What Will Linux Be Capable Of, 3 Years Down the Road? 679
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?"
Re:Pick me! Pick me! (Score:5, Informative)
This is history, not the future (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Drivers (Score:3, Informative)
I've also never seen much of a problem with video drivers. Intel help maintain the X.org driver, nVidia produce their own driver and AMD are doing syncronised Windows/Linux driver releases. What video do you have that isn't supported?
Re:Hopefully it'll be huge (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Drivers (Score:3, Informative)
Same story here with an X1550. New version of Ubuntu came out, with some sort of 'official' or 'improved' ATI drivers. Tried it, exact same results as a year prior: try to install 'special' drivers for my graphics, reboot to gibberish instead of desktop.
Call me back when real 3D drivers install as easily as they do in Windows. That's when we might finally be getting close to "the year of Linux." Until then it's certainly not worth my time messing with it.
Re:KDE4 (Score:4, Informative)
These are the things that don't get much attention, but really, KDE4 is constantly evaluated in terms of usability.
Re:Drivers? Codecs? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:equilibrium (Score:5, Informative)
"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."
Linux boxes ARE being sold at places like Circuit City, and people like them. Asus eeepc and aspire, hp small notepad, etc.
As to the rest? Not equilibrium yet. Linux is growing in datacenters; support for large SMP will improve (especially in management; I'd look for the most growth in virtualization). The "GUI" will improve also. There should be growth with 3D drivers (especially AMD(ATI) chipsets). Intel Larrabee should inspire growth in super-computing.
OpenOffice.org/Firefox/other standard applications are coming along nicely. But, with improved 3D will come standard 3D desktop *and* application support (currently, only available with nVidia's hardware and drivers). This should also be possible with ATI and Intel graphic stacks. In turn, this should inspire extra visual support in applications (think real-time graphics rendered from a spreadsheet). Also, I would expect growth in media transcoding.
What should remain stable is the CLI interface, and base software (VIM should still be VI, with enhancements, GCC should improve, but not be radically different, LaTeX will still be kicking, etc.)
Re:maybe it'll be like ms word? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not very well-versed in OS X development. Could you tell me how those "system services" work?
I go to /System/Library/Services and drop in a file called "Wordservice.service". Then I copy your text into a text box in Safari (or any other program that uses the standard APIs), I highlight it, and select "Safari: Services: Convert: Rotate13" and the text is instantly transformed into the following:
V'z abg irel jryy-irefrq va BF K qrirybczrag. Pbhyq lbh gryy zr ubj gubfr "flfgrz freivprf" jbex?
In this same way Apple has added a (among many) spelling checker, dictionary/thesaurus/wikipedia lookup, and grammar checker to the OS, accessible to every application (they also added a GUI element in the right-click contextual menu for easier access). Before they added the grammar checker, I just added my own, along with the text manipulation service, language translation services, statistical analysis services, and some more I regularly use. I usually assign hotkeys to them rather than navigate to them from the menus. Even more services are offered automatically by other applications I installed, such as Graphiz offering automatic graphing of any tables of numbers I highlight and my LaTeX front end offering automatic formatting of any bibliography information I highlight.
In short it is drag and drop addition of arbitrary functionality that can be accessed from any application without developers needing to do squat to their applications.
Re:It will look a lot like Linux in 2002. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:KDE4 (Score:5, Informative)
I believe the main difference is the integration that you state, and this enabled the whole desktop to be built with those gadgets/plasmoids/widgets/etc. So the desktop interface (menu, taskbar, system tray, etc etc) and the plasmoids are the same thing and that enables you to make much more integrated stuff. All the other "gadget" systems are not integrated with the rest of the system, they're just living in their own world separate from the rest of the desktop.
I think the ability to create native plasmoids is also unique. When your taskbar is a plasmoid, you don't really want it all to be running in JS or something.
Re:Pick me! Pick me! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
Some aspects of innovation are very predictable. There is a crude 10 year cycle for each stage of development (from blue-sky to usable prototype, from early garage to first home users, etc). This is repeated, over and over, until you finally get something that is an integral part of domestic life. Linux has shown much the same pattern, minus the initial blue-sky phase, as the concepts were already well-known.
Four years is a little soon for seeing significant pick-up in the home, but it's near enough the next boundary for me to say that carrier-grade Linux will have made dramatic inroads in the embedded market, and that Linux will EITHER kill off Windows Cluster Edition in the extreme-end market, OR be killed by it. The two cannot coexist, the market is simply too small.
So, anything that is experimental (in both concept and code) now and has been introduced within the last 3 years will not be close enough to the 10 year boundary in the next 3-4 years to move to the next stage of acceptance.
Anything that is experimental in only code, but is already widely adopted in concept, even if the code was introduced recently, may well hit the next level, but you can't really depend on it. Code, however, does mature faster than the conceptual and the underlying technology, so it's reasonable to expect some/all of it to have matured.
Anything that is stable but under-utilized now, but already widely adopted in concept, WILL be widely adopted as implemented within 3-4 years.
Anything that has been blue-sky for at least 6-7 years, but looks like it is making progress, AND out-of-mainstream work is being tried out, will likely become adopted by a significant group within 3-4 years AND make it into the mainstream kernel, but there is never a firm guarantee of things like that. The variable tends to be more of whose version goes in and whose vision is adopted. eg: Although there is now support for CAN buses, it was not the COMEDI code that got integrated. I expect the network code to improve in performance and tuning, but that doesn't mean it'll be Web100 that'll be added. There will be a parallel filesystem available, but there's no guarantee that that'll be Lustre. Polyserve's filesystem was - by all accounts - much better, and HP (who now own Polyserve) may use it as leverage to get into the Linux market, an area they've worked at for some time.
I expect distributed shared memory to appear in some form or other in 3-4 years - Infiniband is getting close to being fast enough, tipc is evolving nicely, and implementations of reliable multicast have existed long enough to push the concept onto the next ten year cycle. If it fails to make the transition, it will never appear at all.
Re:Compiz FTW (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux on the desktop (Score:5, Informative)
What Will Linux Be Capable Of, 3 Years Down the Road?
And what do you see for Linux in 4 years?
I also will go out on a limb and say it will enable Slashdot editors to make titles consistent with summaries!
Not impressed. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Think Antarctica (Score:2, Informative)
There are absolutely *no* standards in linux. Unless by standards you mean "read the code", every developer forking whenever they feel like it and polluting the linux world with yet another pointless distro or fugly app. You cant even guarantee a binary to work on all distros.
You down with /opt (yeah you know me) (Score:3, Informative)
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 [pathname.com]. 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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Upgrading the kernel shouldn't be an issue... (Score:3, Informative)
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. [kroah.com]