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Operating Systems Linux

Linux Predictions For 2025 (betanews.com) 104

Posted by BeauHD from the year-of-the-Linux-desktop dept.
BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: As we close out 2024, we Linux enthusiasts are once again looking ahead to what the future holds. While Linux has long been the unsung hero of technology, powering servers, supercomputers, and the cloud, it's also a dominant force in the consumer space, even if many don't realize it. With Android leading the way as the most widely used Linux-based operating system, 2025 is shaping up to be another landmark year for the open source world Here are the predictions mentioned in the article:

- Linux will continue to dominate the enterprise sector
- Linux will further solidify its role in powering cloud infrastructure, with major providers like AWS and Google Cloud relying on it. - Gaming on Linux is set to grow in 2025
- Linux will play a major role in AI development
- Linux's appeal to developers and tech enthusiasts will remain strong
- The open source movement will grow stronger

What additional predictions do you have for Linux in 2025?
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Linux Predictions For 2025 More

Linux Predictions For 2025

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  • Weak (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday December 14, 2024 @08:03AM (#65012791)

    Those are some weak-ass predictions. Probably correct, but weak.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pizza ( 87623 )

      ...They might as well predict that water will continue to be wet.

      Linux already utterly dominates the enterptise and cloud sectors (except for on-prem Microsoft shops, anyway) and is the only meaningful platform for AI workloads. That's what brings most of the developers to the yard -- it's *big* business now.

      But I would quibble about "tech enthusiasts" -- they're incredibly fickle and inevitably chase after the latest shiny dangled in front of them.

      As for the "open source movement" -- it's inexorably inte

      • But I would quibble about "tech enthusiasts" -- they're incredibly fickle and inevitably chase after the latest shiny dangled in front of them.

        By this point, anyone who is truly an OS enthusiast has written their own OS from scratch.

      • It's a glass-half-full type of thing. am really happy that linux has established the datacenter such a solid important niche (particularly since it affects my working environment). And yes, the reason for that is because competing corporations have found the open-source realm as an effective way to cooperate. True, it would never have got where it is today without individuals writing code because they enjoy it and sharing it for free. They were the genesis. But it would also never have got where it i

    • Re:Weak (Score:5, Insightful)

      by supremebob ( 574732 ) <themejunky@@@geocities...com> on Saturday December 14, 2024 @08:47AM (#65012861) Journal

      Yeah, these are some pretty Captain Obvious level "predictions".

      I can also safely "predict" that Apple will also release new iPhones that look an awful lot like the older iPhones in 2025, but that's not exactly a bold prediction.

      • I can also safely "predict" that Apple will also release new iPhones that look an awful lot like the older iPhones in 2025, but that's not exactly a bold prediction.

        You forgot, "but 1 micron thinner" ...

      • Also that Microsoft will release an update that bricks lots of devices, that there'll be a major data breach affecting tens of millions of consumers, that Chinese hackers will do something nefarious, that Google or IBM will announce quantum supremacy again, possibly several times, and a few other things.

    • Those are some weak-ass predictions. Probably correct, but weak.

      Would you have preferred another Year of the Linux Desktop prediction?

      Marketing has been drunk and high on clickbait for a while now. Weak is a new coffee bean blend by comparison. Still gets the job done, and is appreciated by many for those rustic subtle hints of realistic.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by twakar ( 128390 )
      I agree 100%

      The thing that irritates me most is that the whole article could be summed up as:

      'Linux will keep on rolling, doing what it's been doing for the last 30+ years'

      Useless word salad

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      You mean those are the same kind of predictions you can find in the horoscopes...

  • 2025.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rick Zeman ( 15628 ) on Saturday December 14, 2024 @08:11AM (#65012801)

    ...will be the year of the Linux desktop.

    Oh wait....

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pizza ( 87623 )

      It's been "the year of the linux desktop" for several years in a row now. Unfortunately it's actually "Linux on the Microsoft Desktop".

