I’ve decided that This Week in Linux is going to have a end of the DECADE episode in addition to the end of the year episode that I planned. We are going to do a look back at everything that happened this decade and it do some interesting follow ups
It’s pretty shocking how much changes in a single month and looking at the year also is shocking but to imagine what all changed in the decade is just staggering . . . I mean we went from only having about 4 DE options to basically a dozen, Unity came and went within this decade, Arch popularity skyrocketed, so freaking much stuff happened this decade it’s insane!
This is why I need your help!!!
I want to make this a collaborative thing for the whole DLN community to be involved in so if you would like to participate please reply below with the topics you want to be addressed in the first installment of “This Decade in Linux”.
so . . . what are the biggest Linux GNews topics of the Decade?!
I don’t have a specific thing in mind but I think of the massive growth in cloud/online/web based services in the past decade and that nearly all of it is using Linux. It’s a bit of a trope to say that Linux us everywhere but it literally powers this modern era of the Internet, apps, embedded devices, and technology in general. I don’t see that stopping anytime soon. Look how much stalwart anti-FOSS corporations like Microsoft have changed in that time.
I nominate the rise of functional package managers, namely Nix & Guix. Just like in pure functional programming where the output is only dependent on the input and not on mutable state, functional package managers require the explicit declaration of build & runtime dependencies, build environments, build configurations, etc. All of these input data are then combined to generate a hash which uniquely identifies the output package. Thus every package that’s represented by the same hash necessarily must be the exact same, in every conceivable way, from all the versions of their dependencies down to the minor config tweaks. In this increasingly sprawling world of software development and deployment, functional package managers is an excellent tool for reproducible builds, containerizations, environment isolation, etc.
I intended to make an episode of TWinL for this but then 2020 went into so much garbage status that it seemed less interesting the more and more 2020 because chaotic.
Oh… um… well checks notes Containers, Containers changed how everything IT works. and a whole suite of tools came after it like VMs did back when virtualization became a thing.
Go to the This Year in Linux thread.