The Invisible Linux
Summary
"The best operating system is one that is transparent to the user." - Rene Descartes
A strange kind of duality exists in the Linux world. The server side is growing, flourishing. The desktop side is stagnant. The main reason? Fragmentation. Porting software from one distribution to another - and even different versions of the same distribution - is not trivial. It takes significant effort and time, which hampers the success of the desktop platform. Recently, a challenger has appeared.
Distribution-agnostic package formats like Snap, Flatpak and AppImage have gained popularity in recent years, as they offer a simplified method of distribution, for developers and users alike. The underlying platform becomes less important, as people no longer need to think about the intricacies and dependencies in target platforms - they can just run applications.
This lectures discusses the future success formula for the Linux desktop - whereby it becomes more by being less.
Type
Talk
Language
English
Speaker
Igor Ljubuncic is a physicist by vocation and a Linux geek by profession. He currently works as a developer advocate, and comes with many years of experience in the industry, including medical, high-performance computing, data center, cloud, and hosting fields. To date, Igor’s portfolio includes 15 patents, 15 books, several open-source projects, numerous articles published in leading journals and magazines, and presentations at prestigious international conferences like LinuxCon, CloudOpen, OpenStack days, IEEE events, and others. In his free time, Igor writes car reviews, fantasy novels and manages his award-winning blog, dedoimedo.com.
