktop Linux.
I already pointed in 2011, seven years ago (!), that this is the case - that Linux is already more popular than Windows, because people only have Windows on their desktop machine, but have Linux on their phone (Android was already becoming popular seven years ago), TV, home router, NAS, and a bunch of other machines. Here is my post from seven years ago noting that: http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/2011-April/006874.html
Right, because that worked out so well last time...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Yes, it did!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I can't walk in to a single shop in Copenhagen area an expect to be asked...
"So, would you like that computer with, or with-out Windows?"
We all know that Microsoft didn't become wealthy giving away software, so even if it doesn't specify a cost on the purchase receipt next to VAT... I'm paying for Windows when I buy a computer even-though it will never be used.
I'll might start to believe in a "Linux take-over" when EVERY piece of computer hardware I buy has a "Works with Linux" label, and I won't have to worry about that manufacturer looses interest in maintaining Linux drivers immediately after I open the box.
if you look at it in sort of a Trojan Horse fashion then yes, Linux has taken over.
The majority of mobile phones are running on Android, derived from Linux.
Almost all supercomputers run on some version of Linux
Although most businesses still use Microsoft Office (or Office 365) many of the back office functions are running on some Linux server tucked away out of sight.
It has been a quiet revolution and I think that is how it will continue to be. Most attempts by Linux diehards to be front and center (i.e. Linux on the Desktop, Linux branded phones, etc.) have largely been flops, at least from a commercial standpoint.
I suspect this is a case of too much choice leading to confusion. There must be thousands of Linux distros and in the hands of the general populace it is simply too overwhelming. Sure, me and my fellow geeks love to mess with it but let's face it - we are in the minority. Windows and OSX have succeeded because they are familiar and relatively straightforward to use. The Linux community is just too splintered.
But in the hands of the right people, Linux is just magic. It is fast and stable and just hums along in the background.
And every year the answer is the same:
No, not the way you want to be.
Linux has always excelled in spaces where extreme customization is an advantage. Servers where you're doing anything more custom than business network services (e.g. email, domain authentication and management, file sharing, etc). Small device applications where embedded Windows would be too rigid and prohibitively expensive, like streaming video or music players, IoT devices in general, etc.
However, with all of this, Linux has no mind share with the general population, and that's what people who are this question want. Linux people want regular folks to start giving up their proprietary Windows or Mac boxes and switch to running Linux directly, and that's just never going to happen.
That's because, no matter how good Linux desktop UI's get, they are always far behind the proprietary UI's in polish, useability, and integration with the OS.
And the reason why is blindingly simple:
Money. Not even direct profit, just money spent.
Look at all the Linux products with great UI's. They are ALL in products people purchase. People won't spend money on a device that's hard to use, so it's really, really important that they get the UI right. So these companies spend enough to make sure they get it right.
Android is the quintessential example. Thanks to Android, you can and should say Linux dominates the phone market. But look what it took to make a version of Linux that could compete with a closed source product. It took a massive company like Google spending millions of dollars to make sure that UI piece is right, and integrates seamlessly with the OS.
In the desktop arena (the arena Linux users seem to care about the most), Apple and Microsoft have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing their UI's and making sure they integrated smoothly and seamlessly with their OS. There is just no way a FOSS desktop UI can compete with that kind of highly motivated, focused attention. As good as Ubuntu and the like have made things, they are perpetually behind the industry big dogs.
Yes these companies make blunders in their quest for better UI (MS moreso than most, it seems), but generally speaking the results speak for themselves.
Linux UIs have come a long, long way over the years, but even now they are mostly 5-10 years behind the state of the art. In my experience that's where they seem to stay, and that's why they'll never dominate in the desktop arena.
So you could say 2019 is the year of highly customized proprietary Linux black boxes, just like 2018 was, and 2017 was, and 2016...
Nothing is new for Linux in 2019, it's the same story it's always been. And IMO that's not a bad thing, nor is it something to be ashamed of. Quite the opposite. Linux does what does, and does it extremely well.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
such insight! i'd say linux world domination moment was years ago.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
When I first heard about the Linux vs GNU/Linux debate many years ago I thought it was really silly. Why bother with GNU when Linux is descriptive enough?
Now, I'd say it is an important distinction. Android/Linux or IoT/Linux is nothing like GNU/Linux. As it turns out, Stallman is not just a great singer, he is also right (again).