Linus Torvalds on What’s Hot in the Future of Linux
It’s nearly that time again — pundits are already gearing up for their year-in-review summaries and soon they’ll be offering up more laughably bad predictions for the coming year. As a precursor to all the thrilling inanity that the media will subject you to in the very near future we’d like to point out an interesting interview with Linus Torvalds about where Linux is headed in 2008 and beyond.
Don’t worry, Torvalds isn’t going to tell you that 2008 will be year of the desktop Linux (an empty statement that pretty much everyone else has been making every year for the last six years). Instead Torvalds touts Linux’s flexibility and mentions a few areas he’s excited about — solid state hard drives, virtualization and more.
As Torvalds points out in the piece, Linux’s greatest strength is its flexibility. There’s a whole host of devices, from mobile phones to home entertainment centers, running Linux on a level most people remain blissfully unaware of. As such, looking at where Linux is headed also serves as a kind of barometer for the gadget market in general.
So where can you expect to see Linux in the future? Pretty much everywhere and look for solid state hard drives to make real inroads in the long term. As Torvalds says:
When you buy an OS from Microsoft, not only you can’t fix it, but it has had years of being skewed by one single entity’s sense of the market. It doesn’t matter how competent Microsoft — or any individual company — is, it’s going to reflect that fact. In contrast, look at where Linux is used. Everything from cellphones and other small embedded computers that people wouldn’t even think of as computers, to the bulk of the biggest machines on the supercomputer Top-500 list. That is flexibility. And it stems directly from the fact that anybody who is interested can participate in the development, and no single entity ends up being in control of where it all goes.
Hitting on one of the key reasons the mainstream media continues to largely ignore and misunderstand Linux, Torvalds points out that there isn’t really one single development area that shows huge growth. Instead Linux continues to be a collection of small improvements: “but in the end, a lot of this is just a huge amount of individually small changes that may not be even interesting on their own — what is then really stunning is how big a difference all those small not-so-interesting changes make when you put them all together.”
And the small changes keep rolling in, not necessarily just at the kernel level either — KDE 4 is nearing completion and the Linux driver project is bring more hardware support every day. Linux may not grab that many headlines, but if you want to know whether your favorite gadget is headed for long term success, check to see if it can run Linux.
[via Slashdot, pic from Wikimedia Commons]
See Also:
