Will Unix-based operating systems overtake the M$ Windows monopoly someday?

[Nubclear]

Originally posted by Cloud9
Until I can have a civilized debate with someone, don't expect my participation. If I can't have a civilized debate, I will just avoid the conversation. Insults, flaming, hatred; it's just makes things worse and doesn't solve anything. So if you want to start trouble with me, go pick on somebody your own size. I'm much bigger and wiser than any bully out there, and I'll knock you for a loop (j/k )!

There are two possibilities:

1. He can't stand the heat of the OT. He should leave and never come back.
2. He has no other arguements.

I'm betting its the second one.

[Agathon]

I don't know for sure whether Linux will ever overtake Windows. I suspect it will for economic reasons. A friend of mine manages a reasonably large business and he's thinking of moving everything to Red Hat. I wouldn't call him a digital anarchist, just someone who's fed up of paying MS too much for support.

Why are people complaining about the Linux UIs? They are bad, but then no worse than Windows XP from what I can see.

My prediction is look for it to come on in the business world (esp small business). I doubt whether people will ever be using it to play games on though.

But we shall see my precious...

[Dinner]

Unix will continue to bumble around, just like Apple will continue to bumble around, but niether will ever be able to challenge Bill.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by Tassadar5000
There are two possibilities:

1. He can't stand the heat of the OT. He should leave and never come back.
2. He has no other arguements.

I'm betting its the second one.

Can't argue with someone who's not willing to budge.

It's not the OTF. It's the bigots, the bullies, the trolls and the savage beasts of Apolyton that get on my nerves!

[Cruddy]

Originally posted by Cloud9


It's not the OTF. It's the bigots, the bullies, the trolls and the savage beasts of Apolyton that get on my nerves!

Hmm. Just about everyone who visits OT then.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by Cruddy
Hmm. Just about everyone who visits OT then.

That's what I mean. Apolyton is the perfect place for these thugs.

I respect Ming and the other moderators for the work that they do here; I just wish that they would enforce the rules more. Then the Poly Forums would become a much more civilized destination on the Net.

[St Leo]

Hmm, why am I the only one who has faith in UNIX?

Actually, I suspect that an open-source BeOS clone is what deserves to end up on top, but Linux will manage it out of sheer stubborness. Windows' decades are numbered.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by St Leo
Hmm, why am I the only one who has faith in UNIX?

Actually, I suspect that an open-source BeOS clone is what deserves to end up on top, but Linux will manage it out of sheer stubborness.

I believe that the next version of Mac OS X (Panther) will run on a BeOS filesystem instead of BSD. I could be wrong, though.

Windows' decades are numbered.

Yes, exactly. No corporation can stay on top forever. Just look what happened to Ford; there still in business, yes, but they no longer have a monopoly.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

I'm surprised Asher hasn't replied to this thread yet. Looking at his profile, he hasn't posted anything since about 24 hours ago.

Did he get suspended/banned or what?

[Q Classic]

no. unices and unix-derived/based/inspired oses won't overtake windows on the desktop, i believe, mainly because of usability issues.

as for the server market, i think it'll approach a balance. most high-powered ones will probably stay using the unices, while a lot of smaller networks will run microsoft.

[Ted Striker]

okay, i was too hard on the kid

[Ari Rahikkala]

(disclaimer: This post is more rambly than it should be, and you're unlikely to find any wisdom by reading it. If I could be bothered to, I would write it again. As it is, you'll just have to cope or not read it at all. But then again, it's not worth much less than the other posts in this thread...)

I can't really answer the question itself directly. I simply am not able to foretell what's going to happen in five, ten, twenty years. I can, however, give some free advice about what's going on in the present and a little bit about what has happened in the past... in fact, I'm going to start with an obscenely simplified account of the history of computing.

In the beginning of what's relevant to this story, there was UNIX. It was pretty close to being free as in beer, and also pretty close to being free as in speech, but both of these aspects were informal - parts of the computing culture, so to say. Then it became several Unixes, many (indeed most, I believe) of them becoming more expensive and proprietary as time went on. In the "end", to be UNIX basically meant that you were expensive, proprietary, slightly broken and subtly incompatible with everything else what called itself UNIX. Then along came MS and MS-DOS and Windows, which were even more proprietary, broken and incompatible with UNIX than UNIX itself, but also cheap. And since DOS and Windows did their job even though they broke every Thursday, people used them because they could afford MS but they couldn't afford UNIX.

Now along have come the BSDs and Linux. The BSDs are all that UNIXen were, except that they're free, open, reliable and compatible with each other. Linux is also free (and not only because of the culture, but also because of the licensing, which binds people legally), open, and reliable in the sense that it doesn't matter if something is broken now since in five minutes some Patagonian high school student will have patched it anyway (whether you will trust the patches of Patagonian high school students is your own choice). Well, except for Red Hat, which is basically making its own new triplet of Linux distros look like old UNIXen in all senses except propriety - Red Hat's new distros are expensive, bound to be broken, and probably will make everything incompatible with them.

