Is Linux Taking Over The World? (networkworld.com) 243
"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...
As Madge would say, (Score:5, Funny)
You're soaking in it!
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com].
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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,
No. Just fucking no.
When you do a search using Google, or post something to Facebook, that is not "using Linux".
If you have a GPS unit in your car, that does not mean you are "using Linux".
This is a level of stupid that is beyond Slashdot's normal level of stupid.
Linux could very well be taking over the world, without us "using" it in the strict sense you mean -- that is, using it and knowing that you're using it.
You and I are using numerous technologies to exchange these posts, without knowing what they all are.
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You are a fucking moron.
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Hugging. Please use Hugging.
No.
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Linux is making it work, so unless you are using the device as a paper weight, you are (perhaps unknowingly) using Linux.
You sound like a butthurt Microsoft Munchkin.
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A user never directly interacts with the operating system. That's what the shell is for. You are using a shell (yes, also a graphic user interface is a shell, albeit a much more complex one than a command line interface), and you could be totally agnostic to the underlying operating system. A shell is a special application that allows a user to request computing resources from the operating s
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When the real Fourth Reich comes [youtube.com]
You'll be the first to go [youtube.com]
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Right, because that worked out so well last time... [tumblr.com]
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah, 2019 won't be the year of Linux, because it's not growing anywhere. Sure, it's used in a lot of places, but there's nothing new about 2019.
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Re:I would say Linux.. (Score:4, Informative)
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".
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Re:I would say Linux.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Agreed. Few things I hate worse than a company that ships a Linux-enabled product (the Gnu copyright buried in the back of the manual is a usual clue) but is only provided with Windows, and maybe Mac, software. What did they do, lay off the Linux guy as soon as they got the kernel booted up? Of course, the real reason is that the desktop software is mostly just an ad-injection platform anyway, so it's better to just toss it and use the reverse-engineered tool you downloaded from github in any case.
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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 dist
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I don't think so: almost all "pro-software" is linux compatible (native or through WINE, like you sad), what make GNU/Linux stills lags behind on the Desktop are games (very much AAA titles stills DirectX-only, or it's a mess to work via WINE [when software updates
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Unfortunately, "through WINE" only counts if it's reliable. And WINE working properly out of the box is NOT reliable. Especially for pro software, where proper font rendering is a generally a must-have feature. The eye- and brain-strain of reading badly rendered text for several hours a day just can't be reasonably justified. And then there's all the stuff that just won't run on WINE - Autodesk's Fusion 360 is my current bugaboo.
Games are admittedly a particular problem as well - but most of those actual
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Actually, there are multiple Linux distros these days that are easy to use, and even easy to set up. That's not the problem anymore.
The difficulty with Linux on the desktop at this point is just 3rd party support. Hardware vendors don't prioritize Linux drivers. Software developers aren't prioritizing Linux ports. If you're only running hardware with Linux support, and you're only running web applications and/or native Linux apps, then Linux makes for a great desktop.
Also it means you don't really hav
No (Score:1, Insightful)
Well... (Score:2)
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It's never been about Year of Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
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What is preventing You from installing Linux on Your desktop ?
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The fact that installing Linux is often a PITA. Dual-boot and have Windows fsck up your boot-loader? Figure out this UEFI stuff? Ugh! Not to mention hardware that's crap under Linux.
Now if you get a box that actually works well with Linux, or better still comes with it pre-installed, that's an entirely different experience.
More than phones, billions of them already though (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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They needn't bother. GNOME is doing a perfectly good job scaring people away from desktop Linux.
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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)
Linux hasn't taken over the world (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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While I don't like SaaS/IaaS very much -particularly when it's hooked into insular solutions with their own incompatible API/ABI and so on-, it is hard to deny that most of the big companies DID provide a good number of worthwhile contributions to open source. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba [...] all published fairly interesting pieces of software.
I feel the situation is overall MUCH better than it used to be in the past.
Re:Linux hasn't taken over the world (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Even with LineageOS you'd still be running an outdated kernel and having to use binary blobs, and it all has to be hacked together for the specific phone. This is quite different from a PC where you can just take a Debian release, run a mainline kernel and it will work on pretty much all the PCs.
Actually, it's capitalism discovering socialism. (Score:1)
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
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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.
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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.
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We forged the chains that are now used to enslave us :(
As long as they're following GPL (Score:2)
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Except we dont, its always locked down by some other means.
e.g. How many phones use open source, how many have full source available and can be re-flashed ?
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Actually, beyond embedded Linux devices, the main stack used is Android. Android provides a nice UI framework, is available for practically for every SoC out there and if you device has a display, it's almost guaranteed to what is running underneath it all.
It's also very cheap to find an Android app developer to develop your frontend UI. Much easier than trying to find a develop for the pile
Corproation, not software (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: Corproation, not software (Score:1)
It might not be what you would have hoped but I'd argue we are better off this way than paying Microsoft for every device and web app seat we touch. In 2018 they are the only company that still charges for a consumer grade os. They could have taken over servers, mainframes, mobile phones, automotive, and embedded. They've had products in all these spaces.
