qtopia

From a fanboy's point of view, Linux at the core of Google's new mobile OS is great news. But is Linux really up for this?

There's been much talk in the Linux world over the last few years about "Linux on the desktop". The server space has been fairly locked down for a while now; Linux owns as much market share on the backbone, big-job machines that power the digital world as does the competition. The question, however, of whether Linux is ready for the Desktop - and I mean truly, your-grandma-can-use-it, ready - is still open. From my point of view, here typing this blog post on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon running on a Dell XPS m1330, Linux is all that and more; this is the most satisfying desktop I've ever run. But my friends keep asking me to do stuff that Linux won't do (ie. MSN video chat - "What's Ekiga?" they say), so I have to admit that from a lowest-common-denominator position Linux isn't there, although that has everything to do with market dynamics (Microsoft's stranglehold) and nothing to do with pure ability. But perhaps the next computing movement, which is undoubtedly the mobile phone and embedded systems, will be kinder to Linus' wunderkind?

Or perhaps not. The mobile Linux space has been full of promise for some time, but there's been no delivery. There's Maemo, which powers the Nokia internet tablet line, but as far as I know there are no plans to extend the distro onto handsets. Qtopia was, a year or so ago, full of promise, but Trolltech has recently announced it will no longer produce the Greenphone development platform. OpenMOKO sounds great, but delayed release on the development machines, as well as the notice that it still won't reliably make calls (it's November now; FIC was promising second-gen, mass market handsets by now) makes me concerned that it's a dying horse. Anybody seen anything tangible from LiMo? Palm has been talking about Linux-powered phones for a while now, but the Folio died and the new Centro runs PalmOS.

It's a pretty grim scene, all things considered.

So I have to ask: can Linux really do this? Many big players, including now Google, believe so, and I hope they're right; it would be fantastic vindication for a lot of open source geeks, myself included, if Linux dominates on the next generation of personal computing devices. It would, once-and-for-all, prove the power of the open source model and give the consumers ultimate control over their systems. But I have to wonder if the lack of huge success so far means that success won't ever come.

I'll throw everything I have into supporting Android, 'casue I want Linux on the handset to succeed, but I'm making sure I'm prepared for disappointment.