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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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An immutable OS that run all app whatever are their package distribution.
Later a full OS rewritten in Rust with goods tools that share folder's content accross all devices and mass storage device as syncthing do.
Let's imagine a button where you click on add devices, then you scan the QR code and chose which folder you want to share. :)
The sharing thing sounds like a security nightmare. And who the hell am I sharing files with anyway? No thanks.
My vision of the future is having an os that'll install itself on any device I own whether the manufacturers want me to or not. I want to own the things I own.
That's it. Everything else is fine.
Well, that depend a lot on how do you setup security.
On nextcloud, i can see which device are connected to it, who, when, where and i get alert mail. When you add a new devices, as it is in the settings you will need your password. You might want to extend this security to usb storage with an isolated environnement. So all you need is a dashboard.
The solution i suggest is also a security in case of hardware faillure. How many people do a backup and copy their important file regulary ? I think i'm just making their life easier by hardcoding it. For me it's as brushing my tooth, it's not mandatory, but it's better to make it mandatory.
My vision of the future is having an os that’ll install itself on any device I own whether the manufacturers want me to or not. I want to own the things I own.
Same but i differ. I don't want any kind of device to exist to reduce our footprint's carbon. Eg :
I would limit phones to 3 models and remove all brand. No ads needed, nor announcement. Something low tech. There would be lot benefit on the software side and repairability. It's easier to maitain and it leaves our hand free to improve the OS
in my opinion, Linux has an edge on pretty much everything except for adoption. It's stable, secure, and updated very often. There are a ton of very great libraries for it that make building and running programs very easy. It's great on resource management, and the kernel makes great use of the hardware.
However, most pitfalls in Linux comes from it having less adoption than more popular OSes like Windows or Mac OS. Ultimately, this dampens the "friendliness" of Linux to the masses. If you buy a piece of hardware from the electronics store, there will often be no Linux support. The "mom and dad" folk might enjoy it, but won't know how to install or update things, simply because it's different. Vendors will often deliver shoddy binary blobs for common hardware like wireless cards.
With more adoption comes more pressure for support. We're seeing this with the Steam Deck already: if a game company wants to sell their games on the Deck, then they need to add Linux support, even if that means ensuring that it runs on Wine. I'd love to see this kind of thing for everyday use, i.e. a scanner including Linux software and instructions (and hopefully isn't a nasty "install.run" thing).
If it becomes more common, then friends will help other friends with their computer. "Mom and dad" can look up solutions to problems on the internet, and they'll be able to fix it themselves. Your aunt will buy an iPod and she'll be able to run iTunes in a first-party way. With enough adoption, it will even be weird to run operating systems other than Linux because hardly anyone runs Windows or Mac OS anymore.
I don't think Linux will ever be in the majority, but I see it climbing a bit in the next ten years. Lots of kinks have been worked out, and with the right software, it's even easy-to-use and pretty to look at. We need more devices like the Steam Deck to help pave the way for more adoption! Then after a while, people will use it cause that's what they know.
The “mom and dad” folk might enjoy it, but won’t know how to install or update things, simply because it’s different.
This is rapidly becoming irrelevant as the PC crowd is being reduced to professionals and hobbyists, who don't have a problem learning things. The less computer-literate users stick to phones nowadays and they're mostly content consumers on that platform so all they contribute is body count. They wouldn't bring any contribution to Linux even if they tried to use it.
I don’t think Linux will ever be in the majority
But it is being dominant on every platform where it makes sense and/or there hasn't been a concerted effort to keep it out. The PC is basically the only major holdout thanks to Microsoft and even them have adopted it to some extent.
The less computer-literate users stick to phones nowadays and they’re mostly content consumers on that platform
I think this is a bad thing
I mean, they'd be consumers on any device they used. Streaming/social/email/browsing that's pretty much it.
It's definitely bad for kids who aren't exposed to PCs anymore.
I'd go a few levels deeper: the kernel development process seems to become more and more dysfunctional. Legacy code hindering innovation, bad people being bottlenecks and this absurdly ancient "send a patch via mail" process.
Currently, that's only sand in the gears, but if it gets worse, this could seriously threaten the future.
I'm 100% with this. It doesn't have to be on GitHub, but something like GitHub would really help. It's easy to create a fork, a PR, and get good reviews on relevant lines of code. With email, not so much. In my opinion, If email really was better, few folks would adopt a VCS like GitHub.
Steam Deck gets more popular.
Steam console released with improved multi user experience and VR.
