I don't think it'll be a killer app so much as a confluence of different factors. For one thing, we now live in a world where docker is fast becoming as ubiquitous as git, and unlike git, requires a Linux VM to run on Windows. It's also a key technology for the replication and distribution of ML models, which again, are developed on Linux, trained on clusters running Linux, and deployed to servers running Linux. And this is all done in Python, a language native to Linux, which is now one of the most used languages on Earth.

We already see things like Google abandoning tensorflow support for Windows, because they don't have enough devs using Windows to easily maintain it.

And of course, we have a changing of the guard in terms of a generation of software developers who primarily worked on Windows, because that was the way to do it, starting to retire. Younger devs came up in the Google era where Linux is a first class citizen alongside MacOS.

I think these factors are going to change the face of technology in the coming 15 years, and that's likely to affect how businesses and consumers consume technology, even if they don't understand what's actually running under the hood.

There is no competition when games only come to Linux by "emulating" Windows.

The only thing it has going for it is being a free beer UNIX clone for headless environments, and even then, isn't that relevant on cloud environments where containers and managed languages abstract everything they run on.

Thanks to the Steam Deck, more and more games are being ported for Linux compatibility by default.

Maybe some Microsoft owned games makers will never make the shift, but if the majority of others do then that's the death knell.

Nah, everyone is relying on Proton, there are hardly any native GNU/Linux games being ported, not even Android/NDK ones, where SDL, OpenGL, Vulkan, C, C++ are present, and would be extremely easy to port.

>Nah, everyone is relying on Proton, there are hardly any native GNU/Linux games being ported

This doesn't make the "play" button any different. People only care if the Proton version is buggy or noticeably less performant, and native ports have no trouble being both of those (see: Rust (game) before the devs dropped Linux support)

It worked really well for OS/2.

Are they ported though? I would say thanks to the Steam Deck, Proton is at a point where native Linux ports are unnecessary. It's also a much more stable target to develop against than N+1 Linux distros.

Many are specifically ported to work with Linux without a wrapper, especially among indie games and games from smaller studios.

Unity, Unreal and Godot all support compiling for Linux either by default or with inexpensive or possibly free add-ons. I'm sure many other game engines do as well, and when you're taking a few hours of work at most to add everyone who owns a steam deck or a steam deck clone as a potential customer to your customer base then that is not a tall order.

They do, yet you will hardly find a big name Studio that will waste additional money doing builds, QA and customer support for GNU/Linux, just let Valve do the needful with Proton.

> However, Microsoft has definitely been drinking the IBM koolaid a little to long and has lost the mandate of heaven. I think in the next 7-10 years we will reach a point where there is nothing Windows can do that linux cannot do better and easier without spying on you

that's a fascinating statement with the clear ascendancy of neural-assisted algorithms etc. Things like DLSS are the future - small models that just quietly optimize some part of a workload that was commonly considered impossible to the extent nobody even thinks about it anymore.

my prediction is that in 10 years we are looking at the rise of tag+collection based filesystems and operating system paradigms. all of us generate a huge amount of "digital garbage" constantly, and you either sort it out into the important stuff, keep temporarily, and toss, or you accumulate a giant digital garbage pile. AI systems are gonna automate that process, it's gonna start on traditional tree-based systems but eventually you don't need the tree at all, AI is what's going to make that pivot to true tag/collection systems possible.

Tags mostly haven't worked because of a bunch of individual issues which are pretty much solved by AI. Tags aren't specific enough: well, AI can give you good guesses at relevance. Tagging files and maintaining collections is a pain: well, the AI can generate tags and assign collections for you. Tags really require an ontology for "fuzzy" matching (search for "food" should return the tag "hot dog") - well, LLMs understand ontologies fine. Etc etc. And if you do it right, you can basically have the AI generate "inbox/outbox" for you, deduplicate files and handle versioning, etc, all relatively seamlessly.

microsoft and macos are both clearly racing for this with the "AI os" concept. It's not just better relevance searches etc. And the "generate me a whole paragraph before you even know what I'm trying to type" stuff is not how it's going to work either. That stuff is like specular highlights in video games around 2007 or whatever - once you had the tool, for a few years everything was w e t until developers learned some restraint with it. But there are very very good applications that are going to come out in the 10 year window that are going to reduce operator cognitive load by a lot - that is the "AI OS" concept. What would the OS look like if you truly had the "computer is my secretary" idea? Not just dictating memorandums, but assistance in keeping your life in order and keeping you on-task.

