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...

Comments

As Madge would say,

[SpzToid]

You're soaking in it!

https://www.google.com/search?....

I would say Linux..

[GrBear]

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.

Re:I would say Linux..

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux on the desktop is actually pretty amazing. I've put two non-technical (but not stupid, either) family members on Linux and haven't had a single problem report from them. It's just works. And neither has said "oh, I miss MacOS" or "I miss Windows".

Re:I would say Linux..

[Immerman]

Actually, I'd say the desktop experience of many Linux distros already outshines the proprietary alternatives, even before you start delving into the far deeper options to fine-tune things to your own tastes.

What's lacking is the software support for a lot of major "must have" applications. WINE solves much (most?) of that, but isn't always the most user-friendly software to set up, particularly for the sort of people that are most likely to need it.

I'm eternally surprised that so few desktop-oriented distros ship with a really dialed-in copy of WINE as a default package, (perhaps opt-out during install for the sake of purists). You want to lure new users, make it so that they can easily run their "must-have" software until they learn better. *They* may not know or care about the details, but I'd be a lot more enthusiastic about convincing people to give it a shot if I could honestly say it would run at least most of their existing software out of the box, without appalling font rendering and the many other quirks WINE often displays without a lot of fine-tuning.

This is a bit out of left field, but speaking of font rendering, has anyone else noticed glitches in Firefox text boxes in the last year? I'll be typing, and suddenly it's like the entire text box suddenly pops back into sharp focus when I hadn't even noticed it had gone blurry. Haven't seen that in any other program, and it happens across all the sites I type at.

Re:I would say Linux..

[ras]

My wife, a complete computer neophyte, asked me to put Linux on her laptop a few weeks ago. Well, she didn't use those exact works. She actually said, "can you do to my laptop whatever you did to our daughters laptop to make it run fast".

She really didn't have a lot of choice. The laptop she was referring to was a one of those $400 Windows touch screen laptops with a 32GB SSD. HP, Dell, Leveno and others make them and all have a very similar design - so similar it must have come from one source. My guess is this was a "tablet killer" design from Microsoft. Which is kinda sad, because the hardware is fine for the price. What wrecked it (literally) was Windows 10. Turns out 32GB is not enough space for Windows 10 to do it's upgrades, so eventually Microsoft's patches cause the the machine to run out of disk space and kills itself. Windows 10 is also god-awfully slow on such low end hardware - it can take 15 seconds to response to a click on the Start button.

A stock Debian install with LXDE on the other hand occupies 4GB of the 32GB SSD, and responds to a click on the start button instantaneously, every time. That 4GB includes all the crap people usually use on a desktop, like PDF viewer, picture viewer, browser, email client, and something that Windows doesn't come with - Libre Office. It doesn't suffer from flaky WiFi (apparently a Windows driver problem), and the mouse and touch screen worked out of the box. The touch pad was glitchy out of the box on Windows - it needed an updated touch pad driver.

No questions were asked after the transition. I guess a decade or so ago, the different place for the shutdown button or the different styling would have been jarring. But Microsoft fixed that issue for us by re-arranging everything from XP to Vista to Windows 10. LXDE manages to be closer to the familiar XP interface than Windows 10 is, so it was actually a return to more familiar territory.

To me it looks to be over. Linux has been faster (by no small margin), smaller, more reliable and has a better chance of "just working" on more platforms than Windows for some time now. The issue was all those proprietary .exe programs people used. But Google solved problem for us when they won the battle to move applications from the desktop to the cloud. To wit: my wife uses this laptop when she is away from her desktop to run her book keeping business. Not so long ago that would have required you to run a Windows only MYOB or something similar. She uses several accounting packages now - all are software as a service running in a web browser.

It's a bit difficult to predict what will eventually happen to the desktop. Everyone running a traditional Linux+GNU free distribution seems unlikely. But Windows still being around seems even less likely. It's being displaced on all fronts - on the server even Azure runs more Linux than windows, Linux is already the dominant "User" OS - more people use Android than anything else, and in the embedded space Windows CE has already been driven to extinction. It turns of if you do build a better mouse trap the people will come - if you have the stamina to wait long enough.

Re: What, 20 years ago? Arguable.

[sound vision]

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.

It's never been about Year of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re: What, 20 years ago? Arguable.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

More than phones, billions of them already though

[bobstreo]

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)

Linux hasn't taken over the world

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:Linux hasn't taken over the world

[grumbel]

I feel the situation is overall MUCH better than it used to be in the past.

