Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions) [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
January 3, 2012

Welcome to 2012. This is the first LWN Weekly Edition of the year, and that can only mean one thing: it is time for your editor to go out on a limb and make a number of predictions for the coming year that, by the end of the year, will look thoroughly clueless and misguided. Even your editor can foresee, though, that it is going to be an interesting and highly political year.

On the political front, it is a fairly safe bet that the mobile patent wars will get worse. The participants in this battle appear to be tooling up for an extensive and protracted fight, and there seems to be a steady supply of new companies (British Telecom, for example) piling on in the hope of gaining a piece of the pie for themselves. Things may reach a point where it becomes impossible to market handsets or tablets in some parts of the world. One could hope that a paralyzed mobile market would suggest to lawmakers that the patent system is broken, and that those lawmakers would respond by reforming said system. Alas, a more likely outcome (though not in 2012) is the formation of a patent pool under strong "encouragement" by governments that ends the fights and establishes the positions of a small number of large players at the expense of new entrants. How free software will fare in such a world is far from clear.

The fight for a free Internet will also continue in full force in 2012. Your editor predicts that the current round of net-censorship bills in the US ("SOPA" and its variants) will be defeated. But the forces behind such laws never quit and eventually something distasteful will likely make it through the legislative process.

Laws like SOPA and governmental attempts to control the net in general seem to be causing concern beyond the small group of people who habitually worry about such things. As people wake up to threats to their freedom, they will see that free software is on the front line in the fight against censorship and repression. Hopefully that will result in a better awareness of the value of freedom. But it carries a risk that free software could find itself associated with piracy, crackers, and criminals. We could have an interesting public relations problem to deal with.

On the distributions front, it seems evident that Red Hat will have another great year. Various articles on the net are suggesting that 2012 will be its first $1 billion year, and that the company is looking to hire 1,000 more people. Red Hat has been helped by the growth of Linux in general, by its dominant position in the market, and, arguably, by the difficulties experienced by distributions like CentOS. It has become reasonably clear that, if one really needs the committed support that comes with RHEL, one really needs to just pay for RHEL. That said, the RHEL-rebuild distributions will certainly not be going away in the coming year; neither will the other commercial distributors.

But we will see more focused competition between distributors, with more attention paid to the addition of unique features to differentiate their offerings. There was a long period where most Linux distributions were about the same; the biggest differences were to be found in areas like package management, and they were easy to adjust to. Now we see distributions like Ubuntu focusing on their own desktop experience. Oracle seems to be trying to differentiate with more current kernels and an early move to technologies like Btrfs. Projects like GNOME are increasingly showing a desire to become distributions in their own right. Android and WebOS show the extent to which an ostensibly "Linux" system can differ from its peers. In a sense, the long-feared fragmentation of the Linux system is happening. It is good in that we have a diverse set of projects exploring ways to make a better operating system. But that diversity also threatens to scatter our efforts to the point that nothing ever becomes truly good enough to find widespread success.

Along those lines, Linux Mint will have a reckoning with reality in 2012. This distribution has gained a lot of attention with its approach to desktop design. But it remains a minor distribution, and, at some point, it can only become clear that the resources to maintain multiple distributions (Linux Mint 12, Mint Debian, Mint 11 LXDE, etc.), the MATE GNOME2 fork and the "Cinnamon" GNOME 3 fork simply are not there. Users will also eventually begin to wonder about things like security updates. Your editor fully expects Linux Mint to be a strong and popular project at the end of the year, but it will need to focus its efforts somewhat.

On a related topic, the GNOME3 wars will be long forgotten by the end of the year. Users will have either made their peace with GNOME3 or they will have moved on to something else. The growing availability of GNOME Shell extensions should help considerably. The various attempts to fork the GNOME environment or maintain GNOME2 will mostly fade away.

The fight for the attention of mobile device manufacturers will, instead, continue through 2012. Android is well established, of course, and it is hard to see that situation changing much. But there should be room for another free platform. Quite a few projects - GNOME, KDE, Tizen, WebOS, Boot to Gecko, etc. - would be delighted to occupy that space and be shipped on real products. They cannot all succeed, though. It would be a shame if they were to all fail and leave that space to Windows (which will make a big push on Nokia's handsets) in 2012.

Speaking of Android, mainline kernels will be able to run Android's user space by the end of the year - more or less. That is not the same as saying that all of the Android kernel code will make it into the mainline; some of it may be replaced by code with equivalent functionality. But a lot of hardware vendors are increasingly concerned with Android kernels, not mainline kernels, so the interest in closing the gap between the two will only grow.

The gap between Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice will also grow. Over the year it will become increasingly clear that LibreOffice has captured the initiative and the developer energy in this space. LibreOffice will continue to improve while Apache OpenOffice struggles with the replacement of GPL-licensed code, adapting to "the Apache Way," and trying to produce a release based on a year-old beta. There are some good people working on Apache OpenOffice, but they are swimming against the current.

The kernel's "ARM mess" will be a memory by the end of the year as the effort to consolidate code and clean up subarchitecture implementations continues. The ARM tree was a victim of its own success; vendors actually listened to the pleas to work upstream and contributed vast amounts of code. Now that the problem is being addressed, the "victim" part will go away, leaving only the success; ARM will take its place as one of the primary Linux architectures, even if it does not become the primary architecture in 2012.

The security mess will not go away, unfortunately. Our widespread code repositories and distribution sites present an attractive target to anybody wishing to compromise large numbers of machines. Targeted attacks against these sites can only increase, and some of them will be successful. Our community as a whole is going to have to learn to take security much more seriously. That is starting to happen in some projects, but not in others. With luck, we will not wake up one morning to learn that we have distributed trojaned code to vast numbers of users - but there is no guarantee that we will be so lucky.

