In the last 3 years:

* the kernel turned over to version 3
* the raspberry pis came out
* steam came to Linux bringing with it
* loads of native games
* much better graphics support

and much more besides. Pretty much anyone can just download Linux, install it, and have everything work out-the-box. My question to you is, what will the world of Linux be like in 3 years time?

there's gonna be a "great schism" those who will use 1 click installers (e.g. ubuntu/debian, elementary, etc) and those who build everything from source (e.g. arch, crux, etc). i'm really hoping there'll be some kind of unification of how drivers will be written, making it easier for companies to release opensource hardware drivers, thus making it easier for those who will have to write their own. gaming is gonna explode. lots of "hardcore" computer users are gamers, and lots of them dual boot linux for computer use and something else (windoze) for gaming. is linux gets better video card support gaming will increase, and less people will dual boot. unfortunately lots of "megacorps" will invest in *nix distros and there'll be as many corp backed ones as there are indie ones.

I think it'll slowly keep on moving forward.

I'm not sure if it'll ever get a high popularity rate because OSX and Windows are focusing on marketing schemes which attracts the public.
Sure thing is that we'll get more graphic and driver support due to Steam.
The future also depends on the trends, what we'll want to have. If, for example, a brand new technology that everyone wants to get is purely GNU/Linux based (unlike ChromeOS and Android) then it'll open a lot of opportunities for the community.

(01-10-2014, 03:38 AM)venam Wrote: purely GNU/Linux based

You mean like SteamOS?

SystemD/Linux

(01-10-2014, 03:12 PM)Foggalong Wrote:

(01-10-2014, 03:38 AM)venam Wrote: purely GNU/Linux based

You mean like SteamOS?

Indeed, as long as it doesn't hide anything from the user.
I'm very happy about SteamOS.

I also like SteamOS, it's more or less a debian-install which autostarts Steam.

I really hope it evolves in to something that can be used for a "complete" livingroom-pc; something that I can play games/emulators and watch movies with.

(02-10-2014, 07:59 AM)dunz0r Wrote: I really hope it evolves in to something that can be used for a "complete" livingroom-pc; something that I can play games/emulators and watch movies with.

They've already implemented a music player into the client so I wouldn't be surprised if it gets a video player somewhere down the line too.

I would be happy if there was some smooth way to integrate it into Kodi/XBMC which is what my HTPC runs now. It's a bit too slow for playing games unfortunately, but maybe in the future when there are more games avaliable and SteamOS is more stable I'll switch over to it(if it has a good video player and Android remote control).

without any additional input, when I look at the world today and I think about what is possible for tomorrow, let alone three years from now, I can't help but think about three things: things of the future from "yesterday" (a la Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead"), things of today, and things of the future of tomorrow (a la Kaku's "Physics of the Future").

In "The Road Ahead", Gates waxed eloquent about payment systems and the Internet, which we have fully embraced today.

In today's tech, we talk about various technologies like Apple's Payment system, breaches, and next generation firewalls. This is useful, but not entirely.

In Michio Kaku's "Physics of the Future", we see how things are supposed to be. I.e. the way things are going to be.

If we looked at Linux, FreeBSD, or any other such *NIX, we are forced to look at a couple of different aspects: what we see as available today (i.e. what is in the code-base today) and what is available tomorrow (i.e. what is available in road-maps and future plans.)

When we look at today vs. tomorrow, and we consider into that all of the different things that are foretold in both "The Road Ahead" and "Physics of the Future", I can't help but think that Linux and *NIX are missing out on at least some of the consumer aspects of the future. That said, Linux and *NIX may very well be at the forefront of some aspects of the future on account of the fact that *NIX is far more open, and therefor accessible to researchers, than other operating systems.

As the foundation of the "web", its obvious that *NIX is going to play 'some' role, the question is, what role will it play? To date, Linux, in particular, has played a key role in the hand-held computing space on account of the fact that Android is Linux based. That said, if we consider that Linux is the basis for a whole variety of hand-held devices, as well as the back-end for the rest of it, I think we have to consider the central role of Linux and *NIX.

At the end of the day, all of that means that Linux and *NIX have a central role in the future of tech.

