From tdwalton at gmail.com  Tue Sep  2 17:36:02 2025
From: tdwalton at gmail.com (Todd Walton)
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2025 12:36:02 -0500
Subject: [Cialug] 10yr future of Linux and open source
In-Reply-To: <aLCuUfi3KXFCt92U@chocolatine.org>
References: <aLCuUfi3KXFCt92U@chocolatine.org>
Message-ID: <CALm_Md86ig_dZPJg3BzeoweazWjtsFPFnw7rh9ysu2c6atRLQg@mail.gmail.com>

Here's a direction that I *hope* Linux keeps evolving in. I like that
people are working on moving containerization concepts into the OS. Actual
containers, of course; it's nice to be able to run apps in a container and
have them integrate with the rest of the system. But also things like
Flatpak and Snap for applications, and immutable versioning of the OS bits
of the filesystem a la Silverblue, which I'm still skeptical of but also
haven't actually given a try yet.

Future directions this might take:

* Continued improvements to the things already being done.

* Containerize/Flatpakize entire subsystems? Like, audio is all its own
package and you can have multiple audio systems running at once and hot
swap them? Like the composability of Gentoo.

* Better abstractions for the hardware and install, so you can have one
configuration that you roll out to your work laptop, your home desktop, and
some other computer without having to tweak it for each machine.

* Maybe related to that last one, you have a system running on one computer
and are able to just move it to another one. Like the way you can migrate
VMs from one host to another.

--
Todd


On Thu, Aug 28, 2025, 2:38?PM Nicolai <nicolai-cialug at chocolatine.org>
wrote:

> It's fun to write down predictions and a good learning experience to
> revisit them later. What are your predictions for Linux, open source,
> and the tech world in the year 2035?
>
> I think "Linux on the desktop" will continue growing and at a slightly
> elevated pace, maybe even reaching 10% marketshare by 2035. That said, I
> believe that if the community popularized a concerted effort to displace
> closed systems, Linux COULD become a leading desktopish OS (along with
> Windows, iOS, macOS, Android). Ubuntu and some other distros have been
> sufficiently user friendly for years, and I think Linux could have much
> more marketshare than it does. The days of struggling with xfree86 are
> long gone. Whenever I see a Windows system now the navigation is
> completely bewildering and apparently there are even ads now? If you
> want to popularize Linux on the desktop, you have everything you need
> today.
>
> I think systemd has won and more distros will adopt it, and some that
> don't will come to an end. Developers will increasingly write code
> dependent on systemd, being therefore less portable, requiring other
> operating systems to provide expensive workarounds. This will harm the
> ethos of open source making it a little more superficial (a general
> trend unfortunately).
>
> Currently, we're on the verge of getting 192 core AMD Epyc CPUs running
> at up to 3.7GHz. What will be available in 2035? What if this is a
> standard high-end consumer workstation in 2035, with high-end servers
> doing kilo-core computing? What will people do with unlimited power?
>
> RISC-V seems to be advancing while ARM64 hasn't progressed as much as I
> thought it would. Only Apple is doing interesting work there and it's a
> closed system. Asahi Linux has done miraculously cool work on the
> M-series CPUs, allowing other operating systems to follow in their
> footsteps, but IIRC they've lost a gifted developer who did most of the
> work. And if only one computer maker (say, Gateway 2000) had seriously
> produced x86 machines back in the day then x86 would have stagnated,
> which is where we are with ARM64. Currently, most ARM "boards" require
> some janky work to get them going and the ecosystem doesn't favor people
> who want to ice-skate uphill. I used to think ARM64 would be the next
> dominant platform but now I think it will mainly pressure AMD/Intel to
> advance PPW (performance per watt). So maybe open-source RISC-V could be
> in 2035 where ARM was around 2020, with the potential of being the next
> great thing. Hope so but I doubt it, as RISC-V seems also to be building
> a culture of tinkering with SBCs. That's cool but not for 99.9% of
> computer users.
>
> I want to believe Ladybird will grow and succeed. https://ladybird.org
>
> Memory safe PLs will continue to make agonizingly slow progress. I hope
> "Rust in Linux" will try again. I think memory safe languages will need
> to take over userspace before operating systems make significant moves
> in the kernel. But that seems to be slowly happening. One of the
> blockers in OpenBSD is the fact that Rust doesn't support nearly all of
> the 14 hardware platforms, but I'd be surprised if OpenBSD still
> supports Alpha (among others) in 2035, and luna88k is supported entirely
> by a single developer who is almost certainly its only user in the
> entire world. Super impressive, but not what creates marketshare.
> There's a broad trend to shrink hardware platform support and I don't
> see Rust expanding to obscure platforms like landisk and hppa etc.
>
> Thoughts? Go ahead, share your own 2035 hopes and predictions.
>
> Nicolai
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