On a happier note, a longstanding request from LWN users will be satisfied in 2012: the site will finally use the UTF-8 encoding and will not be limited to the Latin-1 character set. So, soon, it may be possible to find text like "أي شخص يعتقد التوقعات في هذا الموقع هو أحمق" or "ನಿಮ್ಮ ಸಂಪಾದಕ ಒಂದು ಕಾಗದದ ಚೀಲ ಹೊರಗೆ ದಾರಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರೋಗ್ರಾಂ ಸಾಧ್ಯವಾಗಲಿಲ್ಲ" or "明けましておめでとうございます" embedded directly within an LWN article without the need for obnoxious HTML escapes. Your editor predicts that change will come sometime quite soon.

Finally, your editor predicts that the world will not end in 2012. The Mayans, he claims, were worse at this prediction game than he is - and those who would draw conclusions from the Mayan calendar are even worse yet. Despite all the coming challenges, the free software world will not end either; instead, we will finish the year with more strength and momentum than we had at the beginning. It will be great fun to watch.

to post comments

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 3, 2012 23:17 UTC (Tue) by yann.morin.1998 (guest, #54333) [Link] (8 responses)

Happy New Year!

As usual, a good article by our esteemed editor! :-)

I like readings those predictions. There's always some background to back them up, so they are far from meaningless, even when in the end, some do not happen, or are weirdly distorted by an unforesseable twist of events.

> So, soon, it may be possible to find text like [...]

Provided proper fonts are installed, of course! ;-)

Live long and prosper! ;-)

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 14:20 UTC (Wed) by leemgs (guest, #24528) [Link] (4 responses)

Happy New Year.
In korean, "새해 복 많이 받으세요." hehe

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 16:12 UTC (Wed) by yann.morin.1998 (guest, #54333) [Link] (3 responses)

> 새해 복 많이 받으세요.

Now, I can read that! ;-)

I installed all available fonts in Debian. More than 800MiB of fonts installed. Geez... :-)

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 20:52 UTC (Wed) by sciurus (guest, #58832) [Link] (1 responses)

"apt-get install xfonts-unifont ttf-unifont" was good enough for me.

Unicode fonts

Posted Jan 12, 2012 18:00 UTC (Thu) by midg3t (guest, #30998) [Link]

Thank you! I've always been embarrassed to be running such a modern OS and yet only see a tiny subset of Unicode characters on the internet.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 7, 2012 20:10 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

hehe, fun to hear that as my mobile phone (aging N900) has no problems at all...

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 17:27 UTC (Wed) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (2 responses)

Speaking of fonts, anyone have a Mayan font? :-)

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 9, 2012 18:46 UTC (Mon) by lambda (subscriber, #40735) [Link] (1 responses)

The Mayan alphabet isn't yet well enough understood to be standardized in Unicode. They can read most inscriptions by now, but don't yet have a good handle on what are separate characters and what are different ways of writing the same character to do a good proposal for a Unicode encoding. There is a tentative reservation of space for Mayan hieroglyph in the SMP, but there isn't even yet a tentative proposal to fill it out.

Beyond that, rendering Mayan will be a royal pain in the ass, and would require either special rendering support or an advanced font technology like AAT or Graphite, neither of which is widely available. Mayan hieroglyphs are written in blocks of two to four glyphs, with particular layout rules, and sometimes two glyphs were merged into one. These blocks were arranged in pairs of two side by side reading right to left, and those pairs laid out in vertical columns from top to bottom, which were themselves laid out left to right.

Given that Mayan hieroglyphs were either carved in stone for ceremonial purposes, or written as calligraphy, there are many artistic flourishes and a lack of standardization that a printing press brings. So, while it will probably eventually be encoded in Unicode, it will take a lot of research to decode all of the glyphs and become certain enough of the structure to agree on a standardized encoding.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 13, 2012 17:39 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

And on December 22nd, everyone will precipitously stop giving a crap anyway, so...

Ob: http://xkcd.com/998/

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 3, 2012 23:23 UTC (Tue) by meyert (subscriber, #32097) [Link] (7 responses)

Regarding this mayans stuff: http://bizarrocomic.blogspot.com/2009/12/countdown-to-cat...

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 3:23 UTC (Wed) by leews (subscriber, #4690) [Link] (6 responses)

Quite frankly,

Many financial programs should be starting to malfunction round about now due to time_t, if not earlier. Remember that mortgages are calculated up to 20 or 30 years, typically 25, and 2038 - 2012 = 26 years!

Oops: your mortgage expires in 1901. <crash>

Happy New Year!
WS

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 12:51 UTC (Wed) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link] (5 responses)

How many of these financial programs really use time_t rather than a custom hand-rolled time/date system of some sort?

Besides, there's already a simple working solution to the 2038 problem: run a 64-bit system, which uses a 64-bit time_t...

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 19:52 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (4 responses)

Besides, there's already a simple working solution to the 2038 problem: run a 64-bit system, which uses a 64-bit time_t...

You will also have to make sure you use a file system that stores time stamps on the disk with better than 32-bit date range! The older ones don't.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 20:34 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

you won't need to worry about that until you need to store a file with a timestamp >2038. (unless you think that financial companies are tracking things by filesystem dates)

in any case, with 30 year mortgages, this is an issue that they would have started to run into in 2008, so I'm pretty confident that it's not really a problem.