Cheers,
Soda

Wayland + orbment dominance ;)

I see the companies taking more interest & developing parts of the system to be able to control the future direction of Linux. Here I'm thinking of pulseaudio, necessary for using skype, & systemd, being pushed by RedHat. However, I foresee a backlash from hackers, who will rewrite Linux as a new system with a new name. I also feel some users will transfer to the BSDs. Wearable computing will be available & trendy.

I see companies producing their own kernel schedulers and Linux kernel variants and selling them for different use cases to Linux users.

In a way it would be like ARM CPU's. You can literally chose between 40 different ARM CPU's, all of which is based on the same architecture but have subtle differences in performance and design with cost ranging from $70 to thousands of dollars.

I like looking at these prediction threads similar to this one from today's point of view.
What do you think? Were some people on point?
How do you see the next 3 years in the Linux world?

Like z3bra predicted, the Linux ecosystem has been moving towards a SystemD singularity for some time now, and it doesn't seem like it's gonna stop anytime soon.
In the future, I believe SystemD will have more influence than before and add even more features. We've already seen the beginning of this with SystemD/homed releasing last year IIRC.
It also looks like Windows and Linux are getting more and more compatible with each other. Windows now has WSL (2) and I predict it will have the ability to interface with Linux systems more closely during the next few years. Linux also got support for the NTFS filesystem last year, so the support is growing on the Linux side too.

(28-04-2015, 05:14 AM)bsdkeith Wrote: I see the companies taking more interest & developing parts of the system to be able to control the future direction of Linux. Here I'm thinking of pulseaudio, necessary for using skype, & systemd, being pushed by RedHat. However, I foresee a backlash from hackers, who will rewrite Linux as a new system with a new name. I also feel some users will transfer to the BSDs. Wearable computing will be available & trendy.

That's exactly my view.
I see Linux being more friendly to regular users, but becoming unfriendly to hackers.

I think that, with the uniformization of the Linux environment, the differences between distros will become smaller.

I don't know... I don't use Linux anymore so I don't know what the current trends on distros are.

Most distributions today are basically Debian with an even uglier default desktop, so that’s that about distro differences.

Gentoo and Slackware will probably keep up the flame of systemd refugees.

I think in 3 years, there will be purely corporate distros, like Ubuntu, Centos (oh, no, that one is RIP, right), RHEL which will have became systemd/Linux instead of GNU/Linux.
Their desktops will be gnome, cinnamon, mate, KDE... but mostly GnomeD^W Gnome. Maybe Gnome will be merged into systemd and renamed in desktop-environment-d, aka DED.
There, Xorg will be a thing of the past, wayland everywhere, and probably lot of security failures despite the all safer components, because things will be a nightmare to setup correctly. Maybe this nightmare will be voluntarily done, to make corporations more worth of the money they want for the "support", but I think it'll be mostly because knowledge of how system work will be lost.
Things will be very big-data-AI centric, computers will guess a lot, and that'll work nicely... for normal usages.

I explicitly don't put Debian in there, because I believe (as shown by the fact in Debian 10 "buster", "init" can be either: systemd-sysv, sysvinit-core or runit-init) that while systemd will be the major and most widely used system framework, it will still be a GNU-able/Linux distro, with half-ass in corporate-side, and half-ass in hackers-side. That's something I now believe is Debian's trademark after all.

Then, there will be the anti-systemd distro, most of them keeping old sysVinit uglyness by default: Devuan and the others. Sure, they work to use more advanced init and supervision tools, but I don't think they'll be there in 3 years.
Those are the "old guard corporate distro".
Those will provide limited support for big DEs, probably good one for lone window managers.

Another side will be the hacker-distros. Here, I put mostly voidlinux, guix, k1ss, but I'm pretty certain there are others, and we might see more appearing.
Since they are hacker-oriented, they will have completely random support for Xorg or Wayland, not to mention flatpack & the like.
Basically, they'll have completely random support for everything outside the linux kernel, because, well, they *are* hacker-oriented, mostly targeting amateurs (in the meaning, doing stuff for fun).
By random, I mean, some will support a lot a solution, others another solution, and not that things will fail 1 time every 10 times.

(22-02-2021, 09:42 PM)freem Wrote: I think in 3 years, there will be purely corporate distros, like Ubuntu, Centos (oh, no, that one is RIP, right), RHEL which will have became systemd/Linux instead of GNU/Linux.
Their desktops will be gnome, cinnamon, mate, KDE... but mostly GnomeD^W Gnome. Maybe Gnome will be merged into systemd and renamed in desktop-environment-d, aka DED.

