So I spent a few hours polishing my crystal ball today, so here are some predictions for Linux on the Desktop in 2018. The advantage of course for me to publish these now is that I can then later selectively quote the ones I got right to prove my brilliance and the internet can selectively quote the ones I got wrong to prove my stupidity 🙂
Prediction 1: Meson becomes the defacto build system of the Linux community
Meson has been going from strength to strength this year and a lot of projects
which passed on earlier attempts to replace autotools has adopted it. I predict this
trend will continue in 2018 and that by the end of the year everyone agrees that Meson
has replaced autotools as the Linux community build system of choice. That said I am not
convinced the Linux kernel itself will adopt Meson in 2018.
Prediction 2: Rust puts itself on a clear trajectory to replace C and C++ for low level programming
Another rising start of 2017 is the programming language Rust. And while its pace of adoption
will be slower than Meson I do believe that by the time 2018 comes to a close the general opinion is
that Rust is the future of low level programming, replacing old favorites like C and C++. Major projects
like GNOME and GStreamer are already adopting Rust at a rapid pace and I believe even more projects will
join them in 2018.
Prediction 3: Apples decline as a PC vendor becomes obvious
Ever since Steve Jobs died it has become quite clear in my opinion that the emphasis
on the traditional desktop is fading from Apple. The pace of hardware refreshes seems
to be slowing and MacOS X seems to be going more and more stale. Some pundits have already
started pointing this out and I predict that in 2018 Apple will be no longer consider the
cool kid on the block for people looking for laptops, especially among the tech savvy crowd.
Hopefully a good opportunity for Linux on the desktop to assert itself more.
Prediction 4: Traditional distro packaging for desktop applications
will start fading away in favour of Flatpak
From where I am standing I think 2018 will be the breakout year for Flatpak as a replacement
for gettings your desktop applications as RPMS or debs. I predict that by the end of 2018 more or
less every Linux Desktop user will be at least running 1 flatpak on their system.
Prediction 5: Linux Graphics competitive across the board
I think 2018 will be a breakout year for Linux graphics support. I think our GPU drivers and API will be competitive with any other platform both in completeness and performance. So by the end of 2018 I predict that you will see Linux game ports by major porting houses
like Aspyr and Feral that perform just as well as their Windows counterparts. What is more I also predict that by the end of 2018 discreet graphics will be considered a solved problem on Linux.
Prediction 6: H265 will be considered a failure
I predict that by the end of 2018 H265 will be considered a failed codec effort and the era of royalty bearing media codecs will effectively start coming to and end. H264 will be considered the last successful royalty bearing codec and all new codecs coming out will
all be open source and royalty free.