PlayStation sales drop in growth.
Steam OS released, PCs can use it with generic kernels.
Gaming PC manufacturers offer steam OS as a preinstalled.
PC manufacturers start to offer popular distros preinstalled.
System 76 puts their in house laptops into Best Buy shelves.
Adobe and Office no longer stuck on Windows and are distributed as wasm applications.
I can see, in some rare-but-actually-possible conditions, all of those elements happen, but not the last one.
Why would Adobe and Microsoft release software for WebAssembly/Web environments, when Microsoft wants to keep you locked in their shitty environment?
What I could see is that the FOSS alternatives keep getting updated (some of them, like LibreOffice, are full alternatives to close-source software and they have been like that for years), the user population expands (expecially with Adobe and MS wanting to put subscriptions everywhere) and using FOSS software as alternatives for Office, Premiere, PhotoShop, ... becomes the norm.
One of the things I really dislike about Linux is how when setting up, there's a bunch of things you need to troubleshoot, look them up on the forums even though you haven't really done anything wrong, it's just how some software works or there's a bug or there's some weird setting that's incompatible with your system.
I wish there were better defaults for software in the future or just better compatibility/more bugfixes so these cases get rarer and rarer, making it comparable to initial windows experience.
I want to be able to use all the software I want on Linux, officially supported by the manufacturer. No more unofficial version that's kinda working but not really. All the hardware in my new Laptop should come with official Linux drivers, so I can actually use all the things I payed for. I want to be able to contact the support if something doesn't work, and not get a "we don't support that" as an answer. And I want to be able to truly recommend a Linux OS to my non-techy friends and family, so they too can enjoy the freedom and privacy instead of having to sell it out to big corporations because they just can't use a terminal.
I don't think this "plug in your phone and use it as PC" will ever really work. Apps and games always get more fancy and demanding as computers become more powerful, and desktop PCs will always be much more powerful than phones. E.g. a couple of years ago I thought at some point I can buy a tablet and use it for heavy duty coding because it will have become powerful enough, but all the tooling just eats up the performance increase to help you be more productive.
I also don't believe in the "OS in the cloud" thing. Always connected programs and games are shitty already, just image that with your entire OS. There are physical limitations that will always make it inferiour to a good local setup imo, at least until we figure out how to connect network devices with wormholes instead of cables. What I do believe in is having a small always-on personal server in your home, that can replace most of the cloud services we rely on today.
Well okay, since it's up to me: Let's have free software. Fully free Linux on every phone, including all "firmware" which has gotten awfully soft lately. No more proprietary driver blobs for ethernet controllers or cellular modems. No more proprietary DRM modules. No more "smart" consumer goods that come without source code. The free software revolution has gone pretty well in some respects, but we need to finish the job and put an end to all that garbage.
Idk why people are so passionate about it, cause there is no "Linux" - there is a lot of "Linuxes".
I mean, what defines Linux? The kernel? The desktop environment? The flexibility?
Cause, dude, in a desktop level linux has many options, some very little smooth (like any window manager you have to configure everything by yourself) and some very smooth (like KDE and Gnome). I risk to say that Gnome and KDE are as smooth as MacOs/Windows.
Applications are kind the same. What applications are we talking about? There is a huge range of possibilities, which includes apps that run only in windows as well as apps that run only in Linux. Surely main stream apps are most designed for Windows, cause they have the majority of market share, however almost always there is an alternative good enough in Linux.
I wish the future of Linux would be our own people don't blame on projects trying to innovate, like Gnome and KDE does. People on Linux looks like loves to makes things hard or exclusive, but man, we need simple things as well. Simple things on Linux does not "rot" Linux, but make Linux more usable and, as consequence, makes development faster while big techs have to start paying attention to Linux.
By a strict definition, the kernel is what defines Linux.
We all know that nobody respect these definiotions and mostly when someone says linux, reffers to the full operate system
I think it's already a great system, its philosophical foundation of being built around user freedom is fantastic. It just has a few things that are definitely still problems for desktop users. Namely,
I guess that's a lot, but it's still a great system ha.
Whatever it is I hope we don't end up "selling out" for a higher market share. KDE is proof that you can have stability while also having infinite configuration options. Gnome seems to be openly hostile to any other way of doing things that isn't the gnome way.
I don't mind gnome existing but it isn't for me and I hope I don't get forced into using something that I can't modify to meet my workflow wishes. I'm seeing a lot more programs being written without prioritizing being desktop agnostic. I think we can forge our own path making a desktop that is both as stable as Mac OS and as approachably configurable as Linux should be.