  • With FreeCAD going to 1.0, Linux will make a major breakout in engineering CAD this coming year. FreeCAD will follow the same trajectory in that space as Blender and Krita in theirs. First they achieve parity with their proprietary rivals, then surpass them.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by rlees42 ( 1973364 )
      Abhoring the state of commercial CAD options (Windows, excessive subscription fees, insignificant improvement cycles) I jumped right on testing this out. Experienced about 3x the clicks that I should to create a simple sketch and shape. Downloaded a STEP file from GrabCAD -- locked up FreeCAD on import. Kudos to them for reaching 1.0 but I'll check in again next year.

    • Re:Linux will crack the CAD market (Score:5, Interesting)

      by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Saturday December 14, 2024 @12:03PM (#65013133) Journal

      Hmm. Well... I'm not sure, not yet but maybe it doesn't matter.

      OK, FreeCAD user here. And to note, I've never used FreeCAD for a personal project, only work so far.

      I first used FreeCAD ages ago nearly a decade ago. I was using OpenSCAD (odd choice, I know, but I had some rather specific requirements around automation and I was making heavy use of minkowski sums to make a minimal case to spec that just fit around all the things it had to contain). Needed to get some injection moulding done and they won't mill off STL files, they basically needed a proper BREP. It also meant that the full automation was no longer needed since the shape was now fixed.

      So I went to reach for SolidWorks since I'd used it before, and... well one does not simply buy CAD software. Or even hire it. No, one had to talk to the local rep and tell them your life story, etc etc, only to receive the same quote as anyone else. So I duly booked the meeting... in a few weeks. Left with nothing to do and a burning desire for a BREP based file, so I looked at this FreeCAD thingy. I didn't have a desire to try my luck with Pro/E...

      Anyhoo. It was basic, janky, crashy (though I will engage in fisticuffs with anyone who claims SolidWorks is not) and slow, but I had my injection mould cadded up and send to the manufacturer before the meeting with the rep (which I duly cancelled). That was nice, I didn't have a handy Windows machine anyway.

      Fast forward to a few months ago. I needed to make a thing. At least OnShape exists now and doesn't require me to dual boot (my 4090 workstation runs linux), and even offers to sell licenses for money! But it's pricey (but not outrageous), and I only needed to to a thing, and I didn't want to learn a whole new CAD package and FreeCAD is right there and I've heard good things about 1.0...

      So here I am with the "one thing" having almost infinitely expanded. The new FreeCAD is way, way, way better than it used to be. It's not as good (still) as the big boys, but the scope of what it can do effectively has grown hugely. This means it's now a reasonable choice for a much wider range of projects than previously. I'm aware of the limitations, but they're not biting hard right now: I'm doing prototyping with rapid iterations so it's not like I need to CAD up a detailed wiring cabinet or anything to be handed over. There's no one to hand it over to and anyway it would be wasted time because each instance is currently being built once.

      I'm not sure I see it surpassing the major players for a while (though they're not all equal either) for big projects, but it's now a firm competitor on the lower end.

      EDA however is apparently there. Last time (same as my FreeCAD foray), I used EagleCAD which was good. It got bought by AutoDesk, enshitiffied and turned into SAAS. Everyone now says KiCAD is way better, so when I need a board made (soon I expect), I will take the plunge and learn KiCAD.

      So for electronics CAD, it has surpassed major proprietary rivals, for mechanical it's a way off, but it doesn't need to not be for being entirely fine for quite a lot of things you might need to do.

      • EDA however is apparently there. Last time (same as my FreeCAD foray), I used EagleCAD which was good. It got bought by AutoDesk, enshitiffied and turned into SAAS. Everyone now says KiCAD is way better, so when I need a board made (soon I expect), I will take the plunge and learn KiCAD.

        Way back in the day I had some experience with PCAD and either UltiBoard or Pads, I forget which. In 2011 I started using KiCAD and have used it off and on since, although it's been five years since I last used it. But even then it was very complete, mostly logical and intuitive. I shipped off Gerber files for 4-layer boards to a couple of PCB fabs with zero back-and-forth - the boards corresponded perfectly with the design.