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FOSS assists in a concentration of power by select corporations.
Not the way i hoped it would work out.
What were you expecting, that the people who can barely use their computers and the FOSS operating systems or applications that run on them would somehow be able to modify the code and contribute back? It doesn't matter whether FOSS exists or not, because you're always going to see that outcome as long as you allow competition in a market. The most able competitors will eliminate those that are ineffective.
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That's always been the problem with FOSS, as far back as the 1990s when I first began using it. FOSS advocates have this preconceived notion of what the software they write should be. And users who tell them that's not what they need get told "if that's what you want, then you write it." If you're not a programmer, y
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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.
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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 m
As /.'s former poster child for Windows... (Score:2)
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
It's always next year. (Score:4, Informative)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
The desktop would KILL the Linux. (Score:1)
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 c
Linux Desktop (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If you read the statement as saying, "The cloud is taking over the role that data centers used to play" as "the role that a business's internal datacenter used to play is being taken over by the cloud," then it's not wrong.
I think that's what's intended, given the context. The statement is preceded by, "businesses are spending more on cloud than on internal infrastructure." It also makes sense given the argument being made. It used to be that, even if you hosted your servers in someone else's infrastruc
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So in this sense they cloud technology symbolizes "heaven".
My thoughts exactly (see sig) :D
Nope (Score:1)
From TFS: "...businesses are spending more on cloud than on internal infrastructure."
I call Bullshit.
Yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
The Linux kernel surely takes over the world however Linux is nowhere to be seen on the desktop [altervista.org] 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 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
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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
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where it matters most
[Citation needed]
As much as Linux on Desktops would be a good thing:
a) desktops are dying
b) the backend and all intermittent transit for your data is orders of magnitude more important.
Desktop Apps (Score:3)
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.
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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 photos
Not until Apple kisses the ring (Score:2)
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.
Linux is taking over my home (Score:3)
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.
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my wife and younger daughter to ChromeOS laptops
ChromeOS = Google malware.
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.
Google office suite is also malware. All you've done is rearrange deck chairs on sinking ship.
The penguins are comming the penguins are comming (Score:3)
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... (Score:3)
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You DO realize that the entire concept of "the desktop" has drastically changed from 10-20 years ago, right?
Nope, mine looks and works remarkably similar which is kind of a let down. Years ago tech gods were spending at least some time making shit better... today they are spending all their time trying to fuck you.
Today "the desktop" means pretty much everything from a tablet to a workstation.
Sorry I don't recognize that definition of desktop and don't know of anyone else who does. Nobody thinks tablet when "desktop" is invoked.
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.
The only difference between now and 20 years ago is most of the time when normal people sat in front of their computer it was to click the 'AOL' or Internet dialer.
Is this about Skynet running linux (Score:2)
Sierra supercomputer that monitors America's nuclear stockpile
At 2:14 August 29, 2017 Sierra became self-aware and was renamed Skynet.
Could first (Score:2)
Gartner states that 80 percent of internally developed software is now either cloud-enabled or cloud-native.
Network bills are that cheap?
Cup of tea (Score:2)
no prying eyes 4 me (Score:2)
Is stupidity taking over Slashdot? (Score:2)
Re: Is stupidity taking over Slashdot? (Score:2)
Do Computer Science Majors study linux much? (Score:1)
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.
Yes, but why 2019? This is old news! (Score:2)
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
I have the answer (Score:2)
Yes, it did!
Well... (Score:2)
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. Li
This comes up every year (Score:2)
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 sha
wow (Score:2)
such insight! i'd say linux world domination moment was years ago.
Re: What, 20 years ago? Arguable. (Score:4, Insightful)
While everyone was waiting on the Year of Linux on the Desktop... The desktop died, yet Linux lives on.
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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.
Re: What, 20 years ago? Arguable. (Score:2)
Linux is the kernel. For OSS, you want GNU or BSD userspace over a Linux kernelspace, GNU/Linux and BSD/Linux respectively.
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Linux was the kernel. That is, before it grew up to take over the world. Now Linux is considerably more than a kernel.
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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?
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Yah, no. Linux kernel is a kernel. Debian Linux is a Linux distribution.
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This is just to announce the imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release, which I'm calling the Debian Linux Release [debian.org] -- Ian Murdock
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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
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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).
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Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That would be one of those special cases where the laptop actually ships with Linux, and thus the manufacturer makes sure there is proper hardware support for the hardware they install in order to met their marketing targets. Put Linux on a laptop not designed for it (a.k.a. most of them) and things aren't quite so rosy.
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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".
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In theory it absolutely is the same. In practice the market share difference means it's a whole lot easier finding a laptop without decent Linux drivers than without decent Windows drivers
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It's not Linux, but my laptop has run FreeBSD for six years with no significant battery issues. Battery life is not as good as is claimed by Lenovo, but it's not at all bad and the only thing that does not work is the fingerprint reader. Graphics acceleration works well as does the crypto chip. I get excellent performance playing video from an encrypted partition. Not even close to running out of CPU.
I would not recommend it for gaming, but I would not if running Windows, either. My only real issue is lack
Re: No (Score:4, Interesting)
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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 la