Tech Crystal Ball: Linux predictions for 2009
I know I'm setting myself up for disappointment here, but with the new year upon us, I thought it was time to dig out the inflatable crystal ball and look at some of the things the Linux world has to look forward to in 2009.
Android invasion
So far, we've seen just one mobile phone running Google's Android operating system -- the US-market T-Mobile G1 -- but 2009 looks set to unleash a veritable avalanche of new Android devices.
The first, aimed squarely at the Australian market, is the Kogan Agora. Kogan is a local company that rebrands hardware from Chinese manufacturers, and while it started with TVs, Android makes mobile phones a possibility, since the OS is open and ready to go.
Even so, integrating the OS and hardware isn't necessarily a straightforward task, so it'll be very interesting to see how the device turns out when it hits the market at the end of January.
Kogan probably won't have the Australian market to themselves for long, with Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, and HTC (makers of the G1), among others, due to release new models in 2009.
HTC has been putting out some awesome devices of late that have been hamstrung by the features and performance of the Windows Mobile platform that they run, so I can't wait to see what they can do with Android. The HTC Touch HD, with its 3.8" 800x480 display, looks especially promising.
We should see Linux running in a bunch of other devices, too.
Netbook sales continue to climb, with Linux taking a sizable chunk of the market, and at this year's CES, Palm revealed its new mobile phone, the Pre, which runs Linux beneath an incredibly slick, web-focused interface.
Open-source video
If you want to run a fast, modern video card under Linux today, you have to rely on proprietary video drivers to make it work, but AMD is slowly bucking the trend with its push for open-source drivers for its Radeon video cards.
The driver development project, called RadeonHD, got a major boost recently with the release of documentation and example code for the 3D engines on the very latest 4xxx-series Radeon cards.
It'll take a little while for the developers to digest the new information, but I'd expect to see a basic OpenGL driver for these new cards within the next few months.
I'm sure the new driver won't be as fast as AMD's proprietary "fglrx" driver, but it should be enough to handle desktop effects, and the new driver already supports some important features that the proprietary driver lacks, such as display hot-swapping.
Web improvements
Google's Chrome is out of beta on Windows, but there's no sign of the promised Linux or Mac OS X versions just yet. I'm sure they're coming though, one way or another -- if Google doesn't start to push them soon, then the open-source community could well step in and start porting the code itself.
It'll be great to have Chrome on Linux, even if I don't think it's quite the major leap up from Firefox that it's been marketed as, and it'll also be great to see how Firefox improves in the face of its new-found competition.
Beyond HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, a number of new technologies are aiming to make the web a richer place, including Adobe AIR, Sun's Java FX, and Microsoft's Silverlight. It's not clear how popular these technologies will become, if they catch on at all, but unlike the early days of Java and Flash, these platforms won't be leaving Linux behind.
Adobe has been providing excellent Linux support lately, with Flash 10 available for Linux and a 64-bit version of it in development, so it's not surprising that AIR is already supported under Linux.
Silverlight is to a degree as well, thanks to Moonlight an open-source version of Silverlight developed on top of the Mono .NET platform. That leaves Sun as the odd one out for now, but Linux support has been promised in upcoming versions of Java FX.
Those are three things that I'm looking forward to in the next year, though perhaps the most exciting events will be those that we don't know anything about yet. What are you looking forward to this year?
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