RISC-V first class support.
We have the basics down. But hopefully desktop-class RISC-V will be within our reach in a few years!
Immutable root filesystem.
Less user error from borking the root fs. And also less apps relying on the root filesystem would be good. Likely something to be achieved with portals and other XDG work.
Wayland only for all modern desktops.
Wayland will soon have the ability for a lot of cool features that X11 doesn't have, such as storing session data to disk and relaunching into new desktop environments without relogging. This'll make hybrid graphics a lot easier to manage as changes to the active GPU can be done dynamically without logging out and back into your system.
Greater adoption of XDG portals and XDG standards.
Linux is obviously great in many ways because it lacks a single solution to a given problem, and that it's just a kernel, so most of your end-user system is totally configurable while still being a Linux system. However, we have a lot of overlapping work that makes said end-user systems hard to manage when standards collide. Hopefully Wayland will encourage developers to work through XDG portals and other common standards to make Linux user AND developer-friendly.
Nvidia drivers
A contentious issue, but I think the future of Nvidia drivers will be open source. The proprietary drivers have been a blocker in many ways as they're 'good enough' and better than Nouveau, so no one is going to bother backing the FOSS project when the prop. project is better. However, lots of very smart devs are working on bridging the gap and leverage the newly open-sourced portions of NV's drivers, which will hopefully manifest as the end of AMD/NV driver quality discrepancies.
WINE support improved for general desktop apps
Every few years we get a new "Photoshop WORKING on LINUX???" tutorial that has some cryptic setup instructions or github repo that eventually falls to the wayside. WINE is getting a lot more support thanks to Valve and I imagine starting to take on Windows apps for first class support will be a gamechanger for the creative industries that rely on certain Windows-only apps!
Ending the distro-specific packing systems.
Yup, the best saved til last. My boldest claim is that Flatpak is going to kill off the necessity for RPMs, Debs, APKs, etc. for most end-users. The flatpak size disadvantage is negligible in the age of terabytes, but it allows devs to ensure a consistent build environment for their apps on all platforms (something that has caused a lot of flame wars between Fedora and app devs in the past).
For people who DO need apps from reproducible, stable-based pipelines (eg. docker, sysadmins, IT professionals) we'll see Nix becoming dominant. In fact, it's already beginning to eat into docker/container build systems thanks to its powerful reproducibility and infra-as-code paradigms. It's having a real boost after a relatively quiet first decade of life, likely thanks to features like Flakes that can spin up developer environments in seconds.
My boldest claim is that Flatpak is going to kill off the necessity for RPMs, Debs, APKs, etc. for most end-users.
No it isn't, until you can build a Linux system on top of only Flatpak. And guess what you have then? Yet another distro using a different packaging system with its own opinions, just like the rest of them. And there will still be other packaging systems because not everyone will agree with how it does things. Especially once developers start including questionable code in their Flatpak packages, because nobody is there to stop them, which distro maintainers are going to strip out in distro packages because it's harmful to users.
My favorite idea is Linux or Android-derived, or a completely new, Rust-based AGPL-licensed OS, running on 100% open RISC-V hardware. Same for its phone equivalent. All chips must be open, no secret code in them.
I think the future of Linux is brighter than Windows, which is one of the reasons I switched.
I know I'm in a growing niche that still prefer to do my computing at a stationary desktop with a standard keyboard and mouse, A lot of Linux DEs still feel mainly geared towards desktop use while Apple and Microsoft have been mainly focused on the tablet/laptop space for over a decade now.
Then we get into the whole push to "cloud computing". I don't think Microsoft will go cloud only with their next OS like some are saying, But I do believe cloud integration will become so embedded within Windows that disabling cloud features or going completely offline will no longer be possible in the foreseeable future. The average person doesn't give a shit about this move, hell some are welcoming it with open cheeks, But it will be a breaking point for a lot of enthusiast users.
I got a lot of other reasons for moving to Linux but I'm overall happy with the way things in the Linux world are going. And I got a few friends interested in moving to Linux sooner or later for similar reasons.
For Linux desktop to grow past the single digit market share it is at today. It needs to be led by tech visionaries not by code evangelists . The average user doesn't care about if it's running Wayland or x11 or whatever shit you name it they only care about their OS having all the features they need and support all the latest hardware they buy.
