Schaller On Linux In 2018: Rust Rules, Apple Declines, Linux Graphics Compete

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Schaller On Linux In 2018: Rust Rules, Apple Declines, Linux Graphics Compete

Christian Schaller who has long been involved in GNOME/Fedora development while serving as a senior software engineering manager at Red Hat and formerly with Collabora has some bold predictions about 2018 for open-source software...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Christian-Schaller-2018

[cl333r]

Pretty much agree, except for "The H.265 format will be considered a failure", it's already in silicon on all major hw and like h264 will take a few years until it really takes off.

[Nth_man]

> What do you think of Christian's predictions?

Wishful thinking :-)

[LoneVVolf]

- Meson becomes the defacto build system in the Linux community.

Number of applications requiring meson in arch linux repos that are not gnome related : very low
Xorg-server and mesa are both working on building with meson, but even if they do switch in 2018 there's still QT applications.

- Rust puts itself on a trajector to replace C/C++ for low-level programming.
Where can i find the linux kernel , userspace drivers, dbus written in rust ?
(maybe i misunderstand what low-level programming means)

- Traditional Linux distribution packaging for desktop applications will start fading in favor of Flatpak.
if that happens, i expect a new prediction in the near future : 202x : linux systems banned from internet due to increasing number of viruses / malware
Flatpak does have some good points, but it's not suited to replace more then a small part of the applications

The others i don't know enough about.

[doom_Oo7]

So basically "we're doing this at Fedora / GNOME / GTK so it's going to be the next Linux Standard™". These guys should look a bit out of their ass sometimes.

Two years ago Meson didn't even register at less than 1% of usage (https://blog.jetbrains.com/clion/201...-before-clion/) while CMake comes out as the leading build system (added "build" since "meson" also means hostel in spanish and is a particle); I doubt it changed since:
https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...,meson%20build . If any more and more open source projects did switch to CMake.


Likewise, Rust barely registers vs C++ in terms of search interest: https://trends.google.com/trends/expl...6,%2Fm%2F0jgqg

[ALRBP]

- Meson becomes the defacto build system in the Linux community.
Don't know.

- Rust puts itself on a trajector to replace C/C++ for low-level programming.
Seriously?

- Apple declines as a PC vendor.
Why? I will never buy Apple but lots of people do.

- Traditional Linux distribution packaging for desktop applications will start fading in favor of Flatpak.
I think Flatpack will stay limited to few apps, low demand apps, apps hard to integrate and experimental version of apps will use Flatpack, for the rest, classical distribution packaging will remain. It is a great thing to have a lot of apps available in official repositories. That is a clear point of superiority of GNU/Linux distributions over Windows, even with their, much more recent, app market.

- Linux graphics will become competitive across the board. Though part of this he thinks that Aspyr/Feral Linux game ports by the end of 2018 will begin performing as well as the Windows games.
I hope.

- The H.265 format will be considred a failure and moving forward all new codecs will be open-source / royalty free.
H.265 is already used in UHD Blu-ray disks and widely used in free sharing of copyrighted content, it is a success. I still hope that codecs from MPEG will eventually fail and open-source/royalty free codecs will win the battle (AV1 maybe?).

[Michael_S]

In favor of Rust: nothing has challenged C or C++ at systems level programming for decades. So if Rust (or anything else) makes any headway in that space - Swift, Go, D, Ada, anything - it's significant even if on an absolute scale they only get 0.1% of the space. 0.1% is more than other entries have managed.

It still means C and C++ will dominate the space through my lifetime.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Thanks for the laugh on Apple declines. They ``declined'' due to delays in their flag ship desktops/laptops. Every analysts knows the rebound is this quarter and moving forward, but don't let that stop everyone for `hoping' to the contrary.

[Jumbotron]

I think Christian is 100% spot on with the only exception of time scale. 2018 will see all these things truly gain traction....but wide spread adoption won't be until 2020-2022 time frame.

To those snarkingly replying about where is Rust in the kernel. What part of the word "trajectory" did you not understand? That said....C and C++ will fade. It's inevitable, but slowly. C and C++ can not "Rustify" themselves faster than Rust can become a better C or C++. The Rustification of code and apps written in C or C++ including the Linux kernel will continue as it is advantageous. It will soar in the kernel once Linus is gone.

[KRiloshart]

Are feral ports, ports of windows ports made from consoles or are they ported directly from console?