Voice of the Masses: What will Linux look like in 10 years?
The future promises to bring us many things: solar powerered hoverboards, giant underground cities on Mars, and slightly less painful dentistry. But what about in Linux? How do you think our operating system will look like in 10 years? Maybe we’ll all be controlling our Wayland-powered Gnome 18 desktops via eye movement trackers, or perhaps the long-established desktop metaphors will ultimately win and not much will drastically change.
And where will Linux be used? Will we all be running on multi-teraherz dodeca-core Raspberry Pi Model 8s? Will the tablet craze die out and we’ll all return to doing serious work on big beige PCs? Let us know how you think Linux will look a decade from now, and where we’ll be using it, and we’ll read out the best comments in our upcoming podcast recording!
Related Posts
About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
I don’t see any reason to think that the trends of the last decade will be changing in character in the next – that would mean Linux running on the desktops of people reading Linux Voice, and for the rest of the world on small things in, on and around them and on big (racks of) computers far away.
Whether the things are watches, glasses, in-ear appliances or coffee mugs
It’s all about VR and Augmented Reality.
For office work we will have our files and programs distributed throughout our physical office space overlaid onto the office furniture, walls and windows. We’ll probably interface via a pair of normal looking glasses, maybe they’d be a little strange looking at first but not for too long. Linux has a huge head start on this already with Steam and the HTC Vive. The funny thing is that we’ll probably still be typing on the virtual laptop that’s overlaid onto the desk 😀 Who likes talking aloud to computers? it’s embarrassing…
The OS for the IoT seems to have arrived. With physical computing and transactional, reversible updates being generally available (we’re looking at you Snappy Ubuntu Core and Raspberry Pi), Linux is set to run on everything, including the kitchen sink.
While the need for a desktop computing device will remain, I am pretty sure we will be carrying them around in our pockets, giving the term “portable distro” a new meaning.
Phones will continue to get faster, to the point that Canonicals convergence dream will be viable and we’ll have a nice shiny Ubuntu edge-like device that will be bought by a bunch of people while remaining fairly niche.
VR will ‘become mainstream’ via several different channels, but most people will still be stuck in the traditional desktop paradigm. Screen + keyboard + mouse will still be the way things happen, with touch, gesture, VR and voice all adding helpful augmentations that will make computing even easier.
Linux on the desktop will continue to get better and better, with support from most games and a wonderful suite of software on offer.
Who knows, maybe 2025 will be the year of Linux on the desktop 🙂
2025 will be the year of Linux on the fridge. Firefox version 793 will have problems with the ice compartment add-on. Meanwhile, LibreKitchen runs really slowly, it needs 4TB of RAM and the Kitchen server only has 4.1TB total, resulting in the WasteDisposalUnit putting the bins out a day late.
Thankfully things will be much better on the entertainment front as Mr. Poettering’s SystemG has a really great video player, graphics editor and music player (although it still has problems with PulseAudio).
Best of all though everyone running FOSS software on their self driving cars get an insurance discount as Windows just crashes all the time.
hehehe
http://antisol.info/blog/2014/12/future-history-of-init-systems/
🙂
++
It’ll probably be called Androme, or Chromdroid, or something like. With a virtual projected display it will scale to the space you have available from your phone-sized projector.
Or perhaps it’ll just be wired into your brain.
Or if things go really wrong, you don’t need to worry about the OS on an Abacus.
Assuming we don’t fall foul of software patents, DRM, or forking wars – then the best I can imagine is that as Linux gets more popular and relevant it will come under even more pressure than before from greedy corporations and well meaning millionaires.
Call me a pessimist. But. One thing I know for sure is that you can’t put the genie back in the floppy. Whatever happens – however sidelined and embattled our corner becomes – some of us will be using some sort of “libre” unix-y OS, because principals.
And of course the future could be rosier than that…
When it comes down to it, Linux is just the kernel controlling whatever electronic device it’s installled, and so in ten years’ time, it would be nice to see a proliferation of Linux kernels in more devices. I hope the kernel will still be open source, and that freedom software will have usurped it’s commercial oppressors. GNU/Linux has really been a fine example of how well Free Software can be implemented in our present time, and my dream would be for GNU/Linux to be the foundation of change in our digital future. Many of the other commentators have hit upon hardware changes, which will probably be inevitable, but as long as development in the Kernel and Free Software can keep up with these changes, then in ten years time, Linux will look like this: our guiding light and source of unity (no pun intended) in the future. Already people around the globe work together on projects united by Linux and Free Software. In a decade, it may have even brought about world peace!
I hardly see Raspberry Pi in the market after 2 years, here is why – https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-worlds-first-9-computer
Your question is brilliant, but in those “grey” times where the American and United kingdom of America governments are heading towards total disaster – no democracy (laws are enforced), no encryption, no free speech, no privacy (in CCTV towns that’s already happening), and the worst – http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/05/arms-control-treaty-could-land-security-researchers-like-me-in-jail/
If UK votes with “yes” to leave EU, then expect your Kim Jong-un prime minister to rename England to North Korea 2, the current proposed laws, NHS cuts, privatization, absurd tax laws just prove where the country is heading.