Happy to disagree here. We have Elementary OS and also Distros like Void Linux and Solus which become more and more active these years.

(22-02-2021, 09:42 PM)freem Wrote: There, Xorg will be a thing of the past, wayland everywhere, and probably lot of security failures despite the all safer components, because things will be a nightmare to setup correctly. Maybe this nightmare will be voluntarily done, to make corporations more worth of the money they want for the "support", but I think it'll be mostly because knowledge of how system work will be lost.

Wayland reached puberty (13 years now) but is still nowhere near being a good daily driver for anything other than simple day-to-day-tasks like web browsing and such. If you want to do anything remotely "exotic", you'd have to wait for the mercy of wayland implementers.

(22-02-2021, 09:42 PM)freem Wrote: Things will be very big-data-AI centric, computers will guess a lot, and that'll work nicely... for normal usages.

I would highly doubt this. The things I've seen so far are all going into a wrong direction. People are still trying to create an AI by throwing power at it and a big fat network instead of going the logical side and figure out how exactly we can have smart machines. We're in 2021 and we're still getting AI answers by brute-forcing. That's not really what an AI is supposed to be, is it? It just has more information and more computing power, it's not smarter than our current desktop computers.

(22-02-2021, 09:42 PM)freem Wrote: I explicitly don't put Debian in there, because I believe (as shown by the fact in Debian 10 "buster", "init" can be either: systemd-sysv, sysvinit-core or runit-init) that while systemd will be the major and most widely used system framework, it will still be a GNU-able/Linux distro, with half-ass in corporate-side, and half-ass in hackers-side. That's something I now believe is Debian's trademark after all.

Then, there will be the anti-systemd distro, most of them keeping old sysVinit uglyness by default: Devuan and the others. Sure, they work to use more advanced init and supervision tools, but I don't think they'll be there in 3 years.
Those are the "old guard corporate distro".
Those will provide limited support for big DEs, probably good one for lone window managers.

I love to disagree here. Those distros will not go anywhere as long as people have a freedom of choice. People don't switch to Void Linux for not having systemd, they also switch to make their system simpler and faster.

(22-02-2021, 09:42 PM)freem Wrote: Another side will be the hacker-distros. Here, I put mostly voidlinux, guix, k1ss, but I'm pretty certain there are others, and we might see more appearing.
Since they are hacker-oriented, they will have completely random support for Xorg or Wayland, not to mention flatpack & the like.
Basically, they'll have completely random support for everything outside the linux kernel, because, well, they *are* hacker-oriented, mostly targeting amateurs (in the meaning, doing stuff for fun).
By random, I mean, some will support a lot a solution, others another solution, and not that things will fail 1 time every 10 times.

... Hacker distros and you put Void Linux inside? What about Kali-Linux, the so called Hacker distro?

To conclude, I can hardly agree with any of your points.

TheAnachron Wrote:To conclude, I can hardly agree with any of your points.

That's more than fine, I'd love to be wrong on many of those. Now, let me review the disagreements.
In practice, I describe more a world that I'll hate, than one that I'll love, and I'm working on building my distro for that exact reason.

(25-02-2021, 04:15 AM)TheAnachron Wrote:

(22-02-2021, 09:42 PM)freem Wrote: I think in 3 years, there will be purely corporate distros, like Ubuntu, Centos (oh, no, that one is RIP, right), RHEL which will have became systemd/Linux instead of GNU/Linux.
Their desktops will be gnome, cinnamon, mate, KDE... but mostly GnomeD^W Gnome. Maybe Gnome will be merged into systemd and renamed in desktop-environment-d, aka DED.

Happy to disagree here. We have Elementary OS and also Distros like Void Linux and Solus which become more and more active these years.

I do hope that they'll become more active, but I don't think it will go that way. More and more non-curious people will start using linux, and that means, not only GNU/Linux nor BSD/Linux, but also Win/Linux or Android.
I don't like it, but those are parts of current «Linux world», and pretty important when you go out of your own LAN.

TheAnachron Wrote:

(22-02-2021, 09:42 PM)freem Wrote: There, Xorg will be a thing of the past, wayland everywhere, and probably lot of security failures despite the all safer components, because things will be a nightmare to setup correctly. Maybe this nightmare will be voluntarily done, to make corporations more worth of the money they want for the "support", but I think it'll be mostly because knowledge of how system work will be lost.

Wayland reached puberty (13 years now) but is still nowhere near being a good daily driver for anything other than simple day-to-day-tasks like web browsing and such. If you want to do anything remotely "exotic", you'd have to wait for the mercy of wayland implementers.

And that's exactly why I spoke about security failures: nobody will be able to secure the mess reliably. It will end like Xorg, but way faster. I don't think wayland protocol is near usable, especially for people concerned by security.

TheAnachron Wrote:

(22-02-2021, 09:42 PM)freem Wrote: Things will be very big-data-AI centric, computers will guess a lot, and that'll work nicely... for normal usages.

I would highly doubt this. The things I've seen so far are all going into a wrong direction. People are still trying to create an AI by throwing power at it and a big fat network instead of going the logical side and figure out how exactly we can have smart machines. We're in 2021 and we're still getting AI answers by brute-forcing. That's not really what an AI is supposed to be, is it? It just has more information and more computing power, it's not smarter than our current desktop computers.

Again, I agree that big data analysis is *not* AI, but look: that's currently what people calls AI, anything about statistics and errors and nobody understand the bugs they're creating is AI nowadays.

TheAnachron Wrote:

(22-02-2021, 09:42 PM)freem Wrote: I explicitly don't put Debian in there, because I believe (as shown by the fact in Debian 10 "buster", "init" can be either: systemd-sysv, sysvinit-core or runit-init) that while systemd will be the major and most widely used system framework, it will still be a GNU-able/Linux distro, with half-ass in corporate-side, and half-ass in hackers-side. That's something I now believe is Debian's trademark after all.

Then, there will be the anti-systemd distro, most of them keeping old sysVinit uglyness by default: Devuan and the others. Sure, they work to use more advanced init and supervision tools, but I don't think they'll be there in 3 years.
Those are the "old guard corporate distro".
Those will provide limited support for big DEs, probably good one for lone window managers.

I love to disagree here. Those distros will not go anywhere as long as people have a freedom of choice. People don't switch to Void Linux for not having systemd, they also switch to make their system simpler and faster.

I think you underestimate change resistance.

TheAnachron Wrote:

(22-02-2021, 09:42 PM)freem Wrote: Another side will be the hacker-distros. Here, I put mostly voidlinux, guix, k1ss, but I'm pretty certain there are others, and we might see more appearing.
Since they are hacker-oriented, they will have completely random support for Xorg or Wayland, not to mention flatpack & the like.
Basically, they'll have completely random support for everything outside the linux kernel, because, well, they *are* hacker-oriented, mostly targeting amateurs (in the meaning, doing stuff for fun).
By random, I mean, some will support a lot a solution, others another solution, and not that things will fail 1 time every 10 times.

... Hacker distros and you put Void Linux inside? What about Kali-Linux, the so called Hacker distro?

Well... I don't consider Kali-linux a hacker distro. It's a security-related distro, for sure. But not a hacker one. Basically, I don't think we share the same definition of "hacker" here. To me, hackers are people trying to build and improve. Kali was originally based on Ubuntu (backtrack) when debian was too hard to handle, and is now based on debian because they wanted to get the stability after the hype, and debian is becoming more and more ubuntu, by default.

The point here is, "by default". Debian still offers it's users some freedom, and that's why I consider it a bastard distro between hacker-friendly ones like void and corporate friendly ones, likes ubuntu.

Wayland will grow in usage, Wine (and Darling) will improve, bringing new users, and the amount of Linux users on ARM will most probably increase.

The hacker in me wants even more support for RISC-V architecture. I'm also looking forward to the development of Arcan (on BSD specifically). But also more development of other (non-linux) operating systems such as the Genode Framework. Maybe even 9front getting some desktop love?

The Normie in me want's what we all want, better integration with the PC market in terms of games, drivers and hardware support. Basically I want my whole family running some form of free Linux distribution. I still run a normie distro [Pop!_OS] for my wife and daughter to use. I'd like to confidently build a high spec gaming rig with the intention of booting only Linux. That would be nice.