I simply cannot see linux being able to keep up with this change, in the same way the kernel can't just switch to rust - at some point you are too calcified to ever do the big-bang rewrite if there is not a BDFL telling you that it's got to happen.

the downside of being "the bazaar" is that you are standards-driven and have to deal with corralling a million whiny nerds constantly complaining about "spying on me just like microsoft" and continuing to push in their own other directions (sysvinit/upstart/systemd factions, etc) and whatever else, on top of all the other technical issues of doing a big-bang rewrite. linux is too calcified to ever pivot away from being a tree-based OS and it's going to be another 2-3 decades before they catch up with "proper support for new file-organization paradigms" etc even in the smaller sense.

that's really just the tip of the iceberg on the things AI is going to change, and linux is probably going to be left out of most of those commercial applications despite being where the research is done. It's just too much of a mess and too many nerdlingers pushing back to ever get anything done. Unix will be represented in this new paradigm but not Linux - the commercial operators who have the centralization and fortitude to build a cathedral will get there much quicker, and that looks like MacOS or Solaris not linux.

Or at least, unless I see some big announcement from KDE or Gnome or Canonical/Red Hat about a big AI-OS rewrite... I assume that's pretty much where the center of gravity is going to stay for linux.

Counterpoint: Most AI stuff is developed on either an OS agnostic language like Python or C, and then ported to Linux/OSX/Windows, so for AI it is less about the OS it runs on than the hardware, drivers, and/or connections that the OS supports.

For the non-vendor lock in AI's (copilot), casting as wide of a net as possible to catch customers as easily as possible should by default mean that they would invest the small amount of money to build linux integrations into their AI platforms.

Plus, the googs has a pretty deep investment into the linux ecosystem and should have little issue pushing bard or gemini or whatever they'll call it next week before they kill it out into a linux compatible interface, and if they do that then the other big players will follow.

And, don't overlook the next generation of VR headsets. People have gotten silly over the Apple headset, but Valve should be rolling out the Deckhard soon and others will start to compete in that space since Apple raised the price bar and should soon start rolling out hardware with more features and software to take advantage of it.

Most AI dev that I've seen tends to be done on Linux or MacOS first. Certainly the research and training are, because HPC tends to be Linux. And of course, the models are deployed in containers, a Linux technology, to webservers running Linux.

MS has put a collosal amount money into catching up to at least be able to take advantage of the AI wave, that much is clear. Maybe for consumers this will be enough, but R&D wise I don't see them ever being the default choice.

And this is potentially a huge problem for them in the long run, because OS choice by industry is driven by the available tooling. If they lose ML, they could potentially lose traditional engineering if fields like robotics start relying on Linux more heavily.

"Neural assisted algorithms" are just algorithms with large lookup tables. Another magnitude of binary bloat, but that's nothing we haven't experienced before. There's no need to fundamentally change the OS paradigm for it.

I think we're well past the "dlss is just FSR2 with lookup tables, you can ALWAYS replicate the outcomes of neural algorithms with deterministic ones" phase, imo.

if that's the case you have billion-dollar opportunities waiting for you to prove it!

Floating point inaccuracies and random seeds aside, something like DLSS is entirely deterministic. It is just a bunch of matrix multiplications.

You can’t possibly expect me to take your post seriously when there’s not even any true evidence of cognition involved in its writing. Just some meat flopping around spastically from some chemicals pumped up from the gut, and electrical zaps from the nervous system.

We can see that it’s not magic, the neuron either activates or it doesn’t, so why should I pay attention to some probabilistic steam of gibberish it spewed out? There is nothing meaningful that can be inferred from such systems, right?