The end of the word in 2038

Posted Jan 5, 2012 16:54 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

I wonder if there will be embedded Linux (or BSD) systems running some critical function, which nobody has updated for decades. Or maybe updated to patch something at the application level, but nobody realises the OS contains a time bomb...

OK, now I sound like trying to replay the Y2K scare. But Y2K was a non-event because the patching efforts succeeded on time. This had the side-effect of making the people worrying about it look silly. But would it have got fixed without them? Doomsday scenarios got the attention of bosses, making them allocate resources for fixing.

The end of the word in 2038

Posted Jan 24, 2012 12:10 UTC (Tue) by Jonno (guest, #49613) [Link]

Well, I'm currently working on implementing a new embedded control system, that is intended to be used in production for the next 15-20 years, with each manufactured machine having a projected lifespan of 15-20 years. The software will run on a 32bit ARM CPU using time_t for all time operations.

All the engineers on the project know this will not work out in the long run, but the managers either don't care or don't understand...

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 9, 2012 16:09 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

I personally doubt mortgages are computed with time_t directly, for similar reasons to why there's so much interest in decimal floating point.

Mortgages are generally built around months. It seems to me the three pieces of information you're going to most likely need to compute an amortization schedule are:

Days in the a given month
Days in the a given year
Day number within a given month/year

That gives you enough information to compute interest compounding given partial first/last months (ie. a prorated month at either end to align with a fixed payment schedule), and slightly varying interest month to month to compensate for varying month sizes. And, even then that's not strictly necessary, since I believe you are also allowed to just take the annual rate and divide it by 12 to get a monthly rate. I think I've seen it done both ways.

That sort of math is a P.I.T.A. with time_t. Quick: How do you get from one month to the next with time_t? How do you find days in month? Days in year?

It's slightly better with struct tm, but only slightly. This is where it gets a little more interesting, since you could bounce back and forth between struct tm and time_t. But, that seems unnecessary because I can't see how it'd buy you much. With fairly simple logic, you can figure out days-in-month once you have the correct year without ever touching a time_t.

All that said, it would surprise me at all if the date management was built around these low level UNIX structures. It seems more likely, as others have said, that there's hand-rolled date code floating around in many cases. The rest probably uses date management libraries that also don't use time_t directly.

Will Debian freeze wheezy?

Posted Jan 4, 2012 0:56 UTC (Wed) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

Tell us, please!

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 2:52 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (12 responses)

given how many people are still complaining about KDE 4.0 I think you are overly optimistic in thinking that the Gnome 3 wars will fade away that quickly.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 3:35 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (9 responses)

My quick take on it is that GNOME 3 was a much better engineered release than KDE 4 was, peoples complaints are mostly that they don't like the intended behavior, not that it's crashy or buggy or horribly broken (except for those who snarkilly state that any behavior they dislike is "broken"). I was kind of surprised on how many technical people were using stock GNOME 2 rather than the crazy, tricked out environments that Linux used to be known for. Maybe some of those users will come back in a couple of years or maybe they'll stay with their preferred environment but a lot of them have already moved. Now that GNOME 3 is released its back on the path of slow steady improvement

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 3:52 UTC (Wed) by horen (guest, #2514) [Link]

As with KDE4, Gnome3 suffers from "one step forward, two steps back". Given the already years-long existence and development of Gnome, I was horrified (but not surprised) that -- once again -- a major component (if not the major component) of a user's desktop was released (yes!) "broken".

It could -- and should -- have been otherwise.

Further Gnome3 improvement might well be "slow [and] steady", but if nothing else, providing a consistent (read: across distributions/versions) UI is no less important than kernel functions, etc., and many Gnome2 users will seek solace elsewhere.

I predict that Linux Mint's "Cinnamon" UI will become a welcome and worthy rival for Gnome3.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 11:22 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (2 responses)

I was kind of surprised on how many technical people were using stock GNOME 2 rather than the crazy, tricked out environments that Linux used to be known for.

Same reason I stopped rolling my own kernels: that stuff looks less appealing at 30-35 than it did at 20-25.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 14:18 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

And there is much less need to then in the past.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 7, 2012 20:15 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

true. I dont play with styles or backgrounds anymore. but I still DO optimize my desktop for my usepatterns and as I'm far to busy to be willing to wwork around an unflexible interface all the time I find myself using my slow and cramped laptop with KDE more than my big, fast desktop with GNOME. unless something gets better soon I face a choice between learning to write Javascript code or go back to KDE. and I won't learn to code.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 11:29 UTC (Wed) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link]

> I was kind of surprised on how many technical people were using stock GNOME 2 rather than the crazy, tricked out environments that Linux used to be known for.

Most 'technical people' I know are busy doing technical work of their own ;-) and would rather have a simple desktop that is good enough and that gets out of the way.

AFAICT people will only bother with 'crazy & tricked stuff' when the mainstream offerings are not good enough for their own individual requirements.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 16:38 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (3 responses)

I was kind of surprised on how many technical people were using stock GNOME 2 rather than the crazy, tricked out environments that Linux used to be known for.

Maybe that's a sign that GNOME's approach of providing sensible defaults that shouldn't require as much customization was the right one. Once you stop needing to customize every detail to get to a working configuration, bothering to do it just to make things look perfect loses its attractiveness. And when everyone's configurations start converging on the defaults, you get the added advantage that you can use somebody else's desktop, or a newly set-up account that you haven't spend hours tweaking, and still get the behaviour you've come to expect.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 16:57 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

Agreed, that was certainly true for me. Little wonder then that capriciously changing those defaults might cause great waves of displeasure.

