For CUDA, it is not just AMD who would need to catch up. Developers also are not necessarily going to target the latest feature set immediately, especially if it only benefits (or requires) new hardware.
I accept the final statement, but that also means AMD for compute is gonna be dead like OS/2. Their stack just will not reach critical mass.
Proton, Wine, and all of the compatibility fixes and drive improvements that the community has made in the last 16 years has been amazing, and every day is another day where you can say that it has never been easier to switch away from Windows.
However, Microsoft has definitely been drinking the IBM koolaid a little to long and has lost the mandate of heaven. I think in the next 7-10 years we will reach a point where there is nothing Windows can do that linux cannot do better and easier without spying on you, and we may be 3-5 years from a "killer app" that is specifically built to be incompatible with Windows just as a big FU to them, possibly in the VR world, possibly in AR, and once that happens maybe, maybe, maybe it will finally actually be the year of the linux desktop.
that's a fascinating statement with the clear ascendancy of neural-assisted algorithms etc. Things like DLSS are the future - small models that just quietly optimize some part of a workload that was commonly considered impossible to the extent nobody even thinks about it anymore.
my prediction is that in 10 years we are looking at the rise of tag+collection based filesystems and operating system paradigms. all of us generate a huge amount of "digital garbage" constantly, and you either sort it out into the important stuff, keep temporarily, and toss, or you accumulate a giant digital garbage pile. AI systems are gonna automate that process, it's gonna start on traditional tree-based systems but eventually you don't need the tree at all, AI is what's going to make that pivot to true tag/collection systems possible.
Tags mostly haven't worked because of a bunch of individual issues which are pretty much solved by AI. Tags aren't specific enough: well, AI can give you good guesses at relevance. Tagging files and maintaining collections is a pain: well, the AI can generate tags and assign collections for you. Tags really require an ontology for "fuzzy" matching (search for "food" should return the tag "hot dog") - well, LLMs understand ontologies fine. Etc etc. And if you do it right, you can basically have the AI generate "inbox/outbox" for you, deduplicate files and handle versioning, etc, all relatively seamlessly.
microsoft and macos are both clearly racing for this with the "AI os" concept. It's not just better relevance searches etc. And the "generate me a whole paragraph before you even know what I'm trying to type" stuff is not how it's going to work either. That stuff is like specular highlights in video games around 2007 or whatever - once you had the tool, for a few years everything was w e t until developers learned some restraint with it. But there are very very good applications that are going to come out in the 10 year window that are going to reduce operator cognitive load by a lot - that is the "AI OS" concept. What would the OS look like if you truly had the "computer is my secretary" idea? Not just dictating memorandums, but assistance in keeping your life in order and keeping you on-task.
I simply cannot see linux being able to keep up with this change, in the same way the kernel can't just switch to rust - at some point you are too calcified to ever do the big-bang rewrite if there is not a BDFL telling you that it's got to happen.
the downside of being "the bazaar" is that you are standards-driven and have to deal with corralling a million whiny nerds constantly complaining about "spying on me just like microsoft" and continuing to push in their own other directions (sysvinit/upstart/systemd factions, etc) and whatever else, on top of all the other technical issues of doing a big-bang rewrite. linux is too calcified to ever pivot away from being a tree-based OS and it's going to be another 2-3 decades before they catch up with "proper support for new file-organization paradigms" etc even in the smaller sense.
that's really just the tip of the iceberg on the things AI is going to change, and linux is probably going to be left out of most of those commercial applications despite being where the research is done. It's just too much of a mess and too many nerdlingers pushing back to ever get anything done. Unix will be represented in this new paradigm but not Linux - the commercial operators who have the centralization and fortitude to build a cathedral will get there much quicker, and that looks like MacOS or Solaris not linux.
Or at least, unless I see some big announcement from KDE or Gnome or Canonical/Red Hat about a big AI-OS rewrite... I assume that's pretty much where the center of gravity is going to stay for linux.
The only thing it has going for it is being a free beer UNIX clone for headless environments, and even then, isn't that relevant on cloud environments where containers and managed languages abstract everything they run on.
Maybe some Microsoft owned games makers will never make the shift, but if the majority of others do then that's the death knell.
For the non-vendor lock in AI's (copilot), casting as wide of a net as possible to catch customers as easily as possible should by default mean that they would invest the small amount of money to build linux integrations into their AI platforms.
Plus, the googs has a pretty deep investment into the linux ecosystem and should have little issue pushing bard or gemini or whatever they'll call it next week before they kill it out into a linux compatible interface, and if they do that then the other big players will follow.
And, don't overlook the next generation of VR headsets. People have gotten silly over the Apple headset, but Valve should be rolling out the Deckhard soon and others will start to compete in that space since Apple raised the price bar and should soon start rolling out hardware with more features and software to take advantage of it.
if that's the case you have billion-dollar opportunities waiting for you to prove it!
Unity, Unreal and Godot all support compiling for Linux either by default or with inexpensive or possibly free add-ons. I'm sure many other game engines do as well, and when you're taking a few hours of work at most to add everyone who owns a steam deck or a steam deck clone as a potential customer to your customer base then that is not a tall order.
We already see things like Google abandoning tensorflow support for Windows, because they don't have enough devs using Windows to easily maintain it.
And of course, we have a changing of the guard in terms of a generation of software developers who primarily worked on Windows, because that was the way to do it, starting to retire. Younger devs came up in the Google era where Linux is a first class citizen alongside MacOS.
I think these factors are going to change the face of technology in the coming 15 years, and that's likely to affect how businesses and consumers consume technology, even if they don't understand what's actually running under the hood.
MS has put a collosal amount money into catching up to at least be able to take advantage of the AI wave, that much is clear. Maybe for consumers this will be enough, but R&D wise I don't see them ever being the default choice.
And this is potentially a huge problem for them in the long run, because OS choice by industry is driven by the available tooling. If they lose ML, they could potentially lose traditional engineering if fields like robotics start relying on Linux more heavily.
This doesn't make the "play" button any different. People only care if the Proton version is buggy or noticeably less performant, and native ports have no trouble being both of those (see: Rust (game) before the devs dropped Linux support)
We can see that it’s not magic, the neuron either activates or it doesn’t, so why should I pay attention to some probabilistic steam of gibberish it spewed out? There is nothing meaningful that can be inferred from such systems, right?