In the past we had PCs on which you could install an OS of your choice, the hardware was well supported, mostly open and standardized. Now we have phones and tablets which have essentially zero freedom, either they are fully locked down or your are stuck with a single unmaintained outdated Kernel. This is honestly even worse than Windows, as at least with Windows you had the option to upgrade if Microsoft released a new version. With phones however there is no official AndroidOS release from Google that you can install on your phone, you have to use whatever hackjob the hardware manufacturer provided you with, which won't get any updates a few month after the release.

And of course it doesn't stop with hardware, all the software these days forces you into the cloud. Again, worse than the proprietary software in the past, that at least run and your machine and could be cracked, hacked and reverse engineered. Can't really do that with the cloud.

Computing today has pretty much turned into a nightmare, one that you can't really escape from, as most of the proprietary services and hardware do not even have a practical open alternative.

That the companies release some code as Open Source doesn't really help much, as it's never the code that actually matters.

Re:Linux hasn't taken over the world

[bug1]

We forged the chains that are now used to enslave us :(

Corproation, not software

[bug1]

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...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:No

[Waffle Iron]

Linux laptop exists with power management on par with Windows. The basic kernel and userland are fine; it's just that there is no hardware support to speak of. (Sure, it "runs", but it is mostly a battery burner. )

Millions of Chromebook users would beg to differ.

It's always next year.

[w0mprat]

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).

Re:It's always next year.

[mspohr]

It's interesting that ChromeOS has taken over the K-12 education market (58%), is predominant in the consumer market and is forecast to spread to commercial markets:
Chromebooks are forecast to mark its presence in numerous application and service sectors such as banking, hotel industry, financial services and estate agents. In addition, features offered by this device such as collaboration and sharing of content are expected to impact the industry demand. These are economical devices that can offer better working platform for SMBs (small and medium scale businesses) as well as to the start-up companies which are not willing to make high investments for IT infrastructure.

So, Linux on the desktop could arrive in the form of ChromeOS within a few years.

Linux Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Cloud blah blah blah

[Nkwe]

From the summary:

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.

Re: No

[zekica]

My laptop with skylake i5 runs 10 hours on battery with ubuntu 18.04 consumsles about 5-6 watts on idle and 6-8 watts when browsing... Windows consumes about 5 watts on idle so I don't see a difference.

Re: What, 20 years ago? Arguable.

[houstonbofh]

Linux is a kernel. They run that kernel, and so they are Linux. You are talking about Gnu.

Yeah

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

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.

Re:Yeah

[TeknoHog]

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.

All computers are basically huge calculators. Supercomputers set a great example of Linux dominance, because you really want to use all of that expensive hardware for your calculations, instead of it being dragged down by an idiotic OS and spyware. (Linux has much better hardware support than the BSDs, so it's an obvious choice for people who need to make the most of their hardware. I guess the BSDs have a more natural niche at the security conscious servers.)

Traditionally, mobile computing was severely limited by hardware, so Linux was a similarly sensible choice for making the most of it. However, today's phones are looking more and more like corporate desktop machines where you can waste gigs of memory and a handful of CPU cores for shuffling a little text and images around. In both cases there's a similar rationale for the excess: using hardware as a status symbol. Linux is cheap and efficient, but many people buy an Apple just to show that they can afford an Apple.

Desktop Apps

[15Bit]

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.

Re:Desktop Apps

[goose-incarnated]

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.

I use gimp for any/all image manipulation, even when I am on Windows. It's not great for photo editing, but it's good enough and I found out that "good enough" works for me.

My experience of users who point at a specific application as a reason for staying with Windows is that the majority of them first decide to stay with Windows and then look for a reason to do so. Functionality has nothing to do with it.

The users who *are* stuck with Windows are usually power-users of one single application (be it photoshop, or some proprietary CAD app, a particular game, etc), but these users are by far the minority - the majority of photoshop users will find that gimp can do everything they used to do on photoshop, but they won't even look at it.

Linux is taking over my home

[mykepredko]

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.

The penguins are comming the penguins are comming

[WaffleMonster]

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.

For all the "desktop" fanatics posting here...

[GerryGilmore]

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.

Re:No

[Waffle Iron]

Doesn't your argument apply equally to WIndows systems? They work smoothly only because the manufacturer created the proper Windows drivers for their hardware. It's the same "special case".

Re: What, 20 years ago? Arguable.

[quenda]

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?