As the story goes, in the late eighties Bill Gates was asked about the competition Unix posed to Microsoft. He smiled and asked, "Which Unix?"

The same could be said of Linux today. Which Linux? Linux is now defined mostly by the fact that it isn't any one single thing -- no one distribution, software house, or entity has the last word on what Linux is going to be. To that end, the only "Linux" worth calling out by that name alone is the Linux kernel itself -- a kernel which is continually repackaged and distributed in a slew of different ways.

Accordingly, when we talk about the future of Linux, it's probably best to think of it as raw material to be shaped and molded, rather than as an end product. Whether it's being turned into a whole operating system distribution, an embedded system, or a single-purpose application (e.g., a software appliance), Linux is best thought of as a starting point rather than an endpoint.

What's important about looking at Linux in this light is how it shapes expectations. Most people who regularly use Linux in some form do so either at a distance (like on a server), or in disguise (on their phone or in an embedded device). I coined the tongue-in-cheek brand name "Invisible Linux" as a reference to this sort of thing: the best Linux will be the one you don't know is Linux, and won't care. It won't be Linux that's in our future, but things made from Linux.

Linux As A Windows Alternative

For a long time, the distribution was -- and to a high degree still is -- the main unit of consumption for Linux. Most people got their first hands-on experience with Linux via one of about a dozen or so popular distros. The packaging dictated the utility: Most distributions are designed to work as an end-user OS. Some (like Ubuntu, fast becoming synonymous with end-user Linux) are specifically designed to work as a substitute for Microsoft Windows on the desktop, going so far as to provide Windows-specific migration tools.

But the mere presence of an alternative -- even one available at no cost, even one where the transition from Windows has been heavily automated -- hasn't caused the kind of exodus from Windows that we've seen with the OS X-era Macintosh.

People do indeed abandon Windows and use Linux -- many with great success -- but not in great numbers. The exact usage statistics for end-user desktop Linux hover at around 1%; Linux's very protean nature makes it difficult to pin down how many installations are currently out there, or how they're deployed, or how long they remain in use.

What is clear, though, is that even after years of revision and word-of-mouth street-level campaigning (and word-of-mouth is still by far the most powerful way to draw attention to anything), "brand-name" Linux isn't being adopted by non-technical folks. A distribution is, indeed, something made from Linux -- but too much of what goes into existing distributions is beholden to Linux's past instead of its potential future (or futures, plural).