I think it has the potential. It always had.
Android already turned the mobile market upside-down.
The advantage of Linux is that you can take the pieces that suit your needs, replace the others with your own modules and presto, you've got an OS.
Then you can build the hardware for it and bam, you've got a killer machine meant for consumers.
Android may be a bad example here, but think of Tivo. Think about it, suddenly every PC maker can assemble some hardware together and call that a games console.
The missing piece for Linux was always the software, like games and Adobe Photoshop and MS Office. If Linux gets the support it needs for the games that people love, then I could see its popularity going through the roof.
> I think it has the potential. It always had. Android already turned the mobile market upside-down.
In what way did Android 'turn the mobile market upside-down'?
The mobile market turned itself upside-down, and Android was just one of the players, along with (in historical order) Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, iOS, and as one of the last to arrive on the scene, Android.
Not to start a mobile OS flamewar or anything, but I can honestly not think of a single way Android 'turned the mobile market upside down'. It's just a commodity mobile OS like most of the others. That it ended up on the majority of smartphones sold is IMO what you would call a serendipity.
I can walk into a phone shop and buy a contract-free, sim-free smartphone for £50. Sure, it's low end but it is a smartphone. It looks pretty upside-down to me.
The advantage of Linux is that you can take the pieces that suit your needs, replace the others with your own modules and presto, you've got an OS.
Then you can build the hardware for it and bam, you've got a killer machine meant for consumers.
Android may be a bad example here, but think of Tivo. Think about it, suddenly every PC maker can assemble some hardware together and call that a games console.
The missing piece for Linux was always the software, like games and Adobe Photoshop and MS Office. If Linux gets the support it needs for the games that people love, then I could see its popularity going through the roof.