Eventually, if we succeed in making linux popular, there will be viruses/spyware/evil programs. linux has had 40 (most made in labs), apple 200, and Ms countless. We will get viruses if we aren't underdogs. Of course, as long as we keep root sacred (stupid using root permisisons for user accounts in uber-user-friendly-linux-distros) and such, we'll be okay. also, i love KDE, but will KDE 4 be just as resource hogging as windows? maybe, but then again i see Vista's transparent windows and laugh. also, my 846 Mhz can handle kde 3.4 with a couple konfabulator widgets just fine. i try to do stuff like that in winxp and my compy hates me. Is OSX86 going to stomp on linux? it will surely introduce people to the idea of choice as a good thing. but is it going to replace linux as the most popular *nix-like OS for x86? i mean... its BSD based and i really respect BSD b/c of slackware and slashdot informing me of BSD news. Will kde's improvements such as "cd inserted" notifications, etc. make distro choice less and less different? What do u guys want to see in the future of linux and linux distros (try not to be distro specific as things to help a distro only helps those using that distro).

I want to see a user-friendly GUI for creating custom kernels. not just for menuconfig, but for the whole setup.
Or a apt-get implementation for use in any distro (love slapt-get).

Blog style threads belong in General. All the forums that start with Linux - are geared more for the technical questions, unless otherwise noted for the forum.

sorry and thanks for the correction.

Plus, your premise is flawed.

i would like to see a truly universal configuration app like linuxconf that i used few years ago , havent been using that now , not sure how it doing right now ...

Well, first where did you get the data on the Number of Unix/Apple viruses?
Second security isn't all about root/admin rights, there are any other reasons why its easy to infect a windows system and hard to infect a unix system so the general virus/spyware you get in windows won't be technically possible with unix (sure they will find a few way to make a few work but there isn't any way to make as many as with windows).
IMHO there are too many distros already, too many similar but different. I'd like to see a few of the distro makers merge and imporve a few of the big ones.

I would like to point out that the MacOSX shifting to a x86 archtecture will not change anything. Apple will still make computers that cost more then they should and Mac OSX will only run on Apple machines, and even though one could install Windows on a Apple machine I doubt anyone is going to pay extra for a mac and then spend another $150 to get a Windows OS to install on the machine when they could out and out buy a cheaper PC.

And all I want in my KDE is drop shadows that work :-p

first, i know my premise is really messed and almost sci-fi, but i just want to know the answer to my question. and btw, plenty of people are putting the OSx86 on their PCs. Anyone who reads slashdot knows that for once its not a hoax. U do have a point with expensive apple pcs. i do not remember where my facts were from but it was a trusted source i beleive. it was the first i found out the existence of non-windows viruses. Also, i do not quite know all of the great security implementations Unix-descendants have over windows. i just used the example i knew.

The merging is a great idea. i do not use mandriva, but it was nice to see a merger of distros.
it seems like everyday a new distro is born. Instead of making it better by branching off, why not contribute to the current project?

My kde bloat scenario has been answered by research, btw. There will be both a Plasma (fancy) and SimpleKDE (low-resource hog) as part of KDE.

Even with KDE bloat its still not as bad as windows. My little 1GHz laptop that was slow with XP is quite nice running the latest KDE. In a way moving everything to x86 is good in that the few advantages apple may have had can now be had without all their disadvantages. But whatever Apple did never really mattered to me anyway as I went open source so I can run the same OS on any number of different hardware platforms and had a Unix system before they did and have IMHO a better interface in KDE, plus have the choice of using gnome, etc. Basically anything Apple can do Linux can do without needing to become tied to a single vendor such as apple.

true. my 846 seems to run kde 3.4 alright. also, i'd not want to pay $120 for "overly-shiny linux". kde is better than apple's interface. SuSE is getting up there isn't it? $100? not that i use it, but i guess they've got their openSuSE now.

I'd like to see BSD get some steps further. maily, just people making stuff for it. i've seen their (pcbsd) package manager and its insanely easy