        I can't speak about how good or how well integrated their simulation stuff is. But o

        • I shipped off Gerber files for 4-layer boards to a couple of PCB fabs with zero back-and-forth - the boards corresponded perfectly with the design.

          Some memories there! The board manufacturer, a subcontractor of the main manufacturer decided to put a small empty margin around the board, basically cutting away some of the specified copper. This cut the width of a track connecting the programming header down to about a hair. Miraculously only 5% of the boards failed. I only figured that out after days of hair-

      • Awesome story bro. I am doing CAD models that compare well with anything I see coming out of Autodesk shops. So I know what it can do. Also what it can't do. Also how to make it eat my model... there is a lot less of that these last few weeks. I wisely set up a Git based backup script, just a few lines of bash and works wonderfully. I basically keep backups every few minutes, forever. Did I say awesomely? Oh, I said wonderfully. But I meant awesomely.

        I have every confidence that FreeCAD will be better than

        • Awesome story bro.

          What' with the attitude, bro?

          I am doing CAD models that compare well with anything I see coming out of Autodesk shops.

          You're acting like you need to convince me or throw it in my face or something. Given I'm already using FreeCAD 1.0 beta, I'm unsure as to what you are expecting here.

          I basically keep backups every few minutes, forever.

          I mean this was standard practice with Solidworks and Pro/E last time I used them. And by "standard" I mean it wasn't but was standard practice to whinge a

      • You're right. It's going to knock off the major players one by one, not all at once. BTW, do you know how outright buggy Solidworks is, even after having decades and infinite funds to fix it?

    • Blender has in no way surpassed its rivals in anything except price.

    • Linux already dominates the engineering CAD market. That doesn't make the CAD software any less expensive, though.

      • Nice to know. But there are still millions of Windows CAD stations in circulation. They will go extinct pretty soon. The thing is, FreeCAD slots in at the right price.

  • >"What additional predictions do you have for Linux in 2025?"

    Those predictions are hardly insightful predictions, they are just well-known trends that have continued for many years. Except they left off industrial/embedded/controllers, which it has also dominated forever.

    The real question is Linux on the home and business desktop.

    My prediction is that as Microsoft continues to push artificial hardware "requirements", trying to force people to replace perfectly good computers, and irritate users with clo

    • Clear, succinct way to say it. Tagging on, we have already saw that adoption curve turning up at least quadratically in the closing months of the expiring year. The new year is going to be interesting for sure.

    • Re: 2025 will be the year of Linux on the Desktop (Score:5, Informative)

      by RegistrationIsDumb83 ( 6517138 ) on Saturday December 14, 2024 @09:00AM (#65012879)
      I never thought I'd be able to reliably game on Linux. Thanks to proton, I didn't have to reboot to windows to play a game all 2024.

      • I'm in the other side, sadly. I used to be able to not boot on windows to game, but 2024 had been the opposite, with me nearly never boring into Linux.

        Gaming on Linux has gotten better, but gnu/linux as an OS seems to be getting worse and worse. Early in 2024, I decided to finally ditch my EOL'd kubuntu and install something fresh.

        I tried debian, it was absolutely awful, bad performance, and I couldn't even install virtualbox even after trying the 3 official methods.

        Then Arch, the boot and shutdown always h

        • I tried debian, it was absolutely awful, bad performance

          No it isn't and no you didn't. Trolling or just clueless? If the latter then I will set up on the correct path.

          • Not telling, and not clueless either.

          • Not telling and not clueless either. I've used Linux since 2005, and as my main OS since 2008.

            First with ubuntu, then a bit of fedora, then debian unstable from around 2009 to 2013. It was great. Then mint, to flee from gnome 3, then kubuntu, once mate started getting affected by gtk3 and its feature removals.

            And this year I tried debian again as I said, and yes it was awful. Unstable and sid have broken dependencies galore, and the desktop is absolutely lagging.

