If you thought that with SLED 10, Ubuntu 6.10, X.org 7.1, Firefox 2 or anything else in our open source/free software/geeky world, the year 2006 was “tha best”, just sit down and enjoy 2007 🙂
With it’s Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, next Fedora, next Suse, next Mandriva, X.org 7.3 (real time hotplug!), Firefox 3, Flock 1.0, Azureus 3, KDE 4.0, Grub 2, Reiser 4 in mainline kernel, next releases of Ogre 3D, Blender, WordPress, MediaWiki, and things like OpenID gaining momentum, not mentioning progress with Compiz/Beryl/Metisse and everything else that’s too eyecandy to write about it we’re like a fullspeed TGV that is just passing by Microsoft world focused on “Vista” bus stop.
But we’re bigger than that. With last years distros we’ve reached the level of “fairly usable OS” and now we’re exploring new areas, inventing new technologies and exploring new worlds. And 2007 is for me mostly about OLPC, OpenMoko, Optimus keyboard. I played with OLPC during FOSDEM and I’m absolutely amazed. It’s cute, it’s powerful, it’s amazing how they mixed new technologies with open source and with “making the world a better place”. OpenMoko is something I’m dreaming about for a few years and I hope to receive my phase1 phone late this month, while Optimus keyboard is something so obvious I cannot understand why nobody made it for so many years.
One of the most important (not surprising, but long-term important) changes in 2006 was that for the first time we came to the situation when Joe Average was able to buy a laptop/PC, get a free linux distro, install it on his own and start using without having to perform a single command-line task or miss any Windows-only app.
Of course there are tons of cases when it’s not possible. People still need Corel, Adobe, sometimes Microsoft Office – true, but Joe Average (and my Mum) uses Ubuntu 6.10 on his/her Toshiba Portege R200 with Firefox, Open Office, Jabber, SIP and needs nothing more to be a happy user of today’s computer world. And we’re still speeding up…
… so please, think about those poor folks vendor locked-in in Microsoft empire, that will be exploring the “exiting” world of already exploited UAC, DRM, and shiny translucency for the next 5 years. Wave your hand while we’re passing them.