Just curious how positive/negative you are about future of UNIX'es...

I voted 2025. I think it will get more popular every year, but before every n00b on the planet is smart enough to use Unix... that will take ages...

is there a need to vote? OpenSource is already popular as it is at this time being.....

well you have to be clearer about the questions.... what does "popular" mean? M$ have got the strangehold on the desktop market, but *NIX has always had the lions share of the business market in terms of servers and such like. "more" also open to vast amounts of interpretation... the opinion single home user is not in the least bit comparable to that of a business running one large server...

*NIX / M$

I think the only market that *nix can't still compete fairly with M$ it's entertainment, in big extent because of the compelling choice of big game developer's who doesn't bring non-M$ versions of their products (maybe just for the apple's OS), the fact it's that developers have fear to develop to *nix community because (in their minds) it's a very non-standard consumer market, probably because their rule of thumb that says that if you don't pay for your OS, probably you don't pay for anything else

so the reason that *nix are unpopular, it's because their users aren't very targetable as a market, and that's one of the reason's why *nix are so good!

Hano

i voted 2020. I hope M$ breaks until that, and people will be choiceless unless they use Unix. And I hope people become smarter then.

Anyway... People are too stupid for Unix. They can't even cut and paste within a WIMP environ...

vfs.

What I meant with "popular", is when number of Linux users exeed number of Windows users.

When you create standarts for computing and get everyone obey them.

Sigh.... I dunno guys... For now the way things are going in this world (I mean globally, not just Open Source), it all looks pretty #%@$ed up to me.

It'll never happen. I could see somebody creating a new kind of OS based on UNIX that becomes wildly popular, but it can't possibly retain UNIX's command-line interface otherwise regular desktop users'll be scared away. Installing would have to be disgustingly simple (single-click install) and almost any hardware would have to be supported out of the box. What we have now in the way of UNIX-based systems just will never appeal to regular users. They don't wanna go through a command-line to install, they don't wanna re-compile (or even know what a compiler is) or hunt for drivers (they don't wanna know what drivers are either) or anything like that. But who gives a fsck (I actually spelled fsck )? Windows is for those who don't wanna know / worry about their PCs. Linux is better for doing anything beyond checking email & writing reports (ie running webservers, hosting important bussiness apps, programming , etc...). Just my opionion though.......

I think that more and more the command line/gui interfaces are becoming better and better. I don't think it will be long til everyone floats over to linux. There is plenty for the PC GUI lover, and tons for the get-your-hands-dirty Command Line Lover. It's like a half and half pizza with Ham and Pepperoni. Mmmmm, I'm Hungry.

2003

For the desktop, never. For the server, it already has for the past 20 years.