Also, the ability to comfortably use someone else's desktop only works if the features of that desktop are relatively stable from release to release. (Gnome3 and Unity, I'm looking at you...)

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 5, 2012 1:06 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

Little wonder then that capriciously changing those defaults might cause great waves of displeasure.

I'm sure the coders would tell you to s/capriciously/carefully and after extensive study/, no matter how you feel about the changes. I remember the massive storms of protest with default spatial Nautilus, for example, where the UI people told us that spatial was better and we were all wrong to want browser-style, and they had the studies to back it up. On the other hand, I've been generally impressed by some of the intrusive changes I thought I would find most annoying switching from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3.

For example, I expected to hate the full screen activities menu. Instead, I've found that I use it for tasks that are inherently disruptive, so taking over the whole screen isn't as annoying as I expected. Meanwhile, it makes good use of the full-screen space, so it really is easier to use than a launcher menu, task bar, or workspace switcher. And it goes away completely when I'm done with it, so I have less clutter and more space on my desktop the rest of the time. Maybe the guys who said it was a better way of doing things and wouldn't let me use my old setup actually had a clue of what they were talking about.

Also, the ability to comfortably use someone else's desktop only works if the features of that desktop are relatively stable from release to release.

Now here you're getting into to some murky waters. A new major version of a big project is going to have some big changes in it, and not all of those are going to get it right on the .0 release. Fixing your design mistakes means changing user visible behavior, while leaving them means allowing the mistakes to go uncorrected. Neither one is a perfect choice, but I'm inclined to accept that fixing the mistakes is the better course, especially for something that is intended to serve as a stable platform for a long time.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 12, 2012 13:27 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

>> I'm sure the coders would tell you to s/capriciously/carefully and after extensive study/, no matter how you feel about the changes. I remember the massive storms of protest with default spatial Nautilus, for example, where the UI people told us that spatial was better and we were all wrong to want browser-style, and they had the studies to back it up. <<

Yet they had to finally revert the spatial mode, so what's the value of those studies?

>> A new major version of a big project is going to have some big changes in it <<

Not necessarily in the UI.. And users would be perfectly happy with only minor versions, it's developers who get bored not users!

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 13, 2012 17:42 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Enough people, apparently, that I am told that SuSE 12.actually0butwecalledit1soyou'dinstallit actually includes KDE3.5 as a mainline selection again, and someone is maintaining the packages.

That's enough to override my distaste for their flat-out lie on the version number and make me give it a try anyway.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 18, 2012 0:51 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Being one of the ones who you might be claiming is still doing that, I'd say no, I'm not still complaining about kde-4.0. (This written as a user currently on 4.7.97 aka 4.8-rc2, having run both the 4.8 betas and both rcs and looking forward to 4.8 full release in a few days, plus I'm a regular on the kde lists, and have no other desktop installed, or even the backup xterm and twm that would normally be installed in case kde fails, if I didn't have them masked as I don't use them, so I'm certainly no kde basher just for the bashing!)

If 4.0 had been the only problem or even the major one, while it would have been a bit of an issue at the time, I think few /would/ still be talking about it now.

Rather, the bigger problem wasn't the mistake of releasing 4.0 as 4.0 before even the devs considered it ready for normal use, but instead, the dual problems of claiming 4.2 WAS ready for normal use when it was more like late alpha quality (and I routinely run prerelease software as noted above, so I know where of I speak!), many basic features still unimplemented, as the devs were still saying in bugs.kde.org at the same time it was claimed to be ready for normal use, *AND* dropping support for the only still actually working kde, 3.5.x (with x=9 or 10) after a very high profile claim that there'd be support as long as there were users.

4.3 was only beta quality, 4.4 rc quality, and 4.5, at least the later versions of it (4.5.4+), FINALLY release quality, what /should/ have been 4.0. Never-the-less, version numbers don't matter much as long as the software is working and a working version supported, and not hitting release quality until 4.5 would have been no big deal had they not claimed 4.2 was release quality, and worse yet, dropped support for the REAL release quality 3.x with 4.2, thus leaving a nearly three year support gap (twice yearly releases 4.2-4.5, plus monthly releases to 4.5.4) with NO properly working kde!

Of course the story is somewhat repeating now with kmail users due to its akonadification, but at least they skipped the 4.5 release series entirely and continued supporting kdepim 4.4.x with minor updates to 4.7, and 4.4.11 or whatever is still workable with 4.7 and according to testers still using it, 4.8-prereleases. (I'm running the 4.8 prereleases as mentioned above, but have switched to claws-mail here.)

If it had been ONLY 4.0, and they'd not have claimed 4.2 was ready for normal use and continued to support 3.x thru 4.5 or so, it would have been a MUCH smoother transition, and people /would/ have probably forgiven the minor mistakes, which after all, DO happen from time to time, by now. But the compounding and continuing to insist on it, putting their fingers in their ears and yelling nah nah nah when all the users were telling them no, even 4.3 (and to a lessor extent 4.4) wasn't ready, and that they really needed continued support for the 3.x versions that actually worked, THAT was the REAL problem, and it lasted YEARS beyond 4.0!