Enough propaganda. In next 10 years I would like to see the demise of systemd. I’m still wondering why you didn’t asked mister Lennart the following questions – http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_systemd , and why they reject patches for critical bugs claiming that “there is no bug”. We know that the fu*ktards at Minisoft was reporting vulnerabilities to the NSA before they get fixed. Many more examples can be found in internet how the systemd script kiddies err developers are not serving the GNU/Linux community needs but the government one. RHEL+ US goverment+systemd INTENTIONAL bugs=massive backdoor.
At this stage someone here may say “stop spreading FUD”, and I’ll point another link – https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impotent-rage-against-systemd/
The question here is not “systemd is the best init system so far” but what a backdoor it represents, think I am kidding; read the links and come again. Even mister Torvalds banned those 2 RHEL script kiddies from further kernel contributions and the mail list.
Moore’s Law, which observes the doubling of transistor density (hence computing power) every eighteen months, looks set to come to an end within the next ten years. We probably won’t see massive increases in computing power in our personal computers, but we may see more computing power accessible on cloud servers. We’ll certainly see more interesting and creative uses for the computing power we do have; Linux building management systems? Linux cars? Linux healthcare devices?
A positive impact of the end of Moore’s Law may be that personal computers have a longer market life before becoming obsolete. Software with strong community support is more suited to long-lived devices than commercial software, as commercial developers are more likely to move on to new products rather than support old ones. Linux is already supporting older devices through guises such as Lubuntu.
In short, Linux will continue to be the operating system of choice for users who prefer fairness and transparency.
The kernel will have support for quantum architecture
RMS will be ranting about the binary blob of his right temporal lobe as his GNU-Hurd chip is implanted. Everyone else got Linux implanted. We will all be UPGRADED.
All I know is that linux people will be arguing about something.
The AI that runs everything is increasing its intelligence on an exponential rate, and has recently increased its AI performance index from 10,000 MBE to 100,000 MBE, where MBE is a Mouse Brain Equivalent. The lower level hardware and operating systems of these systems are all based on Linux, and open source software, but the git repository is now so large that no human intelligence (1,000 MBE) is capable of understanding even a small percentage of the code.
There are still some humans employed in jobs, where there is a premium on the human service, such as serving in expensive restaurant, or performing consumer tests on marketing campaigns. All the important jobs are given over to AI systems, like running financial systems, controlling the weather, and deciding which movie you will watch tonight.
I think some of the scenario will be as now: Linux will still be strong on servers and Android on devices. But still no desktop market share to speak of.
It’d be great to see Linux deployed increasingly on desktops in schools, colleges, local governments etc. However, I suspect that Windows will be given away as a free-but-proprietary system, which will remove much of the ‘Windows Tax’ argument when buying new PCs.
But a ‘free’ Windows OS combined with LibreOffice and other libre software, could still be a win for many folk.
And Linux will be winning the space race!
The same as 10 years ago. In 10 years time Linux will be everywhere but no one will know about it because it will be on 1% of Desktops; it will have thousands of innovations which everyone will think were invented by Microsoft and Apple; I will still be using it on my obsolete 64 core machine with 1 terabyte of RAM because Windows 20 runs too slowly on it.
No change there then. No doubt with familar lame excuses like, “I would love to run Linux, but MS Office 2025 isn’t compatible”, from the adults and “Death Match Apocalypse, runs 3 frames a second slower on Linux”, from the kids.
In 20 years, desktop Linux will be the same fragmented, convoluted, half done mess it has been for the past 20 years. People will take 45 minutes to install it, 3 days to attempt to debug it and 20 minutes to remove it. Sorry but that’s the truth.
I think we might actually have proper voice control. Typing is not a natural way to control a computer, and leads to repetitive stress.
I’m not sure whether I’m too late for anyone to see this, but I just finished the accompanying podcast for this VotM, and was surprised that no one brought up “convergence”.
With both Microsoft pushing this direction in Windows 10, and Ubuntu pushing this direction in Unity 8 (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2916899/windows-10-just-beat-ubuntu-to-the-smartphone-pc-convergence-punch.html), having one OS and one computer for everything seems like it’s going to happen (whether or not it’s successful, who knows). But I think there are a couple HUGE potential advantages:
1. I only need one pocket computer (currently called a phone), and I can plug it in/bluetooth it to computer displays/keyboard/mouse, VR displays, TVs, whatever. But the point is: it’s ~one~ computer.
2. Because I have ~one~ computer, I don’t need to rely on cloud file storage services to sync any files; they’re always on my one computer. I don’t need to use a web-based RSS reader, email client, whatever just to keep my things in sync.
3. It could potentially be cheaper to have a full modern computing environment, because you just need your single pocket computer, and could plug it into a full “station” at a library or government sponsored place to have a full workstation.
Whether or not this becomes a big thing, I don’t know, but I hope it does because it seems like the sort of near future I’d like to live in.