Well, I’m now back from LinuxWorld. What a ride! It was more fun than every amusement park I’ve ever been to, combined. At the same time, I took a bunch of notes and tried to absorb as much information as possible. Here’s some final thoughts:
Since this was my first LinuxWorld, I don’t have much perspective on how this event may have changed over the past few years. What I do know is that many people are saying that this year’s conference was a lot more subdued than in previous years. I think that’s to be expected, what with the Dot-Washout and all.
The theme was definitely centered around bringing Linux into the mainstream, as the best choice for enterprise class businesses to base their IT on. I think there’s a lot of merit in that, and although that’s not my chief interest in Linux, I can see that a big part of Linux’s social acceptance will be tied to whether or not it can be a commercial success in the enterprise. Not that social acceptance or commerical success are even ends in themselves that Linux people should be concerned about.
What I am really interested in is Linux on the desktop. I know, I know, that’s supposed to be dead and all that. But have you seen what Ximian is up to? Their desktop, and especially their Evolution product (an Outlook clone) are looking really, really good. They’re so good I think that they will be a big player in helping Linux to get more acceptance as a viable desktop alternative. KDE has done a lot in this respect, as well. If StarOffice 6.0 comes out as well as it looked at Sun’s booth, that might be the whole nut. We’ll see.
Either way, the point is there’s enough really good software out there that you can make a completely reasonable case for switching to Linux as your only desktop solution. That’s what I’ve been in the process of doing for the past few months, and I’m now confident enough to completely free myself from Windows. It’s not installed on any of my machines currently, and I have no intention of reinstalling any time soon.
Along similar lines, Tribes II and Quake look totally awesome on Linux. I played Tribes II a little bit at the AMD booth and it was fun–everything you need in a FPS, and more. Quake looks similarily good, although I get bored of DM-type stuff just looking at it. So I’m not worried about missing out on any new games because of the switch to Linux–hell, I don’t have time for gaming anyways.
The last of my concerns, Flash development–well, that’s a bit of a tough one. I’m kind of over Flash, and am a lot more interested in spending time learning a real programming language like C/C++ or Java. That shouldn’t be hindered by Linux in any way. If Macromedia can be convinced to get their shit together, maybe they will release Flash 6 on Linux. If not, I guess there’s always VMWare or something.
So that’s that. Linux is where it’s at, and I’m good with that.