Linux

I hope the joy and knowledge and freedom our for-bearers had is what we will continue to reap in the future. there will be challenges, but we will prevail.

The future of PCs in general is tied to professionals and gamers, there is no need for a pc anymore in an household who is not anything of the above

Which means that the average PC user will become more and more tech savy, this is the only thing that could raise the Linux market share

On the other hand I don't see a single chance of linux becoming relevant in personal computing unless a big corporation decides to offer an experience that is/has:

• A polieshed UI, something eye-pleasing like MacOs
• Noob friendly in the sense that it offers a 100% TRUE terminal-free experience
• Reliable across hardware of any kind, the average user doesn't want to worry about graphic or wifi drivers. Heck the average user doesn't even know what a driver is
• Not buggy
• An easy way to install any software they need, today's program coverage in various software centers often doesn't fulfill the needs of the average user

I don't like the migration to wayland when it is so woefully not ready to replace x11, terrible a11y, window embedding is still non existent, the window positioning seems like we might be getting is a watered down version that still wont be compatible with many apps.

Im not saying x11 is good, I am more then familiar with the multitude of x11 issues that are honestly a meme at this point. pretending like migrating to wayland will be this massive step forward is wrong however, it's a step to the side, just as broken, but different issues we can pick from.

x11 is broken by design, and wayland is designed to be broken

I expect to see distros that use Flatpak as its exclusive package manager, even for the bare-metal, in the near future. Also, Linux as a remote desktop on the cloud will probably be attempted at a larger scale, given that Windows 12 is rumored to try that route.

Not where I'd like to see it, but where I see it going:

Much like the three major publishers - Mac, MS, Google. Google and Apple are already using Linux/bsd. MS, on desktop is the only player left. They happen to be the most prominent player. It's an odd thing though, as others have pointed out. That more and more people, outside of work simply don't have a PC anymore. Phones have taken over for what a lot of people would have used a PC for to begin with.

With that, MS may replace their NT kernel with a *nix (probably built themselves or heavily modified from something like Gentoo - like ChromeOS) and then what. We'll still have these mega corps still pushing closed sourced systems.

Idk, I guess the question of "do we actually want Linux on everything?" remains. The enthusiast PC market differs from pre built OEMs for a reason.

Would I like to see wider adoption, yes. But I think it's better suited still for enthusiast and repurposing older machines to save them from e-waste.

I don't think theres anything else that might happen with Linux -- it's already "The free Windows" as is.

Linux is way to fragmented and without a great dominating distro it will never. Waymand, Ubuntu, Mint, Gnome, KDE, WTF, Users don't fucking care about that jargon. Most Window users don't even know the name of the browser they are using or that "the internet app" is even called "browser".

A few weeks ago I updated Ubuntu from 22 to 23 on my home media center. First tried the Updates App because why not just press a single fucking button like on windows or mac. No - no major updates there. Open a console, apt update and upgrade the hell out of everything, update the package sources with some shady regex command I copy pasted from some random forum, update upgrade again dist-upgrade WTF. After everything was done the layout of the info area (network, wifi, etc) was fucked up. Read some only shit about gnome shell extensions, themens, nothing made sense, force reinstalled the gome shell - worked again.

And somebody expects that "typical" users to do that don't even know what Windows Version they are running - sure.

linux has to start a new OS from the ground up. Go back to command line and PC-DOC days. Everything must be controllable at a basic level. Shove MS and Apple out the door. Nobody wants their adware and virus bloated shit any longer.