Linux looks increasingly unstoppable these days. I find it easy to believe that in 100 years time, everything with a CPU in it will be running some descendant of it - and quite possibly it will have Android in its ancestry too.
If you're creating any kind of new computing gizmo now, Linux gives you so much existing value for free (allowing you to add your own stuff on top) that it's hard to see why you'd use anything else.
I think you are exactly right. Why pay thousands of dollars for operating system features that are either unstable or unnecessary, when you can use Linux for free and usual make it do exactly what you want.
I think that things like Raspberry Pi and OLPC will also help move linux into the hands of regular consumers.
As much as I like Linux, is this really the best outcome? A monoculture of any form is not helping anyone.
There are other operating system platforms like the various flavors of BSD that might work just as well. Having more than one option is always a great benefit.
God I hope not. I use Linux at work, because it's currently the best option in terms of software & hardware support, but if you've EVER done anything with the Linux kernel, you should hopefully have realized how helplessly terrible it really is. It's an enormous beast, the turnaround time for testing changes is terrible because it takes so long to compile even after you change a single file, etc.
If we're still using Linux in 2112, we should just launch all the nukes and end ourselves.
It takes on a modern machine (in my case a laptop from last year) about 4-5 mins, full with modules. In comparison, some random java project I am working on, it takes maybe 7-8 mins.
And actually, if you ever compiled a kernel, which I highly doubt, the make system does not recompile everything, only your change. Besides that, modules you can compile individually.
i7 laptop with 4 GB of RAM. I haven't measured it, but whenever I kick off a kernel build it certainly takes long enough that I end up going off and checking email, etc. But you're right, I haven't built Linux kernels for desktops and Android devices and BlueGene systems, hacking in changes or just putting in debug prints to try and figure out what the fuck Linux is doing so I can write a hardware simulator. Oh wait, yeah, I fucking have.
The kernel I'm working on now, non-Linux, can build in about 5 seconds--and this kernel works on a pretty large segment of hardware, too.
If you're creating any kind of new computing gizmo now, Linux gives you so much existing value for free (allowing you to add your own stuff on top) that it's hard to see why you'd use anything else.