Windows and iOS lost their way

With Windows 8 proving unpopular with power users and OS X Yosemite eliciting pointed criticisms and even talk of Apple losing some of its "just works" magic, the Linux desktop may well be the refuge power users and developers are looking for.

Melamut points out that while Ubuntu for phones gets all the press, Canonical has also been ramping up its "cloud" options as well, targeting dev ops, cloud developers and the like with OpenStack environments and other tools that make developer's life easier. If you're using it in the server room, why not your desktop as well?

That's the user the openSUSE project plans to target, chasing what openSUSE senior consultant Douglas DeMaio calls "power users" and making openSUSE, in DeMaio's words: "The MIT of Linux distros."

The focus on power users isn't new for openSUSE, which has long offered the very sysadmin-friendly YaST as one of its big selling points. Over the past couple of years, openSUSE has completely re-written YaST in the more developer friendly Ruby language (previously YaST was written in a homegrown language) in an effort to draw more power users and sysadmins to YaST and the openSUSE platform.

DeMaio told The Reg openSUSE plans to continue making improvement to YaST and focus on other power user features and tools like the recent move to Btrfs as the default file system. For openSUSE, the name of the game is evolution, not revolution. "The innovation is in the process," said DeMaio, "it's in the tools."

You can leave your hat on

The Fedora Project has taken a similar approach, but in a more radical way. Fedora has long been a massive, sprawling project with dozens of different "spins", speciality deployments and niche packages. On one hand this is part of what allows Fedora to bubble up some very interesting projects, like the DevAssistant tool for developers or its robotics package setup. The problem with this nebulous approach is that the lack of cohesiveness has made it hard at times to figure out where the project is actually headed. It often seems like it's headed everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

That changed this year with Fedora.next, which essentially envisions Fedora as an onion with several different but connected layers. There's a couple of core components, a bare OS and then a base system - Fedora minimal if you will - then comes something new, what Fedora calls environments or, or if you prefer the marketing term, "flavors."

These are the different setups that arrived when Fedora 21 was released. Right now there are flavours for cloud, server and workstation environments (the latter is basically a desktop environment geared at software developers).

Fedora Project lead Matthew Miller likens the new structure to Lego. "The idea is: we can take some of our bricks, and we can ship those as sets," he told us, "and maybe even, unlike Lego, we will ship them pre-assembled for you, but we’re not gluing them together, and we’re not getting rid of the basic supply of bricks."

The modular approach also sets the stage for other directions in the future. Right now the flavours are cloud, server and workstation because those are the places the distro is focused. Down the road, if Linux-friendly hardware emerges in the mobile device world then perhaps we'll see a new "mobile" flavour from Fedora.

Fedora's approach mirrors what's long been the guiding principle of good GNU/Linux software: small parts loosely joined. This will no doubt cue comments about the evils of systemd, but at the structural level at least the modular approach seems alive and well in Fedora.

So far though that modular approach has not jumped on the mobile bandwagon.

While most of the Linux world may be ignoring the mobile future for now, or perhaps waiting to see how Canonical fares, there's a second, slightly less glamorous possibility for the future of the desktop PCs where Linux fares quite well - the return of the desktop/laptop.

When Apple’s iPad arrived, pundits proclaimed the end of the PC and so forth, but what we learned from dabbling in mobile is just how valuable our laptops really are. And when we get back, desktop Linux will be there waiting with open arms. ®