The Future of Linux?

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What do yous think the future of linux will be? Do you think it will get better more popular and easy to use? Or stay just as hard and just idle along as it is or fade out of existance slowly?

Good question

My personal feeling is that Linux will remain quite marginalised because Microsoft has completely domainated the operating system market.

Linux will always be there. It's just a matter of if/when it will become popular.

It will still be around, but marginalized, because most people are happy enough with Windows or Mac that they're not really interested in customizing their OS's.

Linux is way to frickin hard for most people to ever figure out. Its not as easy to get going or change settings on for semi advanced newbies.

I don't think it's a matter of the OS being 'user unfreindly' so much as it is a matter of available applications that will run on Linux. MacOS X is based on BSD, and many mac users appreciate being able to use the CLI interface.

Microsoft is dominant when it comes to office productivity apps, but they won't release Linux versions of their applications due to the factthat it would cut into their OS market share. Adobe and Macromedia are dominant in the market for graphics and web development, however I havn't seen them porting their apps over to Linux. Steinberg and Digidesign are fairly dominant when it comes to Music production software, but as far as I know, they have no plans to port their works over to Linux.

Windows is also the predominant platform for gamers, but the development of games for Linux has been marginal, at best.

Until some of the major companies start porting desktop apps over to Linux, it will most likely be relegated to server applications. --For the record, I don't see that happening in the near future.

Also, does anybody remember BeOS? BeOS was a fantastic OS that nobody developed apps for, and it's practically nonexistant these days in part due to the fact that there was nothing available for it.

You must admit packet managers and installing apps in general is a pain in the ass in linux its alot harder for newbies to do. You can't just point and click. Applications also need to be compiled for specific distros some thing thats compiled for one distro doesn't seem to work on another this would be a night mare for developers to try and work with. Imagen releasing a differen't cd for every distro of linux for your game and then 6 months later new versions of distros are out and all of a sudden you applications won't work on the new distros. Linux is just a nightmare. Its ok once you get used to it and learn it. But for the average end user its just crazy hard and no one wants to learn that much about there computer just to install a applications. Plus trying to figure out what distro to install is enough of a problem on its own.

I really wish linux would sort is stuff out because I think because its free if it was easy to use and set up and install applications I would start selling the computers I set up for busnesses and old ladys instead of setting them up with Windows which is what me and my brother are currently doing.

Linux won't ever be a mainstream operating system. Or, rather, if it is, it will be because it mutated into something a lot like Windows.

The fact is, most people want a consistent GUI, and they don't want to have to deal with the guts of the OS. And, really, they shouldn't have to...it's not really necessary in order to use the computer productively. Something like MacOS, which slaps an abstract interface on top of a UNIXesque backend, might be an option, but that would be a huge investment of time and money, and I don't think the open source community is up to the task.

Until Linux can offer something which is as easy to setup and use as Windows, it'll continue to be relegated to the geek population.

Jeremy

Bingo!! !! !

That is just whats wrong with linux. NONE of the linux geeks get that the system needs to be easy to use if they really want to put a dent in M$. They say they hate M$ and have a tool to hurt them but don't make Linux easy to use because thats not the geek way. And yes it would take alot of time and money to do and I don't really think they are up to it either.

Linux isn't going anywhere in the server market. Last I heard it's still continuing to gain credibility and momentum. Pretty amazing considering just 5 years ago, most big corporations wouldn't even think of it. They had the misconception that free, open software was full of bugs and security holes (no profit motive to make it reliable), inconsistent, was put together by a bunch of pot smoking hippies, and there'd be no way of getting support for it.

As for home desktops, I don't think Linux will ever put a big dent in that market. The only way it would be done is if it were to somehow run existing and new Windows apps. There are tons of people who bought MS Office 97, continue to use it to this day, and won't even consider anything else because it's what they know. I use Windows because I need Internet Explorer for web development--it's amazing how many correctly coded HTML pages I make that render perfectly in Firefox or another standards-compliant browser, yet are a mess in IE. Plus I like to play Battlefield 2 and other current games.

A home-market Linux system would need to include some kind of COMPLETE Windows emulator or VM. And of course there would be major compromises between performance, compatibility, security, and copyright issues. So I don't see that really happening.

Linux will never go anywhere as long as MS has it's way. Hardline capitalists despise open-source/GNU-GPL software as being low quality, incoherent, and paramount to theft as there is no exchange of money between two parties.

Gates fits nicely into this crowd, as evidenced by his infamous 1976 "Open letter to hoobyists".

It's tempting to blame Microsoft, but the fact is that it's Linux which is keeping Linux down. It's simply not the kind of product that most computer users want, nor the kind of operating system that developers of consumer (as opposed to server) software want to develop for.

Windows, for all its flaws, and despite Microsoft's world domination plans, is the kind of thing that most people want. It's simple, it's low-maintenance, and it provides an easy framework for developing and running GUI-based applications.

Nobody is keeping Linux down; it's free, and even the commercial distributions are affordable. The only thing stopping it from being the Next Big Thing is the fact that most people don't like it.

Jeremy

Steve Ballmer has equated Linux to being a cancer to the software industry. The Daniel Wallace lawsuit demostrates what many entrepreneurs feel about the impact of open source software.

The idea that people can get together and collaborate on a piece of software, and then distribute it WITH the source code at no cost with minimal restrictions is absouletly unacceptable to some people here in the states.

Linux might not be user friendly at the moment, but as the Halloween memos point out, MS is not gonna sit idly by and watch linux become a success.

you´ve got a problem with user-friendliness with linux, but it´s okay now if you take a friendly distro (like, for an example, suse). If you install it for them, it´s not even a problem with many old ladies, because many of them only want to use it as an electronical typewriter and write emails, perhaps look some photos and surf a bit - all of that is not more complicated with linux, if you see linux before you are used to windows. In fact, I read a study that said that people who knew absolutely nothing of computers before have less trouble with using linux for business as with using windows after the first weeks - but how many newbies begin using linux?
If the only software pupils see in school is produced by M$, you can´t expect anything else than the pupils thinking of Windows and Office as natural, and - for example - of Linux and OpenOffice as difficult, because they aren´t used to it.
And why bother about other OS if windows is pre-installed?

without questioning, that´s not the only problem, but it strengthens the other reasons for the little succes of linux - and is something, that I think is often underestimated or forgotten.

I haven't been very impressed with Linux. I've tried a couple of Mandrake distros and currently have Fedora Core as a dual-boot option on my PC.

For Windows development I use Delphi so I bought Kylix when it came out. It was simple enough to get a program running under the IDE, but I gave up trying to make it run stand-alone. It would seem that Borland gave up on Linux too. Maybe like many of us they are waiting for Linux to "be finished".

I installed Fedora Core in order to do some cross-development for an ARM based embedded linux system. I remember trying to get the Subversion client to installed. I spent hours downloading packages to resolve dependencies. Almost every package created yet another un-resolved dependency.

I bought a Mac Mini last summer and now use it for most day to day activities such as web browsing and email. Well, that and X-Plane

These type of questions always puzzle me. It's like Linux is some sort of new OS and you're wondering: "Will it be around in a couple years?" "Will people keep using it?" etc.

I have been using Linux for 13 years and the difference between then and now is astounding. Linux continues to grow every day and with distros like Ubuntu regular non-geek people are getting into it. Even my parents use it so they don't have deal with all the Windows exploits.