Add to that any average Joe would freeze at the prospect of having to enter a command line to maintain their computer or use their firewall. In short for Linux to grow it needs to copy windows or macOS otherwise it will keep being used by nerds and sys admins
In a very real sense I do think that the command line is ever so slightly too maligned as a beginner friendly tool. I definitely agree that it’s intimidating for people and that it’s easy to mistype a command or whatever… but good god is it ever nice to be able to tell somebody to “just copy and run this command” instead of guiding them through a GUI. Of course that has its own problems (ideally you don’t run commands you don’t understand), but it can be a really nice way to quickly help somebody. Macs strike a good balance with this in my opinion. There are GUI options for more or less everything (that seem to be front ends for command line tools), but also command line versions available, giving you the best of both worlds.
Accessible for everyone.
If the desktop UX has very good screen readers, keyboard navigation, voice to text etc., I believe its benefits would automatically spill over to all.
Also it would retain the UI / UX experts who become forced to abandon Linux for macOS which maintains a niche in this.
I'd like to see some phone distros to use as a daily driver.
Other than that I like where gnome and KDE are going.
I've been using my htpc mostly with a mini keyboard and touch pad. A TV mode would be cool to see. Like what big screen is doing I guess.
Better documentation for any distribution not called Arch. Better bugtrackers for all major projects? (KDE, Thunderbird etc)
There are a couple factors that play into future-planning. The first, and most important factor is that most people neither care what OS their hardware uses or actually need more than the barest baseline. They want to spend time with their friends doing the things their friends are doing.
This is what has allowed Android to gain such massive prominence in the mobile space. It's all that's needed to play crap web games, listen to music, watch videos, and commune on social media. Expect more and more consumer hardware to be ARM-based devices running Android for the next few years.
The next big factor is that Linux has become a sort of driver dumping ground for reputable hardware manufacturers. Want to sell a piece of hardware? Better make damn sure it's got Linux driver support so that it can be part of an Android device. This means that more manufacturers are contributing drivers and code to the rest of Linux. It doesn't necessarily mean that code that works with Linux is going to be open source or play well with others. nvidia has proven to be an absolute bastard in this regard.
I don't think that means the future for Linux is going to be dim. I do think we need to expect and plan for more corporate presence. Some of that presence will be good. It doesn't take much to be a good member of the community. However, we do need to keep our collective eyes out for nvidia-like presences that will only serve to anchor everyone else down.
Where I'd personally LIKE to see Linux going is to provide more power to older hardware. We have a wealth of hardware that's in the 10-20 year-old range that can be doing useful work. The problem there is maintainership. It's harder to get volunteers to work with older hardware. If you can get people to work on supporting that hardware, it means fewer PCBs in landfills and more doing hobbyist or scientific work.
In the 'modern' Desktop Linux space, I'd like to see a renewed focus on privacy. I'd like to see privacy features baked into the kernel alongside security features. In a lot of cases those are the same feature.
To be more mainstream granted it isn't because of a shitty locked down distro incompatible with the others.
What I love most abou Linux is its freedom. It doesn't try screwing me over for their own benefit, gives me full control of the system and is broken down into components. Having the underlying system foss for many is great to provide and make it easier to adopt more ethical software for computing.
I was always in and out with Linux.
My problem was always that something was always a bit off with the apps or environment than I got used to, and most of thr times I just couldn't adapt. Things like my laptop touchpad worked differently, the mouse moved differently, apps had functions differently or lacking onebthing, others other things.
Also, most DEs was lacking functions (like dbl click on window icon to close), or were buggy. Then KDE4 came out and it was a trainwreck after 3.5 and I lost all my hope for a while.
And, on my mission to kinda solve these resulted always me bricking the system.
Now, to be fair, this was 10 years ago.
But, I know I won't use Windows 11 for a while now and I kinda bored with Windows 10 so few weeks ago installed Debian on my PC with KDE Plasma. Tho I have nothing against Windows, it served me well in the past... 25 years. But now I'm more focused on dev work and productivity, and Windows 10 became slowly awkward for the different works I had. Most of the times I used WSL so why not just hsve the realdeal at the first place? Also, lots of Pis and some servers I have are also running Linux, so why not have it on my main machine?
It's nice. Still have some minor annoyance or inconvenience with it, but I don't care. Honestly, seeing what Linux became in these 10 years made me go 'wow'.
So, I have hope in Linux in the future. Especially since OS and architectural boulders are rapidly disappearing.
I remember Wine being no more than a POC you can run Notepad or Solitaire on Linux. Now you can almost run any fucking game on a Linux system. This is awesome.
