2020: Will BSD and Linux be relevant anymore?
Konrad Heuer
kheuer2 at gwdg.de
Tue Jul 19 06:46:58 UTC 2011
I found it very interesting to look at the thread "Lennart Poettering: BSD
Isn't Relevant Anymore" and the original interview.
Just to make clear: I started using FreeBSD approximately in 1994 with
2.0-RELEASE and still use FreeBSD and hope to do so a lot of years to
come.
But: Neither BSD nor Linux will ever have chance to conquere the desktop,
despite of KDE, Gnome or anything else. In business environments there is
no alternative to Windows. Microsoft successfully created Active Directory
from DNS, LDAP and Kerberos with an easy-to-manage interface and -
meanwhile - a seasonable server operating system like Windows Server
2008R2. It was long way for them from horrible Windows NT, but they did
it. I don't see any chance to manage a large client-server-cloud with BSD
or Linux as you can do with Active Directory.
Additionally, and especially in the personal environment, the market will
more and more move away from the traditional PC or notebook -- except for
games, but that's again not an area where Linux or BSD are strong -- to
tablet PCs and other mobile devices. To my mind we'll have to face a rapid
change within the next years, and operating systems of the future might be
Android or IOS or Windows Mobile or something similar which my base on
Linux or BSD but are something different.
Let's forget about BSD or Linux on the desktop and about KDE and Gnome
etc. Nice to see them, but useful only for few.
BSD will have to keep in and find new niches on the server market. The
number of installations is not the most important figure. Functionality is
important -- ZFS, HAST, CARP, jails, as already mentioned -- would be nice
to see a distributed file system.
So, let's continue as we did for years ..
Best regards
Konrad Heuer
GWDG, Am Fassberg, 37077 Goettingen, Germany, kheuer2 at gwdg.de
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