I kinda bounce back and forth between feeling like a tech curmudgeon, and freshly optimistic of the future...among some things that make me look forward to the future include:
* computer makers who focus on either linux or "fix it yourself" audience...like system&6, Pine64, and the newest Framework (laptop empowering DIY...though they sell it with Windows they mention adding formal linux support later)
* also more decentralized communications and networks...like the matrix protocol (and associated distrib. network) along with apps like Element, nheko, fluffychat, etc.), the Briar project, the fediverse (and all its apps and instances like mastodon, pleroma, pixlfed, etc.), and on and on.
* finally, there are more and more headlines related to privacy and controlling one's own devices...which continue to become mainstream. While i'm not expecting to have the big corps change overnight...but capitalism being what it is, at some point these big corps will start to adjust their offerings even if only a little to fill the needs that the layperson consumers are beginning to ask/talk about. Sure, plenty is still fluf - like Apple's supposed marketing around privacy...but that shows that at least Apple and other firms are listening to the signals being eminated that privacy - as only one example - is now a selling feature...i'll defer to the reader if Apple has actuaklly achieved anything here...but the fact that it is a topic that has come up in the mainstream enough for Apple to use it as marketing means that there's something to this...which means that some other big corp or med-sized corp might grab that and run to make services and products that cater to the crowds who favor privacy, control, etc.
...at least that what i'm feeling this morning...fingers crossed that my raspberry pi doesn't stop working because another sdcard has failed. ;-)
Great list. One thing I want to reinforce is that the leading edge engineers of the world are only just starting to surface wide-scale, acceptable, happy practices for running systems/software. It's only in the past couple years that "build a cluster of raspberry pi's" has become a "legible"/comprehensible pitch, something that makes a light bulb go off over people's heads. A couple years ago we wouldn't really have known what to think, what that would be good for.
But now we have the shared language, the operational tools (& culture) to imagine clusters of computing resources coming together, reinforcing & helping one another, providing reliability & stable known operating environments for a vast variety of "easy" to launch workloads. To the point that a hobbyist can bring up a pi cluster mini-data-center in less than a weekend. That's draw dropping amazing, & a colossal demonstration of how much mastery we've achieved over such a wide wide set of concerns. 5 years ago we didn't even have the shared language to express the goal/desire, the cloud was abstract, but now it's real & something we can do for $120 and a couple hours. And we'll only get better. We're only really just getting started with this inertia, only just started bringing a lot of big ideas into the commons. While the primary drivers are big & medium entities doing ops, this is a huge foothold for the home, for the hobbyist to get going with, to make running software simple but not too simple, to have a platform that scales from very low & easy to very big & fancy. There's a lot of epic & amazing home-cloud stuff going on, & this is all so new, & very technical, but over time I expect a lot of paths to be paved, a lot of lessons learned, and the amazing ultra-leading-edge works like onedr0p's homecloud[1] to spring into bloom & to seed new efforts. Having a rich, high-potential ecosystem that computing & the computing community can build atop of & get good & get more elegant with is a precondition for any other part of computing succeeding. Without good ops, personal computing can go nowhere, and we are so so so much better gathered & doing so much better than we were even half a decade ago.
Once our own computing becomes possible, the spread of p2p & distributed systems might start. Even that doesn't seem ultra-necessary to me. I believe the mediums we have are enormously powerful, enormously flexible, and incredibly distributed if put to use for those ends. Specs like ActivityPub and ActivityStreams can remake how almost all software works, can provide the fabric of connectivity that makes connected networked systems so compelling, so interesting to participate in, without the top-down-control, with self-determinism & agency & genuine ownership of data. That we can have amazing new online vantage points for these wide & diverse feeds of information when we harken to protocols & feeds.
Still missing right now, mobile/low power systems are still trapped in the old world: the most important device we own, our phones, can not participate in the new dawning better-ops cross-system-ops galaxy we are breathing life into. Unlocking mobile from the confines of narrow consumerdom is a long battle, and I mostly hope the overwhelming brilliance of self-hosting Linux makes Linux on the phone too compelling to allow these consumer,
* computer makers who focus on either linux or "fix it yourself" audience...like system&6, Pine64, and the newest Framework (laptop empowering DIY...though they sell it with Windows they mention adding formal linux support later)
* also more decentralized communications and networks...like the matrix protocol (and associated distrib. network) along with apps like Element, nheko, fluffychat, etc.), the Briar project, the fediverse (and all its apps and instances like mastodon, pleroma, pixlfed, etc.), and on and on.
* finally, there are more and more headlines related to privacy and controlling one's own devices...which continue to become mainstream. While i'm not expecting to have the big corps change overnight...but capitalism being what it is, at some point these big corps will start to adjust their offerings even if only a little to fill the needs that the layperson consumers are beginning to ask/talk about. Sure, plenty is still fluf - like Apple's supposed marketing around privacy...but that shows that at least Apple and other firms are listening to the signals being eminated that privacy - as only one example - is now a selling feature...i'll defer to the reader if Apple has actuaklly achieved anything here...but the fact that it is a topic that has come up in the mainstream enough for Apple to use it as marketing means that there's something to this...which means that some other big corp or med-sized corp might grab that and run to make services and products that cater to the crowds who favor privacy, control, etc.
...at least that what i'm feeling this morning...fingers crossed that my raspberry pi doesn't stop working because another sdcard has failed. ;-)