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.