While I'm not a gnome user, it seems to me that while gnome 3.0 started out much the same way, devs and users apparently talking past each other, they actually admitted the problems and by 3.1, did the extensions thing (reversing the earlier purist positions to implement it as they did), and things were already clearing up. Plus, the community at least had learned something from the early kde4 fiasco, and when gnome3 started doing the same thing, the community was *MUCH* faster to respond with mate and cinnamon, etc as well as with users switching to other desktops faster. But the kde4 lessons combined with the faster community response got the message across faster to the gnome3 folks as well, and the two and a half year plus support gap that kde4 had simply didn't have a chance to occur with gnome3, as the response on ALL sides filled in that gap *MUCH* faster. It might be argued that it was six months or a year, but that's FAR smaller than the nearly three years with kde4, because after kde4, the community simply wasn't going to tolerate a 2.5+ year gap, and made that EXTREMELY clear MUCH quicker in the process than they had with kde4.

IMO...
Duncan

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 3:38 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (10 responses)

Тест, тест. Один, два, три. Говорит Москва.

A note for the future :)

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 3:57 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (9 responses)

Now we just need a little 'translate' button next to each comment which deduces the source language and concerts to the reader's language .... using open source tools of course :-)

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 8:30 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (7 responses)

Oh, this one was easy: "Test, test. Een, twee, drie. Hier spreekt Moskou.'

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 8:47 UTC (Wed) by iq-0 (subscriber, #36655) [Link] (6 responses)

Or for our english readers: 'Test, test. One, two, three. Here speaks Moskou.'

Not everybody speaks dutch either ;-)

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 9:27 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I'd say "Moscow speaking" is both more idiomatic and closer to the original.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 10:20 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (4 responses)

> Not everybody speaks dutch either ;-)

How's that different from German? :->

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 10:50 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (3 responses)

A language is a dialect with its own navy.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 16:13 UTC (Wed) by horen (guest, #2514) [Link] (2 responses)

A language is a dialect with an army and navy

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 16:51 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

Gosh, there's a Wikipedia page for everything... I first heard this quote when studying descriptive and comparative linguistics in Leyden, some twenty years ago. It was attributed to Meillet then and there.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 18:33 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

"Secure this building"

To the Army: Post a guard at the doors

To the Navy: Turn off the lights and lock the doors

To the Marines: Assault the building, killing or capturing anyone inside

To the Air Force: Secure a 5 year lease with an option to buy.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 13, 2012 17:24 UTC (Fri) by cgray4 (guest, #11599) [Link]

Have a look at Ubiquity, which is a Firefox extension that does almost exactly what you want. Select the text, hit Alt-Space, and type tr (for translate). Unfortunately, it's not so actively developed any more, but it still works really well for me.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 8:56 UTC (Wed) by heineg (subscriber, #45427) [Link]

Happy new year!

I am missing a prediction when the (complete) Preempt-RT patch will be part of the mainline kernel.

As usual by the end of the year?? ;-)

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 10:12 UTC (Wed) by amit (subscriber, #1274) [Link] (9 responses)

ನಿಮ್ಮ ಸಂಪಾದಕ ಒಂದು ಕಾಗದದ ಚೀಲ ಹೊರಗೆ ದಾರಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರೋಗ್ರಾಂ ಸಾಧ್ಯವಾಗಲಿಲ್ಲ translates to "your editior one letter bag outside on the road program not possible". I don't want to predict anything from that.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 14:13 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (8 responses)

Not being a Kannada speaker, I clearly didn't write that myself. I had to rely on Google translate, which can be used to get back to something close to the original intent...

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 17:29 UTC (Wed) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link] (6 responses)

Fascinating that google translates its own nonsense back much more understandably than a native speaker.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 21:13 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (5 responses)

Google Translate is absolutely useless for anything else than producing blank stares and/or giggles at the receiving end. At least with a reasonable dictionary you can piece together one word at a time and give a better chance of guessing the intended meaning.

In order to get a feeling what Translate produces, try using it on closed loop of languages (ie. going back to your native) and see. That's roughly what you intend to send. (Yes, I've received auto translated texts more than one time. The first time I could at least have a good laugh about it.)

Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Posted Jan 4, 2012 21:38 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

In order to get a feeling what Translate produces, try using it on closed loop of languages (ie. going back to your native) and see.

This is deeply flawed idea.

That's roughly what you intend to send.

Not really. Every translation loses piece of original. No matter who does it. After few translations you can get entirely different text. If you are doing machine translation then it'll lose some of the original meaning and get some random noise instead. If it's human translation then it'll keep about the same amount of original but the rest will not be a random nose - it'll include personality of people who did the translation.

The great example is the tale of "Ein Gleiches" which was translated in 1902 to Japanese, then in 1911 to French and then shortly after that back to German.

Original:
Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh'
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest Du auch.

Tranlation of translation of translation:
Stille ist im Pavillon aus Jade
Krähen fliegen stumm
Zu beschneiten Kirschbäumen im Mondlicht.
Ich sitze
Und weine.

The very fact that the last German translator had no idea that he's back-translating quite famous work of Goethe should say you something...

Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Posted Jan 5, 2012 12:11 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (2 responses)

Asbolutely, the perfect translation does not exist unless the target language is a pure transcription of the source. But those theoretical exercises are far from what Google Translate produces, which is often unparseable to a native speaker and you would be hard pressed to even guess at the intent of the original text.

A reasonably intelligent human with a dictionary fares much better. Your German example, while being a clear example of the difficulties involved, is still parseble in the end.

Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Posted Jan 8, 2012 20:52 UTC (Sun) by csawtell (guest, #986) [Link] (1 responses)

I can't agree with the above with reference to Google Translate in Spanish to English translations. My experience is that the English result is perfectly readable. My immediate reaction was "Goodness me, this seems to actually work". From time to time, the result might be a bit stilted, but still perfectly readable and understandable. I was very surprised.

Unfortunately it's not so simple...

