2005 was a good year for Linux

Late in 2004 I wrote a blog post (sorry, not public anymore) about my predictions for 2005. It was most focused on the WWW world, and the headline was that next two years, between Fx 1.0 and IE 7.0 will be boring. And it seems that I was right. Firefox 1.5 is nothing more than a polished version of 1.0, I really like it, beside of some memleaks I heard about (but didn’t see), Opera went free, which was so predictable that the only surprise for me was how much noise they made around (bravo!), other browser simply evolved, exciting only those freaks who find themselves thrilled because due to complicated process of CSS hacks some browser is able to display a yellow face. Boring, boring, boring.
In Poland we say “Excitement as on mushrooming“…

Second quarter of 2006 is will be much more interesting, many technologies that are being shaped for years will be ready by that time, many browsers will be released, including the most important one, Internet Explorer 7.0, but also Firefox will go 2.0 then, and we’ll probably have Flock 1.0 for you Also, new technologies will pop up. There will be a bit more CSS2, first signs of CSS3, SVG, Canvas, Web Forms, Web Apps, and first beta’s of Gecko 1.9. It’ll be an exciting time and I’m so happy that I have a chance to be in the near the middle of the process. I’m sure it’ll be an exciting battle between the old giant and the young horde…

The situation is vastly different in operating system world. OS’s are more like browsers were around year 2000. The giant is still before the release of it’s crushing release, and the open-source world seems to be a few years before doing what Firefox did for browser market. In the post I mentioned before, I predicted that 2005 will be a good year for Linux development, because we’re going to clear a lot of garbage from our playground, and start working on the first packages that in the future will be a part of solution that will compete with Windows as the desktop solution for the masses.So year 2005 was a year of new KDE and Gnome, stabilization of Linux distro releases, openSuSe, Fedora, nothing shocking, no revolution, but a good year.Today I found a nice confirmation of this. On three very different machines, three very different people installed Linux. And for all of them it was pretty easy and flawless. And those weren’t the “common” machines. I installed Kubuntu Dapper Drake on my Acer Aspire 5024 notebook (with ATI IXP modem, Radeon x700 video card, AMD64 CPU etc.) in a 4 easy steps, and the only thing I had to do was manually choose partition because I wanted to preserve my other OS’es.
One of my friends installed the same Kubuntu on his Athlon 700 with GeForce2 and very old motherboard (no GRUB allowed!), and another installed Slackware 10.2 on his odd machine with some Riva TNT 2 card and other museum devices.
None of them is a open source activist, they’re just Internet users who play MUD’s, use WWW and email… We’re really getting near to end user!Another nice thing is that more and more woman use Linux which also, in my opinion, means that the philosophy and user experience offered by open source world can attract people who are sensitive to other areas of the solution called Open Source. Comparing to 2004 I hear much more about someones female friends familiar with Linux, I see more girls on Jogger, which is the blogging service for Jabber users, like Nami, Joanna… And today I met a couple in the junk food place who were learning before some exams, both were from IT High School, and I was able to help them a bit. It was a pleasure to see people who want to became a coder Who knows… maybe in the future, the geek party won’t be equivalent of “Many Single Male Building Their Ego On Talking To Each Other”? Hope so…Back to predictions, year 2006 will be of course much more interesting. Once more, many technologies are almost ready to start influencing the market. Big things like Xen, intel Mac OS, Reiser 4, Xorg 7.x, small ones like InitNG, Elektra, and things that will show up at the end of 2006 like KDE4, Gecko 1.9, Flock, Xgl, Windows Vista…

At the end of 2006 we will probably at least know how will look like things that will change the computer world in 2007, 2008. At the end of 2005 I have problem to list what changed on my desktop since 2004 (beside of new versions of packages, but nothing big there), I’m pretty sure that at the end of 2006 I’ll have a long list of changes Market will probably start using those in 2007, so at the end of 2007 the world will really ride on things that are crafted today… It’s very stimulating for my mind, and the fact, that everyone can take part in the process and work on Open Source is a great thing that I hope will be well used by my friends from Poland who love to repeat that they have no chance to build their CV