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<div style="font-size: 20px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0 0 15px 0;
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida
Grande', 'Lucida Sans', sans-serif;">The state of Linux in 2022</div>
<img alt="Sandra Henry-Stocker"
src="https://www.askwoody.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/nl-henry-stocker-so.png"
style="margin: 5px 5px 0px 0px;width: 135px;float: left;border:
0;height: auto;outline: none;text-decoration:
none;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;" align="left">
<p style="margin: 10px 0 15px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;"><em>By Sandra Henry-Stocker</em></p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;font-size: 15px;padding:
0;font-weight: bold;font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans
Unicode', 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans',
sans-serif;mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust:
100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Linux continues to play a
major role in a number of market segments, from everyday embedded
devices to supercomputers.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">While it is used on fewer than 3% of desktops, it dominates
supercomputing, web servers, the cloud, smartphones, and more.
Linux-supported systems have even helped in the successful
completion of 65 SpaceX missions. The fact that Linux is
open-source means that it can be optimized for many different
purposes and, looking at the Linux roadmap, it has.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Let's take a stroll through Linux and see where it stands
in 2022!</p>
<div style="margin: 20px 0 0; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold;
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida
Grande', 'Lucida Sans', sans-serif;">Linux dominates
supercomputing</div>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">One of the most significant wins for Linux is the role it
continues to play in the world of supercomputing. In the last five
years or more, Linux has not only been the dominant force in
supercomputing — it’s running on all 500 of the top 500
supercomputers. Given its open-source nature and the role that
companies such as Red Hat play in continuing to produce and
sponsor some of the most popular and successful Linux
distributions — such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora
— Linux remains the clear top choice for supercomputing.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">The availability of source code has largely enabled this.
Supercomputers are uniquely designed systems built with specific
problem-solving challenges in mind. They require the kind of
custom operating systems that open-source enables.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Although most modern supercomputers use the Linux operating
system, each manufacturer makes changes to whichever Linux
derivative they use to accommodate differences in their hardware
architectures and to optimize the operating system for each
hardware design.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Many supercomputers have millions of cores, and many run at
speeds measured in petaflops, each equal to 1 quadrillion
floating-point operations per second. Linux enables this
impressive performance.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">The supercomputer in the top position these days is
Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. With its 8,730,112
cores running the HPE Cray OS distro of Linux, it's also the first
supercomputer to break the exaflop ceiling — running at 1.102
exaflops (Figure 1). This means that it’s exceeding a quintillion
(10<sup>18</sup>) calculations per second. The second-position
supercomputer is now Fugaku at Riken Center for Computational
Science in Kobe, Japan. Fugaku is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux
(RHEL) at a speed of 442 petaflops (10<sup>15</sup>).</p>
<p style="margin: 15px 0 15px 0;padding: 0;font-size: 12px;width:
698px;line-height: 1.32;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;"><img alt="Top 10 Supercomputers"
src="https://www.askwoody.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/NL-2022-08-29-henry-stocker-fig-1.jpg"
style="margin: 0 0 3px 0;border: 0;height: auto;outline:
none;text-decoration: none;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;"><br>
<strong>Figure 1. Top 10 supercomputers</strong> <em>Source: <a
href="https://AskWoody.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=589ef6d038a469ebdf98dc000&id=9267d6a46a&e=0c37a0ed01"
style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust:
100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">top500.org</a></em></p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">In short, Linux has been enthusiastically embraced by the
high-performance computing industry and has enabled an application
ecosystem which allows these systems to be broadly used for
everything from molecular modeling to weather forecasting.</p>
<div style="margin: 20px 0 0; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold;
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida
Grande', 'Lucida Sans', sans-serif;">Linux and its role in cell
phones and embedded devices</div>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Google’s Android OS accounts for as much as 85 percent of
the global smartphone market, with smartphone makers relying on
Android to manage their devices.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified
version of the Linux kernel, along with other open-source software
designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as
smartphones and tablets.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Linux is also used on a wide variety of embedded devices —
cable boxes, smart TVs, video recorders, surveillance cameras,
routers, switches, navigational systems (e.g., GPS devices),
digital cameras, satellite receivers, and medical instruments.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Just as Linux can be extended to accommodate huge computers
with thousands or millions of CPUs, it can be reduced in size and
functionality to provide very specific (but limited) functionality
to embedded devices and small instruments.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Linux has made a jump forward in many areas. It now
manages:</p>
<div style="line-height: 1.3;">
<ul style="margin: 0 0 10px 30px; padding: 0; list-style-type:
square;">
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">96.3% of the top million supercomputers</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">96.3% of the world's highest-usage web servers</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">90% of the cloud infrastructure</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">85% of smartphones</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">39.2% of websites</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="margin: 20px 0 0; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold;
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida
Grande', 'Lucida Sans', sans-serif;">Linux security</div>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">The Linux OS puts a lot of emphasis on system security,
process management, and uptime. It provides tools for user
privilege management and for administrative privilege management
through the root account.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">That doesn't imply that the use of open-source is free from
risk. A report this year from <a
href="https://AskWoody.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=589ef6d038a469ebdf98dc000&id=60bd47d595&e=0c37a0ed01"
style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust:
100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">Snyk and The Linux
Foundation</a> focuses on the risks resulting from the
widespread use of open-source.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">At the same time, updates are available on a very frequent
basis to fix flaws and make improvements. In fact, Linux systems
are often set up to automate patching.</p>
<div style="margin: 20px 0 0; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold;
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida
Grande', 'Lucida Sans', sans-serif;">New distributions in 2022</div>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">There are more than 300 Linux distributions. Most fall into
“families,” depending on which major release they are related to.