Posted Jan 9, 2012 20:29 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

I get the impression that machine translation is still one of those cases where the results are highly variable. It's better when languages are more closely related and where they've put more effort into manually tuning the results. So a pair of reasonably closely related languages that get translated between a lot, like English and Spanish, are likely to produce much better results than two languages from different language groups, like English and Japanese, or a rarely translated pair, like Scots and Faroese.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 18, 2012 1:06 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

FWIW, Google-translated "English" signs seem to be a popular thing in China, apparently become "English" lettering is seen as hip even for people without a clue what the words actually say, with the often comical results.

This has become one of several regularly reoccurring themes on languagelog, which I discovered about a year ago and immediately added a feed subscription to my feed-reader for.

Easy to remember version http://languagelog.com , tho that redirects to languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu (University of Pennsylvania Language department hosts, but a number of linguists regularly contribute including Victor Mair, the specialist in the various forms of Chinese).

I find the language debates there generally pleasant and often fascinating and/or entertaining diversion from the world of freedomware technology that I otherwise spend so much time in. =:^)

Duncan

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 10, 2012 0:16 UTC (Tue) by sumanah (guest, #59891) [Link]

My parents would be ashamed to see me sounding out the Kannada letter by letter, but they might be grimly amused that I at least got "ಚೀಲ" ("cheela" or "bag"). In any case, it was a nice frill to see Kannada in my LWN. Thanks. :-)

Signed, a US-born daughter of Kannadiga parents

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 4, 2012 14:49 UTC (Wed) by leemgs (guest, #24528) [Link] (14 responses)

Dear Jonathan Corbet,
Thank you for your posting of good articles about Linux and
Open-source for a long time. I hope that you will support
web pages (e.g: http://m.lwn.net) for smart phone users
additionally. Starting this year, I think that many subscribers
will read your valuable articles of lwn.net gradually.
Thanks again.

Regards,
Geunsik Lim,
Samsung Electronics.

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 4, 2012 16:50 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (13 responses)

Hi Geunsik, what phone do you use? Mobile Safari and Chrome reflow the articles so they perfectly wrap to the screen width. LWN's pages are fast and light. I don't see m.lwn.net being able to improve on the exerpience much! I read lwn all the time on an older Android handset.

Commenting isn't pretty of course... The 2-mile-wide text entry box triggers quite a few scroll bugs, and scrubbing back and forth to try to read what you wrote is reminiscent of 40 column terminal days. It would be nice to see that improved.

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 4, 2012 21:48 UTC (Wed) by dambacher (subscriber, #1710) [Link] (1 responses)

yes this works if you customize lwn to wrap words at less than 40 letters...

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 4, 2012 22:01 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

though you cannot set it below 20!! What's with that?

Why even have a minimum?

If m.lwn.net simply got rid of the minimum and placed the left column above the main body rather than beside it, it would better for small-screen browsers (not all of which run on Android or iOS).

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 4, 2012 22:52 UTC (Wed) by Velmont (guest, #46433) [Link]

Yep. We don't need m.lwn.net, only a couple of extra media queries will do it!

I read LWN from Opera Mobile all the time. Works very well. Only need the media query to default to a sensible zoom level, and move the sidebar to the bottom.

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 5, 2012 2:00 UTC (Thu) by leemgs (guest, #24528) [Link] (9 responses)

I am using Android based smart phone(e.g: galaxy S, galaxy S2) currently.
Although LWN's pages are fast/light technically using multi-touchscreen of phone,
I think that the subscribers need suitable pages
for better readability because of a small screen size of smart phone
compared to a screen size of desktop pc.

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 5, 2012 2:17 UTC (Thu) by leemgs (guest, #24528) [Link] (8 responses)

For example, http://m.lwn.net will get a lot of readers/subscribers
in mobile environments according to smart phone(e.g:iphone,
android phone) users. :)

We already are learning from Facebook/Google+.

*LWN
http://m.lwn.net/ - * not support :(
http://www.lwn.net/

*Facebook
http://m.facebook.com/
http://www.facebook.com/

*Google Plus
https://plus.google.com
http://www.google.com/mobile/+/

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 5, 2012 5:35 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

having to go to a different URL to get something suitable for your device is a bug, not a feature.

If LWN added some detection to detect mobile browsers, and then converted the left bar to something else, it would be far better than almost any other site when accessed on a mobile device, no need for a completely separate USL (and the implied separate site served by it)

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 5, 2012 8:54 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (2 responses)

Of course it's not a bug. We type www in front of every domain name to tell the browser we want the Web page and not an FTP site, right?

(Yes, I'm being sarcastic.)

Also... m.lwn.net doesn't exist so far as I can tell. I'm getting DNS failures on both my desktop (Comcast) and phone (Sprint). LWN has always been a pain in the ass to read and use on a phone in my experience, especially when it comes to commenting (iOS devices tend to get especially very confused and lose the scrollbars in the comment fields). If there's a better way to use it, it's clearly not made obvious (or better yet, automatic).

On the upside, at least it's not as bad as the horrendous (if occasionally informative) Phoronix is. That site is a nightmare to use on a desktop with its "oops I moused over a hover-link on the way to trying to click a regular link, and now I have a page-size Flash ad" setup, and it's basically unusable on a phone.

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 13, 2012 20:17 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

"www" is what you name the web-server host if you haven't got anything *better* to name it.

