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Cloud Linux IT

Is Linux Taking Over The World? (networkworld.com) 243

Posted by EditorDavid from the beyond-the-desktop dept.
"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...
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Is Linux Taking Over The World? More

Is Linux Taking Over The World?

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  • As Madge would say, (Score:5, Funny)

    by SpzToid ( 869795 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @03:45PM (#57733024)

    You're soaking in it!

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

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @03:48PM (#57733034)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • 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.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:I would say Linux.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01, 2018 @05:30PM (#57733396)

      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".

      • It's the exact case with some family members here too: God loves XFCE!

      • Re:I would say Linux.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ras ( 84108 ) <russell+slashdot ... au minus painter> on Sunday December 02, 2018 @06:55AM (#57735762) Homepage

        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.

    • 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

      • 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 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

        • 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

    • 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)

    by Vanyle ( 5553318 )
    No
    • I think that depends on whether 2019 will be the year of the Linux desktop...

  • It's never been about Year of Linux (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01, 2018 @03:52PM (#57733058)

    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: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What is preventing You from installing Linux on Your desktop ?

      • 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)

    by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @03:56PM (#57733068)

    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)

    • Microsoft has been fighting tooth and nail to keep Linux Desktop at bay.

      They needn't bother. GNOME is doing a perfectly good job scaring people away from desktop Linux.

  • Linux hasn't taken over the world (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @03:58PM (#57733076)

    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: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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)

        by grumbel ( 592662 ) <grumbel+slashdot@gmail.com> on Saturday December 01, 2018 @05:40PM (#57733434) Homepage

        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.

    • 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

      • 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.

        • 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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by bug1 ( 96678 )

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

    • what's wrong with that? They make money, we get tons and tons of free software (free as in beer & speech).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bug1 ( 96678 )

        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 ?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      What's taken over the world is those companies' disgusting and heinous application stacks that happen to run on Linux.

      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)

    by bug1 ( 96678 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @03:58PM (#57733080)

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • 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.

    • I think you misspelled "coproration", which refers to pieces of excrement handed out to the poor unsuspecting masses. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki... [wiktionary.org]
    • There's nothing stopping FOSS from releasing the same products as the corporations are. The corporations are just better than FOSS advocates at figuring out and giving users what they want.

      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

  • As /.'s former poster child for Windows... (Score:2)

    by 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

  • It's always next year. (Score:4, Informative)

    by w0mprat ( 1317953 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @04:06PM (#57733112)
    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. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mspohr ( 589790 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @04:26PM (#57733192)

      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)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01, 2018 @04:15PM (#57733158)

    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)

    by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @04:26PM (#57733194)
    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.

    • 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

  • Nope (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    From TFS: "...businesses are spending more on cloud than on internal infrastructure."

    I call Bullshit.

  • Yeah (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @04:32PM (#57733222) Homepage

    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.

    • 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

    • 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)

    by 15Bit ( 940730 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @04:39PM (#57733254)
    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.

    • 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

  • 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)

    by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @05:11PM (#57733336) Homepage

    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.

    • 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)

    by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @05:22PM (#57733374)

    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)

    by GerryGilmore ( 663905 ) on Saturday December 01, 2018 @05:32PM (#57733406)
    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.

    • 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.

  • Sierra supercomputer that monitors America's nuclear stockpile

    At 2:14 August 29, 2017 Sierra became self-aware and was renamed Skynet.

  • 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.
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Yes, it did!

  • 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

  • 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)

    by sad_ ( 7868 )

    such insight! i'd say linux world domination moment was years ago.

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