> 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

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.