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 18, 2012 1:42 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

No such problems with phoronix, here, but then again, I couldn't legally install the proprietary flash if I wanted to (and generally don't bother with the freedomware gnash/lightspark alternatives), as I can't agree to the rights and black-box-liability waivers and thus in the US at least, probably would be held not to have the legal right to install and use them, even if I did want to use blackbox proprietaryware I can't examine from folks already demonstrated not to respect the user's rights, even to examine the code he's expected to agree to waive liability claims on! The noscript and requestpolicy extensions help tremendously as well, and I have privoxy installed with a phoronix-specific blocker for that page obscuring blocker ad that lacks a working close method if scripting is disabled.

But I suspect the biggest phoronix audience is gamers and others that have no ethical or legal problems with proprietaryware, and the flash ads you mention probably work for many of them. Meanwhile, it's quite unlikely I'd be in the market for anything advertised anyway (especially on a site using abusive tactics such as page-blocker ads with no way to kill them if scripting is off), so even if it's per-view paid, it's ultimately better that the advertisers don't get that view from me since that only brings down the response rate and therefore ultimately the per-view fees they're willing to pay.

And life is /so/ much better without the incessant ads... the reason I gave up on TV and radio years ago, for computers and the net, where I could better control such things. (One thing I've noticed, tho, I can listen to internet radio in German or French or Italian or Japanese or Korean or... or even local AZ over-the-air Spanish stations, and have a higher ad tolerance, since I don't understand them and thus they aren't such an insult to my intelligence after I hear them the 10th or 100th time. It takes to the 100th or 1000th time if I can't understand what they're saying anyway, before the invariant recorded repetition itself gets to me.)

Duncan

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 5, 2012 16:42 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (3 responses)

On my Android phone, I tend to regard "m.wherever" as meaning "mutilated.wherever", not "mobile.wherever"; I've yet to see an m.wherever that was actually better on my 'droid than the www.whatever is.

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 6, 2012 10:46 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (1 responses)

Agreed. Some sites even has a "feature" where they detect that you have a mobile phone, and sends you off to the mutilated version. Even worse, a lot of them has no way to get back (short of changing user agent).

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 13, 2012 20:21 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Much, *much* worse: many sites (FireDog was very bad about this) detect that you're on a mobile device *and redirect you to the mobile *HOMEPAGE** (no matter what actual internal page you were trying to go to.

The proper approach to this is:

1) detect the user's browser. If known non-mobile, stop.
2) If known mobile, display the page using a mobile style sheet, if possible.
3) On your mobile stylesheet, provide a link to allow the user to switch back to the non-mobile style, and a second link to set a cookie to make the non-mobile behaviour the default for that site.

You shouldn't do it with redirects, cause perhaps the user wants to share that story with friends, and those *friends* won't be on a mobile device -- some mobile sites work poorly or not at all on desktop browsers.

(While I'm at it: hint: putting the title in the URL is also wildly antisocial design. If you must do so, do it as a (deletable) suffix to the articleID.)

Our 2012 predictions: http://m.lwn.net support for mobile enviroment

Posted Jan 12, 2012 16:00 UTC (Thu) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]

And I tend to prefer mobile versions of websites, even when on large screens. This may stem from my use of tiled window managers, but they're generally lighter, less cluttered and less likely to force a specific UI down your throat, as on mobiles even designers seem to realize how their predefined layouts can break on unusually sized viewports. Also, Flash is rarely installed on phones (even though Java MDP is widely implemented), so sites make videos more accessible instead of wrapping them in binary downloaders and players for /branding/.

I want to choose layouts and font sizes myself. Fixed-width text boxes and forced sidebars are ridiculous. Opera can be told to ignore CSS position suggestions and keep web pages narrower than the window, but that does little good against table layouts (which can't be disambiguated from tabular data).

Unicode

Posted Jan 4, 2012 16:45 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

!מזל טוב! כל הכבוד

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 17:00 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

What a shame the unicode consortium hasn't assigned yet codepoints to Mayan glyphs…

http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 17:03 UTC (Wed) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link]

Happy New Year!
سال نو مبارک

British Telecom? I think you mean BT.

Posted Jan 4, 2012 17:04 UTC (Wed) by ribbo (subscriber, #2400) [Link] (2 responses)

British Telecom has been known as BT since 1991. Its not British Telecom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_telecom#1991.E2.80.9...

British Telecom? I think you mean BT.

Posted Jan 6, 2012 10:11 UTC (Fri) by mhy (guest, #44155) [Link] (1 responses)

Trust me. Neither of those is the preferred term to describe that company for anyone who has ever had to deal with them. I can't use the language which is used, however, for fear of upsetting people.

British Telecom? I think you mean BT.

Posted Jan 11, 2012 19:47 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I dunno. I've always found "Brutish Telecon" to be apt, family-friendly, and an excellent description of their unique approach to customer service.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 17:21 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (3 responses)

I predict that extensions.gnome.org won't be quite as useful as hoped. Many extensions will suffer bitrot, updating will be tedious, and it will acquire a reputation for instability. Also, it would be interesting if a security problem or two cropped up.

An effort to produce a nicely-integrated set of extensions could succeed, especially if curated by a popular distribution. In fact, that would be excellent.

But, I'm not sure who's going to do that... With Cinnamon and Unity forking clean away, it doesn't appear that many downstream developers want to tie their projects closely with Gnome3. Understandable.

On the one hand, it's a real shame that the Linux desktop has been thrust back into such deep uncertainty. On the other hand, 2012 will be a fun year to watch!

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 23:33 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> An effort to produce a nicely-integrated set of extensions could succeed, especially if curated by a popular distribution. In fact, that would be excellent.

