Quite a few people like to do this, so let’s have a stab at it.

SteamOS 3.0 will drive Linux adoption to 4%

At the time of writing, the total number of Linux users on the Steam Hardware & Software Survey sits at 1.16%, which makes this prediction optimistic at best, though not without basis. I am also very aware that the survey numbers don’t encompass the entirety of the Linux userbase, as it’s probably got a statistically small number of “gamers,” for historic reasons.

While this could be called Valve’s second attempt at entering the hardware space, following their failed “Steam Machine” launch, and the earlier versions of SteamOS (based on Debian,) it is perhaps their attempt which shows the most promise, as they are bundling the development efforts of Proton, a new-ish form factor for handheld PC gaming, and an immutable, gaming-focused OS into one package.

To some people 4% might seem small, but given the historic share of Linux on the desktop, I would be happy to see anything above 2% this year, and I’m hoping that the number of people who get their Steam Decks, and don’t immediately install Windows, shifts these survey numbers into the two-story sort of heights, because we shouldn’t be aiming for the stratosphere just yet.

More companies will publicly support Linux

Support in this sense is by way of either resources, or finance. I know that a lot of people said this might happen after Heartbleed, and were woefully disappointed, but I do believe that an increase in the number of vulnerabilities found in FLOSS software, will directly impact the engineers and more technologically-inclined members of large companies, perhaps even governments.

Every company these days, if they want to admit it or not, is a tech company. Being a tech company also comes with an amount of reliance on FLOSS software because its ecosystem has proven to be so valuable to the industry, these facts are inescapable, and I suspect that an increase in the vocal members of a company’s engineering staff, will result in more financial support to smaller-but-vital projects, and perhaps even engineers being hired to specifically spend some of their time contributing to the FLOSS projects used by the company.

This, of my predictions, is perhaps the one that I want to see the most, whilst simultaneously suspect is the one that’s the least likely to come true. There’s an article in here about how companies are scared of FLOSS, due to a deep-rooted fear of something which is so fundamentally anti-capitalist, but like it or not, this is the world in which we inhabit.

Nvidia will publicly change its stance on Linux

Historically, Nvidia hasn’t exactly been a darling of the FLOSS world, with its intransigence and sometimes staunch opposition to the rest of the Linux ecosphere. This has been tolerated, for want of a better word, because several members of the community want the best from their hardware, and sadly that has generally meant buying Nvidia cards, at the expense of the package maintainers and distribution developers who have to make their users’ lives easier, and their own sanity. Again, hats off to those who make it better for the rest of us.

That said, I do think that there’s change on the horizon when it comes to Nvidia and Linux. More recently, it feels like there might have been a bit of a shift internally, and even though I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s definitely going to be Nvidia GPU code directly in the kernel, like AMD and Intel, I do suspect that we might start to see some of Nvidia’s tooling be made more open (if not fully FLOSS) and its Linux support becoming more advanced than it historically has been.

Again, I don’t think this will end up with Nvidia being on-par with AMD in the Linux world, but I can hope.

When I say publicly, I’m not sure what I mean. I don’t think this’ll be a direct tweet from the Nvidia account; more likely I suspect it’ll be a long post to a mailing list somewhere, from some internal executive that we’ve not been made aware of before.

Have a good 2022.