I don't trust Red Hat terribly much. I do like them for two things: Being the first to bring a Linux-based OS to the masses, and paying Alan Cox's bills. However, beyond that, they seem to be replicating many of the mistakes that have had a part in diminishing the popularity of UNIX. They're making their main operating system releases really expensive and incompatible with a lot of other things. The Red Hat Linux distribution is basically all but dropped, and its maintenance is being moved to the community; since the technical base of Red Hat Linux is far from even being good (nightmarish package management, complicated configuration), the one thing that this will likely cause is even more suckiness. The company knows that.

So, instead of Red Hat, I'm putting my trust in the "lesser" (in terms of popularity, not merit) Linux vendors and communities. Mandrake is, AFAIK, doing a good job at building workable package management on top of the RPM architecture, and combines cutting-edgeness and desktop usability pretty well. So do some of the myriad other distros. And then there is Debian which is still, IMO, the very best Linux distribution available (even though I don't use it myself). A successful desktop-oriented fork of that, or a miraculous success of the Debian Desktop project, would be one of the best things to ever happen to Linux.

As for the purpose of this thread, I sort of forgot to include that anywhere along the way so I'll just write it up here... continuing this history of mine, Windows is now slightly (but only slightly) less proprietary than before, slightly more expensive than before, and less broken than before. However, it's also a lot more evil than before (*). Linux (non-RH), on the other hand, is unreliably reliable and very incompatible with Windows, but free (unless you use one of the new RH distros, but those should really be counted as UNIXen that are more broken and less proprietary than most) and open. BSD doesn't count since it's dying (but if only more people knew about BSD and used it...). IOW, this situation is similar to the situation in the end of the Great Age of UNIX, but not the same. I intend to keep on sitting and watching (especially as this post would already have been mostly valid in what, 1997 or so?)... and Linuxing with Gentoo .

(*) I don't mean evil as in "Burn Bill at the stake!" (+5, insightful), I mean evil as in licensing stuff and giving the source code that was supposed to have to be a secret to China, and etc..

[Whaleboy]

I think Linux will overtake MS and Unix, obviously first on servers, especially with the impending release of 2.6.x kernel, which will be superior to even 4.4BSD.

The desktop will be a harder nut to crack, imo 2.6.x will see Linux eat more and more into MS and a couple of years down the road, it could well be an even playing field. 4/5 years from now, I suspect Linux to be very dominent on the desktop, as X is either dumped or severely improved, and projects like KDE and Athene continue to improve and mature.

After that, I believe that the BSD's superiority on the server platform may well force Linux off, perhaps entirely onto the desktop, and after that, who knows? Certainly the possibilities of interpreted OS's with weird and wonderful threading are more open to UNIX based systems, particularly BSD and Linux because they tend to be far far more modular. Maybe even in a number of years, the BSD's will rule the roost, of course, then there's the HURD!!

I think MS has a bright future, but not in operating systems, they should stick to what they do best, namely making software apps. They will possibly have to change their business model to include open sourcing, if not, certainly port apps to *nix platforms.

[Wraith]

--"Why are people complaining about the Linux UIs? They are bad, but then no worse than Windows XP from what I can see."

Mostly because they're used to how it is with Windows, so a different kind of badness strikes them as wrong.
Personally I don't think any of the current OSes had done enough with HID, and that definitely includes Apple. The best bet, when you can get away with it, is CLI. I've never seen a graphical interface I was truly pleased with.

In any case, I think Linux is a long way from challenging Windows on the desktop. There's too much inertia behind Windows, and that's before you take Microsoft's business practices into account.
Still, they've been kind of shooting themselves in the foot lately. A good chunk of the places I know of that are considering more *nix stuff are doing so because of Microsoft's latest licensing scheme.
This will help alleviate the problem above, btw. If more people end up using it at work, they'll get used to the problems of the UI, just like they have with Windows.

On the server end Linux and BSD are going to do pretty well, as they have been. Microsoft may finally be getting its act together with 2003, but they've got a big reputation to live down first. This, of course, is where their "embrace and extend" philosophy will help them, although not until they fix their licensing.

However, I think both ends are in for some major changes in the next few years. The way computing is moving (massive storage, fast networks, multiple processor arrays/grids/clusters) is going to require some pretty fundamental reworks if we want things to scale properly.

Wraith
"Hello. My $NAME is ~inigo-montoya. You killed my process. Prepare to vi."
-- The Unix's Bride

[muxec]

The most important adbantage of Unix is cost. But peer tp peer warez downloader reduce it. Unix will be still needed on servers, but PC users will preffer SmallFlexible windows