            I don't know if the problem comes from kde, f

            • Not trolling *

              On compiz fusion was smoother *

              Crappy autocorrect and lack of edit function...

            • So what was the issue with kubuntu? KDE + nvidia + x11 should be pretty well sorted there.

              I know it's not a gamer favorite, but running AMD GPUs is pretty seamless with KDE + X11 on any machine I've tried. nVidia... well, hopefully things will get better because they've finally released an open source kernel driver that can (as I understand it) pull in the rest with a binary blob kind of like all those existing driver+blobs that work seamlessly. Because man I hate dealing with their drivers :-/ https://deve [nvidia.com]

              • I've used nvidia gpus since 2009 (9700 in a macbookpro, then a 770, then a 970 and now a 3060ti), it always worked well with similar performance as windows with the proprietary blob, with the DE I used (mate then kde), with smooth 144fps. I've become quite proficient with wine over the years too, to the point I only rebooted to windows once in a while to play the odd game that really didn't play ball with wine.

                Since I reinstalled though, it's extremely laggy even for simple desktop usage like opening applic

                • Since I reinstalled though, it's extremely laggy even for simple desktop usage like opening applications or minimizing windows

                  You've got something way broken. And dollars to doughnuts it's not Linux, it's something else. Possibly something in your home network that you are confusing with CPU performance. Run top to be sure of this. Hit "1" to see all the individual cpus. I am confident it will help you get pointed in the right direct.

  • I'm sure they'll have the bugs worked out of Wayland by then, and the new GNU/Systemd distros will finally support cutting-edge features like "three finger swipe on touchpad", "hibernate", and "bluetooth".

  • My 2025 prediction - Linux will get kicked off National Vulnerability Database (NVD) due to flooding it with junk CVEs.
    • This. A CVE report should be required to ship with an exploit.

    • WTF bro?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        They really need to quit filing every bug as CVE. There are hundreds of these filed since they were allowed to self-report. It is flooding everyone downstream that deals with CVEs. CVE is not intended to be a bug reporting database, but a vulnerability database.

        • What you're missing is that there is a reason why Linux is far and away the most secure generally distributed operating system. You're barking up the wrong tree. Way wrong. Please do us all a favor and find the right tree to bark at.

  • KDE's web browser tech is integrated into Windows 11's UI, so I view Windows 11 as a KDE distro.

  • "with Android continuing to dominate mobile gaming, Linux offers gamers a unified ecosystem across devices"

    Uh what? Android games aren't Linux games. They're Android games. Yes, Android has many commonalities with desktop Linux, and someone who understands Unix can understand and navigate the Linux underpinnings of Android no problem. But no, Android apps aren't Linux apps. You have to run a whole Android system with its own kernel under Linux to get even shaky and inconsistent compatibility.

    • Nice post. But I would add one correction: Android is Linux. Speaking as someone who has spent considerable time as root on Android devices. Cosmetic skin on Linux only. Shitty one for that matter, but that's a different question.

      Think of Android as just another Linux distro and all will become clear.

  • Seen that (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Saturday December 14, 2024 @09:56AM (#65012953) Homepage
    And where it matters, on the desktop, it will continue to suck because Linux as an OS doesn't exist [altervista.org].

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Tora ( 65882 )

      And yet, after 30 years of working in both operating systems AND many more, I've had the most problems with drivers and cross-compatability in Windows over any other operating system.
      I think the article's straw-man assertion just doesn't hold up in the real world.
      If you run an alpha-release of one of the main distros, maybe, but ... that's ALPHA. You don't do that if you want stability.

      • This has been my experience as well. I have bought an assortment of hardware including two scanners and one printer because they were no longer supported by the current version of Windows. What's more, in literally every case, the hardware spoke a protocol that was still used by newer hardware which had driver support. Some of it probably could have been made to work via inf file hacking, while some of it might have required driver hacking — which is harder these days due to signed drivers, so you hav

    • Re:Seen that (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Saturday December 14, 2024 @12:50PM (#65013229) Homepage Journal

      Linux as an OS doesn't exist, that's true.