I don't know what retreating to distribution-specific installers is going to achieve over a installation method that is trivially easy to use, can be used by anybody using any distribution, and can be curated in any way that is meaningfully useful.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 5, 2012 17:53 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Distributions integrate things nicely. They research, curate, stabilize, and distribute (install) software, a job most users don't care to do themselves.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 9, 2012 13:55 UTC (Mon) by ssam (guest, #46587) [Link]

it would be good progress if extensions.gnome.org did not cause gnome to crash :-)

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 17:31 UTC (Wed) by davidarusling (guest, #80637) [Link] (1 responses)

Jon, good predictions, I particularly like your prediction about the ARM mess going away.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 9, 2012 16:21 UTC (Mon) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

I like the prediction, but having been here a few years, I think it's an overly optimistic one. I think the ARM mess cleanup will make considerable headway, but I personally predict it won't be "solved" by the end of the year.

Take that with a grain of salt. My crystal ball is more like a magic 8 ball that's leaking fluid.

Apache OpenOffice.org

Posted Jan 4, 2012 22:39 UTC (Wed) by nanday (guest, #51465) [Link]

While some people working on Apache OpenOffice.org seem to expect it to eventually leave the incubator stage and become a regular project, The Apache Foundation may be planning something different.

From the rumors at ApacheCon a couple of months ago, The Apache Foundation may be content with running OpenOffice.org through the incubator process, then releasing one fully-audited version of the code, which LibreOffice or any other project can incorporate. Whether the Foundation has any interest in any subsequent releases may be another matter altogether.

My impression is that Oracle's gift of the code somewhat embarrassed Apache, and this scenario is a way that the Foundation can benefit the general community, then bow out gracefully.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 4, 2012 23:01 UTC (Wed) by Velmont (guest, #46433) [Link]

No really daring predictions other than what you say at the top about me reading the Weekly Edition. Nope, it is not out yet - this article is still just a prerelease from the next one :P

Thought I was lucky there, but alas, I can see no new weekly edition.

WebOS as differing?

Posted Jan 5, 2012 7:03 UTC (Thu) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (1 responses)

Is there a small mistake in the article when comparing WebOS to Android as stretching the "Linux" concept? After all, Androis is the one re-implementing everything above kernel, while WebOS uses GStreamer, Pulseaudio et cetera. Granted, it has its own UI stuff, but it's still the GNU/Linux type of Linux with several huge middleware portions (and also Qt as optional library) that are common with other Linux distributions.

When/if Samsung comes with its Tizen variant with the rumored E17, it's no more different than WebOS since E17 is relatively unique as well as being pushed by a major player.

Of course WebOS UI framework is proprietary so far, which is a bit differing factor. Let's see if the plans to free it up come to life, and if it's of any interest in the Qt5 / GTK3+Clutter / HTML5 era.

WebOS as differing?

Posted Jan 5, 2012 13:39 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Android uses low-level Linux userland also. You can, if you want, still create a chroot environment and run any particular ARM flavor of Linux you'd care to on a Android phone.

Putting a lot of thought and effort into something like WebOS or a QT-based Linux environment is akin, at this point, to beating a dead horse.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

Posted Jan 5, 2012 13:55 UTC (Thu) by jordi (guest, #14325) [Link] (6 responses)

2012 is the year when Debian is supposed to release wheezy. But of course, you never know. :) I missed this prediction from our editor, so here's mine: yes, it will, despite the 900+ release critical bugs currently open.

Debian oldstable looms

Posted Jan 6, 2012 10:08 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (5 responses)

I am not sure if that makes me happy, as I am running Debian stable "squeeze" on all my machines (excellent release by the way) and I would need to update them or run oldstable for a while. It isn't even one year old, by goodness' sake!

OTOH it would be great to run a current Iceweasel or Chromium, and have some cutting edge packages for things like MongoDB. I am beginning to feel the pressure that Fedora or Ubuntu (non-LTS) users have withstood for so long: upgrade or die.

IMHO, at this point, one major release every two years is fine for Debian.

Debian oldstable looms

Posted Jan 7, 2012 16:00 UTC (Sat) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link]

> IMHO, at this point, one major release every two years is fine for Debian.

Absolutely. But we somehow need to get those releases synced to the even years first, in order to stay closer to Ubuntu's LTS releases, and longterm supported kernels.

Debian oldstable looms

Posted Jan 7, 2012 16:04 UTC (Sat) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link] (3 responses)

> OTOH it would be great to run a current Iceweasel or Chromium,
> and have some cutting edge packages for things like MongoDB.

You can find iceweasel 9.0.1 backports on:
http://mozilla.debian.net/

For Chromium, inofficial backports are available as well from a 3rd party person.You could also run Chrome instead, if you don't have a problem with that.

MongoDB is fairly up-to-date in backports:

mongodb | 1:2.0.0-2~bpo60+1 | backports/squeeze | source, amd64, i386

Debian oldstable looms

Posted Jan 7, 2012 22:36 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

Thanks for that! I certainly have a use for Iceweasel 9.0.1. I am already using Chrome at the moment, it is nice and has a Debian repo.

Same for MongoDB: they keep their own repo; even better than Chrome because this one is Free software. By the way, somebody should tell these guys.

Debian oldstable looms

Posted Jan 8, 2012 0:07 UTC (Sun) by juliank (guest, #45896) [Link] (1 responses)

> Same for MongoDB: they keep their own repo;
> even better than Chrome because this one is Free software.
> By the way, somebody should tell these guys.

It's a wiki, you can add it yourself.

Debian oldstable looms

Posted Jan 8, 2012 0:32 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Silly me, I even had an account there. Done!