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2011, An Important Year For Linux
By: Qushawn Clark
Expert Author
2012-01-04
There was a lot happening in the world of open-source Linux computing this year, and 2012 will most likely be just as eventful.
Since its inception in 1991, Linux has continually been in the shadow of its more popular contemporaries, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. However, it has gained quite a faithful following, and continues to thrive in its own niche (mostly in the development world). I just want to go over a few of the bigger stories from 2011, partly just remind people that Linux is still going strong and isn't going away anytime soon.
- Distro Mania! - 2011 saw many high profile releases in the realm of individual distributions. Ubuntu, which has historically been the most popular desktop distro, released 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, which was met with a great deal of resistance. This is mostly because it was packaged with Canonical's new Unity desktop, which is worlds different from the traditional Gnome 2 desktop. Linux Mint, the distro that has been steadily replacing Ubuntu as the most popular, released version 12 ("Lisa") recently and has been very well received, mostly because of making an effort to make Gnome 3 usable for traditionalists. Other distros that had major releases this year include Red Hat, Centos, Oracle, Fedora, and Bodhi.
- Linux 3.1 - the newest version of the Linux kernel was released in 2011 with a laundry list of fixes and improvements over the last version. In fact, you can look at a message directly from Linus Torvalds outlining many of the improvements that were made. Initially, the kernel did not actually have any changes made from the previous version, but Torvalds felt as though the number change needed to be made to speed up the development process.
- Gnome 3 - Gnome 2 was very clearly the most popular desktop environment, mostly because it was what was packaged with the Ubuntu distribution. Torvalds, who was a dedicated user of Gnome before the new release, decided to stop using Gnome completely after trying out the new version of the interface. He has some very strong words about it as well, stating that "In gnome3, the developers have apparently decided that it's "too complicated" to actually do real work on your desktop, and have decided to make it really annoying to do."
- The rise of Android - The biggest story of the year may be the amazing growth of the Android operating system for the mobile market. It has vastly overtaken any other mobile operating system for sales over the previous year, which is very impressive given Google's already impressive growth in other areas of their pseudo-empire.
This has been a big year for the little guys, and hopefully the successes Linux had this year will continue into the future, or else we could all end up programming on Windows for a living (Yikes!).
About the Author:
Qushawn is a staff writer for the iEntry Network.
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