      But Windows as an OS doesn't exist, either. It's a long series of different OSes with varying compatibility. They kept changing the way it works, which is reasonable, but also changing the way things are done, and not subtly.

      And also, not intelligently; In Windows 8 they tried to make the system touch-friendly, but they left tons of interfaces with no updated replacement so it wasn't realistic to depend on touch. Windows 10 was a great refinement, but Windows 11 jacks up a bunch of interfaces again. The peak of quality and backwards compatibility was 32 bit Windows 2000 and NT.

      The switch to 64 bit left support for a lot of hardware and software behind; software with 16 bit components would no longer function on 64 bit Windows because Microsoft deliberately did not include support for those processes in the 64 bit NTVDM process despite the fact that amd64 processors support mixed mode operation which would permit it. Because of the inferior way in which shared libraries work on Windows as compared to Unix (where you can have as many different versions installed and loaded simultaneously as you have disk and memory for) it is unreasonable to be able to support older software and newer software at the same time.

      Your comment begs the question, is the desktop what matters? Historically the answer would have been an unequivocal yes, because that was where everything happened. For many businesses that is still true, but for many others it is not. Many things are now happening on the web, and what matters in those cases is the browser. A lot of businesses could exist with nothing exposed to the user but the browser, since they are doing literally everything through one. Even a lot of supposed standalone applications are now just a browser locked down to a single site. Microsoft itself is promoting this future with its web-based office suite, so they are simultaneously preparing for and ushering in an era in which their desktop OS is irrelevant to more people.

  • .. will keep the loopholes in Windows 11 wide open and gaping. .. even for older Hardware .. and on older out of support Macintel iMacs, Books, Pros ..

  • BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews:

    Might be worth noting that he is the author of the BetaNews article itself, not a random person who happened to think it was neat and shared it.

    • I don't see anything wrong with someone submitting their relevant article to Slashdot. In fact, I'd prefer the author have their name in the open on the submission, versus the dumb "an anonymous reader shares..." posts - as if it's not blazingly obvious who "anonymous" is.

  • The moment Apple announces they will make an enterprise OS is when these journalists and pundits will do an about-face on their unshakeable belief in Linux.
    I don't think Apple could actually have a chance, but if they even dipped their toes into the industry we'd see a total media circus around it.

    • Early in the millennium, Apple tried getting into the enterprise market with the Xserve [wikipedia.org] and Xserve RAID [wikipedia.org]. It was actually decent hardware (especially the RAID), but it didn't gain enough traction for Apple to stick with it.

      I knew a couple admins who connected Xserve RAIDs to Red Hat Linux servers - overall they were quite happy with them. The Xserve as a standalone server, though, didn't really offer much that Linux couldn't handle equally as well (or better, in many cases).

      I will note that these products we

      • Yea, I have Xserve G5 (ML/9217A), I used to also have an Xserve G4 (RackMac1,1) but the PSU died and I sold it as-is on ebay for slightly less than the $80 shipping. (don't worry, I made the buyer pay shipping). I also have a Sun Fire T2000 (UltraSPARC T1 piece of crap). My small rack of gear is mostly off because they're such power hogs and have very loud fans that they make the office unpleasant to be in. I have Debian on the Xserve and a very old copy of OpenSolaris on the sparc (I was trying to get Xen

  • And that's a good thing for those of us who use it in the desktop. First, that aberration that is Gnome 3.* will continue spinning its wheels. Second, the bad guys will carry on focusing on Windows. Third, it will still be possible to use non-Windows-ized Linux distributions.

    The fact that Linux will not make it big in the desktop is a blessing for some of us.

  • My predictions. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak AT yahoo DOT com> on Saturday December 14, 2024 @12:49PM (#65013227) Homepage Journal

    Some of these are snarky, but frankly those responsible deserve it.

    1. Documentation, particularly of Linux kernel internals and filesystems, will remain poor, leading to many re-invented wheels and a sustained naivety about why things work or don't.

