Android

• Better app compatibility
• More bugs fixed and features added
• Less e-Waste
• More open source projects
• People possibly valuing privacy more
• Games start to drop kernel anti cheats

Probably will be most notable for personal desktops with increased software support of consumer hardware. Mainstream only cares about what OS is pre installed, linux users are 99,9% advanced users just by the fact that they take the time to install an OS. Company adoption have the same issue, companies use what have worked before and what most employees are used to… and of course, what is pre installed on the desktops they buy.

Desktop linux is unlikely to happen at any point, just by the above facts. I am also not convinced it is the first choice for most tasks on a desktop. Servers and mobile it works great and other LTS hardware. With that said, I think when governments adopt linux we will definitely see an actual market and ecosystem develop… 2030? Maybe before, because countries will wake up and release its not the best idea to share all their data with MS. I could see something like Trump becoming president again, could actually spur on the adoption rate.

Sorry for the ramble, interesting question 👍

You’ll see a lot more CVEs.

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Simplified and with a lot of user power and user freedom abdicated to a few companies, or to a few groups of developers working together, in order to make things much simpler and much more optimised for the average user.

I mean, suffice to see how often people can be completely lost when they’re asked to decide between clicking either the OK or the Cancel button, or use a simple drop down menu, or decide if they should even be bothered with their privacy at all when using any app as long as it is free and shiny… As it is, Linux stands no-chance against that with its many quirks, workarounds, with its sudo pacman -s or sudo apt install, and with its focus on freedom and privacy. No matter how excellent those tools can be, and no matter how important freedom and privacy should be.

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How would software support improve?

• Less fragmentation between multiple different ways to install software (Ubuntu-derived distributions currently have apt, flatpack and snap while some software is available in neither so I have to manually download a binary or even compile it myself)
• Better support for certain use cases like… I don’t know… fractional scaling which Windows has supported since Vista
• Simplified system settings. People make fun of Windows splitting settings between the “new” settings app and the old control center. On most Linux distributions, I may have to set some things multiple times for my window manager, my compositor and so on… again, scaling is the main culprit here but themeing has similar problems.

Basically fix the few things that work better in Windows, even for power users, ideally without sacrificing the flexibility that makes Linux so awesome.

Edit: bonus suggestion though this one is kind of tricky to do without sacrificing flexibility:

Less fragmentation between distributions. Recently I had some driver problem (can’t quite remember what) and googled a solution. I found a solution in a support forum for a different distribution than what I had. Looked good but in the end it didn’t help me because the config files were in completely different locations, default configs were different, packages had different names and they recommended using some UI tool to configure the device that wasn’t available on my distribution or at least I couldn’t find how to install it.

For myself, I’ll eventually figure that out. It takes me a few hours that I could spend on something productive but whatever, we’re geeks, we do shit like that. But now imagine my mom calls me about that problem. She probably won’t have the same distribution that I have because we have entirely different use cases. Good look troubleshooting that over the phone. With Windows, I can rely on 80% of all users having one of the latest two versions (so currently 10 or 11). The fix that works on my machine will probably work on theirs and most things I find online will apply to what they have. Same for macOS.

Edit 2: For context, I run Ubuntu and Debian on quite a lot of headless machines such as servers and embedded stuff. It works great and I wouldn’t want to miss it. But on desktop, I’m still in Windows and won’t leave for the foreseeable future. Every few months I try setting up some desktop linux and every time it takes less than a week to annoy me so much that I’d rather wipe the whole thing and install Windows than figure out how to fix that mess of two different display servers, five different desktop environments and two entirely incompatible GUI frameworks in a trenchcoat.

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1. how would it look
2. what would it look like

Pick a lane.

How would the mainstream view it?

Mostly postive, there can be some complaints about being hard to use etc

How would software support improve?
How would gaming look like?

More apps and games might come and many companies might consider it.

Which country will become the first majority >Linux majority? India? Seychelles?

Prob some third world country

How many local governments would start >adopting it?

Idk

What year do you think it will happen in?

Prob around late 2020s

It would likely look like versions of the three most popular forms of Linux today, Android, ChromeOS, and Steam Deck.

Very likely, it would be developed to host a vendor’s app store as a way to make money. Depending on the company, it would likely give admin access to users based on corporate preferences similar to how Android phone sellers lock or unlock parts of the phone. You can still install your own Linux to some computers, but that market would likely remain the same size it is today.

I also see some companies with a business model like Stripe deploy specialized Linux computers to businesses designed to deployable to large companies and have a longer lifecycle than a Windows OS. With payment of these computers likely done on a material + maintenance program, updates to these computers would likely focus on security and uptime only. Some individual large companies may even have their own flavor of Linux, like a hotel chain deploying terminals across corporate and franchise hotels and tied to corporate servers.

10% of what market? It already has more than that in the server and embedded markets. In the desktop market, that will never happen. It’s just not user friendly enough and probably never will be.