So, I'm testrunning Linux again before I invest a motherload of money into a new PC (I'm using a 2009 era server machine as my desktop atm) and if it's good, I will continue to use Linux and probably Debian on my new machine and will format my drives and set up a partition table that is Linux-y, and not just mount all my NTFS drives and use them like they are native to the system.
Honestly my biggest hope is some generally accepted way to install software that is consistent among distros. I'm leaning toward liking flatpak for this currently, but I also like how appimage works too.
It is really close now, close enough I've dropped windows entirely at home, but occasionally there's still something I'll stumble across that officially only has Deb or rpm download options and if I try from my distro package manager it fails for one reason or another and I give up, just skip it, and be disappointed for a bit.
Oh and support from devs of games at least as far to get anti-cheat stuff to work via proton, but I avoid a vast majority of those games even on windows because their anti-cheat can be so system invasive...
I think immutable distributions will be more attractive to hardware vendors. I think hardware vendors feel that current Linux is too much like the wild West. Much like Chrome OS, the immutable OS can be a lockdown for work environment or school environments.
I can see a market for that.
Those of us who know how to unlock it, will have a large selection a very powerful Linux hardware.
For Linux in general? If I could decide? Here goes:
I’m still a proponent of phone as workstation. They’re fast enough. I’ll still run a server at home but being able to plug a cable into my phone and it turns into a work station is still a dream of mine.
being able to plug a cable into my phone and it turns into a work station is still a dream of mine.
Is it a dream because you think it's not possible? If so, I have good news for you:
There's this project called darling which is like wine for Mac OS I hope that takes off and we can pirate them damn Adobe apps everyone needs for work.
For me it would be open-ness and through that privacy. The dream device would be some mobile convertible with the repairibility of framework, that is completely free and open source hardware and software. Like powered by risc-v, with some future open gpu, and every (storage-/keyboard-/touchpad-/touchscreen-/battery-/network-/wifi-/ etc) controller on it being risc-v and running open firmware as well. Just such that for every byte being processed in this device you could pin down the piece of circuit and line of code that makes it so. In terms of linux some future version of gnome on a immutable distro with flatpaks that have very tied down permissions would be a nice future to me.
And I think overall many aspects of this are moving in that direction. The biggest roadblock is probably a truly open gpu, and then highly integrated controllers like for storage.
TLDR: The future are linux hardware vendors, governments deciding to use linux, and RISC-V+ARM.
There are already a few linux hardware vendors out there and my favorites are Tuxedo Computers as well as Starlabs and Slimbook (the guys who make the KDE laptop. Not to be outdone by linux phone vendors like Pine64, Purism, and Volla. We need more of them.
Hopefully they will have the funds to start marketing and ad campaigns to change the image of linux from "just for geeks" or "only if you have spare time" to something like "better for privacy", "the only option for true freedom", "cheap but classy", "subscribe to nothing", etc.
Linux has no problem providing a fluid experience with RISC-V and ARM, while windows struggles - especially due to the amount of proprietary and legacy software that exists on it. Windows might be able to prepare for it and provide a translation layer or VM for those things, but probably not with a good experience.
Finally, governments. I thank Trump a lot for this: getting China to start accelerate ditching Microsoft. The EU is also wary of Trump winning again to start a tradewar + there is an EU level decision to use opensource. Countries are slow to implement this decree, but I only see it accelerating and countries wising up to international collaboration to create either their own distro (e.g EULinux or something), or paying emergent opensource vendors to write solutions for them.
I don't believe this will be done before 2030, probably 2035 we might see ~50% of government desktops and laptops on linux, but the future is very difficult to predict.
We are the future already :)
a small thing is that hardware will be linux focusef, such as removing the windows icon kn the super key
Nothing special. Normal adoption of new standards, protocols and features and some new, easier ways to develops desktop apps for it.
For example let's say we want to add moving windows between phone and a desktop by swiping. It would be some new protocol and would be handled by DE on Linux and Android. Someone would develop the standard and different Linux app would add support for it. Exactly the same way we have bluetooth now.
The RedHat and Canonical oligarchs are well underway in achieving their windows-like linux desktop through systemd and flatpaks and what not, so we may see a small but highly deployed number of immutable distros becoming the forced de-facto standard.
Microsoft continues their new approach at EEEing linux through WSL Azure, and everyone's happy about it.
Torvalds will eventually die, as will Stallman, so all that'll be left are the communities, which unfortunately don't have that much strength/voice.