    2. Application developers will remain incompetent in testing, resulting in a defect density between 10x and 100x that of the kernel. This will result in an increasing number of embarrassing failures that nobody will take responsibility for because they regard it as soneone else's problem.

    3. The likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle will continue to eat away at the edges of Open Source, both for direct profit and - as Oracle has gone so well in the past - to cripple competition.

    4. The poor state of collaboration and the intense egos will result in projects continuing to implode and die rather than get picked up by others, as happened with both Reiser filesystems and is very likely to happen with bcachefs. It will also result in projects being steered by vanity, rather than good engineering, as happened with GCC prior to EGCS replacing the original codebase.

    5. Despite all of this, businesses that can't afford to replace their IT infrastructure will migrate from Windows 10 to Linux on the desktop, and from VMWare (where you now have to buy a minimum of 32-core licenses) to open source virtual machines.

    6. Linus Torvalds is foreign, a proponent of freedom, and thus the natural opponent of the corporate donors to Trump. Expect him to be amongst those Trump expels.

    • Re:My predictions. (Score:5, Funny)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Saturday December 14, 2024 @02:53PM (#65013491)

      6. Linus Torvalds is foreign, a proponent of freedom, and thus the natural opponent of the corporate donors to Trump. Expect him to be amongst those Trump expels.

      Or... Trump will fork his own distro, probably named Trump Linux, sell it for $1,000 in a gold box, w/o support, *and* people will buy it.

      • Inside the box will be no physical media, but a single sheet of paper that says "RTFM" with a copy pasted, impossible to type googlified URL that's 700 characters long.

  • It's going to be the year of the Linux desktop!

  • I've been experimenting with AI and Open Source Code: I think a lot of projects which are currently struggling are going to get new life and new code pumped into them thanks to AI. Tasks which were previously out of reach of programmers who couldn't spend the time to learn concepts can be quickly solved and moved on thanks to AI. I've been able to write a wifi heatmapper and media cueing software for live stage production within hours when previously these projects would take months to get the same results.

    • I am currently looking into writing Wayland/Pulseaudio/Network Manager GUIs for GNUstep so we can finally have a mac-like desktop on Linux.

      GNUstep plus Compiz plus avant-window-navigator would give you that stuff on X11. Compiz is kind of warty, but it does the Expose thing and several other things that you need for the full experience.

  • When Redmond goes ahead with their " Windows Recall " feature, that will do more to push
    users towards considering a Linux environment than anything else in modern history.

    Linux is far from perfect, but when given the choice between it and the Redmond AI Overlord
    watching, listening and recording every single keystroke I make, I will take the Linux route
    without hesitation.

    Technically, I'm already there since my home server is running Linux and my secondary
    desktop is running Mint. I'll just have to give up my

  • For real this time. Ask any commenter on Reddit or YouTube or slashdot whenever a Windows article appears and they will all tell this will finally drive them to Linux

  • And get comparatively better than the alternatives by not shooting itself on the foot over and over with a GAU-12 with dumb trends.

  • No Linux distro will spam you with sales ads for an AI Chatbot ( looking at you M$ co pilot)

  • The name Linux is going to become less relevant because it is going to be forked under a new name to get away from woke ideology that is infecting the tech industry. It is also going to be forked and further developed under new names as world War 3 is going to divide the world more than it is now. This division includes more counties or continents having their own separate version of the internet, and their own version of Linux.
  • I have 2 older Windows 10 gaming PCs which always seem to be updating something or other. One is stuck in a 'windows could not apply this update' loop, can't find anything to resolve it other than 'reformat and reinstall' which is not happening.

    So now both of them dual boot Ubuntu. The game I use most (Elite Dangerous) works flawlessly. Both HOTAS work fine. My home brew button-box works fine. The systems boot faster and updates are painless.

    I'm sure there are some games with anti-cheat runtimes which m

  • SteamOS and Bazzite will continue to grow. No longer needing to also maintain a Windows device or installation will allow a lot more people to full switch to Linux.

  • Maybe in ten years if all goes well . . .

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