Tim Almond

I was pondering on Pootergeek’s post about Linux (cue my own bit of Hovis music). How when I first tried Linux, it was Red Hat. It didn’t install very well and crashed frequently. That was a few years ago.

Today, I’ve got a laptop running Ubuntu Linux, and many of the sites I have built have been designed and built on that laptop. It is far easier to install and runs solidly.

There’s often a joke on Slashdot about when the "Year of Linux" is. When the year is that it makes its big breakthrough. There really is no year, it’s slowly evolving. Which mirrors what happened on Windows and mainframe. It took time for Windows to dominate in corporate environments. Even after PCs had been on desks for many years, the majority of software development was still on mainframe. Over time, developers switched. And whilst there are still mainframes, very few corporations would build a wholly new system using mainframe technology.

But if I had to pick a year, it would be 2007. Dell announcing that they are going to build Linux desktops. Flash Player running on Linux. Palm to run Linux. The PS3 has a menu to install Linux. Solaris has gone open in the face of the competition from Linux.

The growth of Linux is a virtuous cycle. The more people who use it, the more it gets supported by hardware and software companies, which leads to more users, which leads to more support by hardware and software companies…

Personally, I’m spending more time training myself in cross-platform technologies, because I sense where this is going. That technologies like Django or Rails are going to start eating into the space that is occupied by asp.net, that companies will start seriously using MySQL instead of expensive heavyweight solutions like Oracle and SQL Server.

Linux is coming, and is unstoppable. It’s just a matter of time. 

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Tags: Linux //