But if Ubuntu could make it with their touch model.... Whats stopping the other Linux distros? Of course they didn't but you get the point.

Lucky for us Ubuntu is not the only Linux distro They still have to walk the line, it wouldn't be hard to replace them.

About a zero chance.

For one thing, companies won't cotton to the idea of not being able to blame someone. Second is hardware makers. They want to blame someone too. If customers keep calling them about stuff they have no control over then they get scared.

Why I still use Android, I'll never know. That has to be the worst security model. A few million devices that will never get updated every year???

No. Unless suddenly the majority of computer users change their ways and decide to use software with little or no doucmentation, no UI consistency, and no effective support mechanism, along with spotty hardware support and the inability to run a lot of existing software.

What you think: in 500 years?

IMHO we only have to look at the smartphone explosion to get a whiff of the future. Most people have no idea what OpSys is on their phone(s). It is effectively an appliance. People spend far more time choosing brand/model/color in cars rather than engine and drive train. They just want to "turn the key, press the pedal and GO!. Now all this is referring to basic hardware and personal devices. I think only servers and supercomputers will care what is 'under the hood". Plus, even though the reports of it's dying appear to have been greatly exaggerated so far, I do think the death of the Desktop PC as we know it is inevitable and less than 20 years away. Of course, if (and likely, when) quantum computing or some fundamental paradigm shift occurs this could happen faster. I sincerely doubt we would recognize the world of computing after the 20 year mark. In 50 years, it will be entirely alien to anyone reading this in the present.

Since FreeBSD is exploding on PS4,... many systems, I think that too that UNIX or maybe too Linux will cover the PC areas. However, MS and Gates will use *BSD into MS Operating systems to make their machine better. Since MS has excellent developers it is likely that MS will be always a winner in the domain of desktop, professional (office,...) and home Softwares.

Netflix runs on FreeBSD.

FreeBSD and OpenBSD are what I run on all my boxen, with FreeBSD what I've used as my main desktop OS for the past 12 years and what I like best of any OS I've ever tired.

NO as soon as redhat sells out to M$ every body will jump on the windows band wagon

When MS will take Redhat and some part of Linux, then, people will realize how BSD was good!

Finally Linux will look like MS Windows, because Windows developers will develop System (Init,...) that will make sure that Linux operating systems works (better) but basically does same as MS operating system, driven by business & MS. It has already started.

Linux or *BSD has already practically replaced MS Windows... just not how some might have envisaged.

~ 20 years ago it was desktop PCs and laptops, before and just after the "internet revolution".

You now have far more people online, but they're using phones and tablets and even chromebooks, etc. These are mostly based on Linux (Android) or *BSD (Darwin/iOS).

Linux and *BSD are out there, but just not in the form of a typical and traditional desktop OS on an x86 desktop/laptop PC, using X.org and window managers, etc. They dominate when it comes to embedded systems and in the network appliance and server markets.

Windows still dominates in the platform it was originally designed around and for the usages it has always fulfilled (office/productivity and games as well as in certain scenarios where very specific bespoke software is used, e.g. medical or defence).

But even in gaming Windows has lost heavily to the consoles, MS acknowledged this years ago with the development of xbox. And with medical and defence applications it's not a given that MS will always hold onto those markets.

And consoles from Nintendo and Sony are nowadays powered by FreeBSD based operating systems.

So yes, MS still holds onto the market it has always held onto and is still developing for - x86 desktop - but that market is shrinking.

Personally I think Linux users should stop fretting over "market share" and just "use the software". It really doesn't matter if Linux captures the Windows/x86 desktop market. It might have been a pipe dream, at best, in 2000, nowadays it's just irrelevant.

This is downright nutty. Ubuntu's Unity interface is (by necessity, because the whole idea of Unity is an architected, totally integrated UX to appeal to non-computer people) not very customizable, but you could just not use it and install the desktop environment you want, or use one of the forks that come with different environments built in. It's still GNU/Linux, the tools all do the same things and Mark Shuttleworth cannot make the GNU GPL go away no matter how much money he has.

Ubuntu's "touch model" was a complete failure because they were late to the market and everybody kept using Android for touch devices. It was such a failure, in fact, that Unity is now dead, GNOME is replacing it, and from Ubuntu 18.x on Unity will never threaten your freedom ever again.

Well in that case we'll all be living in our Mars colonies experiencing VR teledildonic encounters indistinguishable from reality on our quantum computers whose wiring is made of room-temperature superconductors, or something. But I certainly don't think the GNU/Linux desktop experience will ever catch on among ordinary users. And frankly, from your FUD about "untalented" programmers designing Linux software, you don't actually want it to.

Go read the text of the GNU GPL. The copyright claims of the authors over the Linux kernel and the GNU userland utilities, and the language of the GPL, prevent them from being used, in whole or in part, to make proprietary software. It's illegal. I suppose systemd could be licensed under a proprietary license but I don't believe for a moment that Lennart Poettering would do it and it would cause all the distro maintainers to go back to init to protect their distros from being screwed over by this hypothetical Evil!Poettering.

E: Or they could just fork the last free version of systemd and call it systeme because licensing it not retroactive.

https://ubports.com/

Ubuntu Touch is not really dead or failed yet.

Can you walk into your service provider's store right now and buy an Ubuntu Touch phone? If not, Ubuntu Touch has no hope of gaining any significant market share. Android was first, Android took over the non-Apple smartphone market, and Ubuntu Touch is in the same position as DR-DOS was--a product that may or may not be technically superior to its rival (Android in one case, MS-DOS in the other), but nobody cares. Even Microsoft can't break into the market, and they've got gigantic amounts of capital and partial integration with desktop Windows, which has a vastly higher market share than desktop Linux of any kind. Ubuntu for phones was DOA, and if it wasn't DOA they wouldn't be scrapping Unity and going back to a pure desktop interface for mainline Ubuntu builds.

And I suppose you could flash your phone with it, but many Android phone users, including myself, use phones they don't even own. Mine is the property of Sprint and I just lease it. They would not be pleased if I tried to install a different OS on it. Home PCs are almost always owned outright by theiir users, who are free to do what they will with them.

When he disabled root login and made people use sudo for everything, Ubuntu became Linuxish. He cannot get rid of the GPL (whether the GPL is good or bad is another issue), but there is nothing stopping him from neutering other Linux programmes and applications to also make them Linuxish. Personally, with the failure of his vision, I would be surprised if Shuttleworth does not terminate Ubuntu soon. Licences will be irrelevant then.

Hey, guess what? You can just do this:

sudo gpasswd root <password>
sudo gpasswd -u root

And now root is unlocked. Root is disabled by default because it's less secure than sudo and makes it easier for raw novices to break something (since with sudo you have to make the decision with every command to execute it as root, but su or a root login allows you to do root stuff willy-nilly), but anyone who isn't a raw novice can get it back immediately. Why would Mark Shuttleworth terminate Ubuntu? He already has around a thousand times the money he'll ever need, and he probably enjoys spending it on a project that benefits others (which still makes him a Bourgeois Capitalist Pig, but one more acceptable than say, the Koch brothers). And if he did, the community would fork it and carry on without him because there is too much momentum behind Ubuntu. Hell, there already is a fork of Ubuntu that is almost identical to Ubuntu but without Canonical's direct support: Linux Mint. This all sounds like conspiracy theories to me. Mark Shuttleworth is not putting chemtrails in your operating system.