The three primary families of Linux distributions are Debian, Red
Hat, and SUSE. Many other Linux distributions use one of these
three primary distributions as their foundation and are described
as RHEL-based, Debian-based, or SUSE-based, respectively. For
example, Red Hat–based distributions include Rocky Linux,
AlmaLinux, ClearOS, Oracle Linux, Scientific Linux, and Fedora.
(CentOS, a once-popular distro, was discontinued in 2021.)</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Some of the newly released distributions in 2022 include
EndeavourOS, based on Arch Linux and with a number of variants —
KaOS (KDE), Fedora Game Spin, and Ubuntu Touch (a mobile version
of Ubuntu). There’s also Slackware 15, Ubuntu 22.04, Zorin OS 17,
Pop!_OS 22.04, Linux Mint 21, CutefishOS, Fedora 36, Nitrux Linux,
and many others.</p>
<div style="margin: 20px 0 0; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold;
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida
Grande', 'Lucida Sans', sans-serif;">Special-focus Linux
distributions</div>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">With hundreds of distributions and access to source code,
it’s no surprise that many distributions with a special focus have
come into being.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Some of the best distros for security and privacy include:</p>
<div style="line-height: 1.3;">
<ul style="margin: 0 0 10px 30px; padding: 0; list-style-type:
square;">
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Kodachi — routes connections through VPN and Tor</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Qubes OS — provides security by isolation</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Septor — routes all traffic through Tor</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Tails — anonymizes connections using Tor</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Whonix — anonymizes connections using Tor</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Tor provides a secure, encrypted protocol that uses a
series of layered nodes to hide IP addresses, online data, and
browsing history.</p>
<div style="margin: 20px 0 0; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold;
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida
Grande', 'Lucida Sans', sans-serif;">Linux for Developers</div>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Linux continues to serve as an excellent platform for
developers. It supports almost all the major programming languages
(Python, C/C++, Java, Perl, Ruby, etc.) and offers a vast range of
programming applications.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Some of the distributions recommended to developers
include:</p>
<div style="line-height: 1.3;">
<ul style="margin: 0 0 10px 30px; padding: 0; list-style-type:
square;">
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Arch</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">CentOS Stream</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Debian</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Elementary</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Fedora</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Kali</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Manjaro</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">openSUSE</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Pop!_OS</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Raspbian (now Raspberry Pi OS)</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Sabayon</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Solus</li>
<li style="margin: 5px 0 5px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Ubuntu</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="margin: 20px 0 0; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold;
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida
Grande', 'Lucida Sans', sans-serif;">Rocky Linux and Peridot</div>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Another big win for Linux is the recent addition of Rocky
Linux, which is already filling the gap from the demise of CentOS.
Rocky is “bug-for-bug” compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux
(this is a good thing) and comes with something called Peridot.
This feature provides the build\-chain infrastructure tools that
make it easy for developers to grab and extend the source code
when they want to do something independently of the Linux
community or any upstream organization.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Along with the 2022 release of Rocky Linux (Release 9)
comes the news that additional checks and balances have been put
into place to ensure it remains 100% open-source (i.e., no
proprietary code).</p>
<div style="margin: 20px 0 0; font-size: 18px; font-weight: bold;
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida
Grande', 'Lucida Sans', sans-serif;">Wrap-up</div>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Linux continues to thrive on everything from supercomputers
to embedded devices. It also is available in several-hundred
distributions — maybe as many as 600. Many distros have a special
focus to serve the needs of newbies and pros, musicians and
gamers, or artists and authors. 2022 has been a good year for
Linux, and we’ll likely roll into 2023 with some healthy momentum.</p>
<p style="margin: 10px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">In addition, according to <a style="mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">GlobeNewswire</a>, the Linux market is expected to have a
significant compound annual growth rate that will land it at
$21.05 billion by 2030.</p>
<table style="width: 100%;border: 1px solid darkgray;margin:
0;font-size: 14px;font-family: Verdana, 'Helvetica Neue',
Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif;padding: 0;background-color:
#fdc54a;background-image:
url('https://www.askwoody.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/talk-bubbles-2022-background.png');background-repeat:
no-repeat;border-collapse: collapse;mso-table-lspace:
0pt;mso-table-rspace: 0pt;-ms-text-size-adjust:
100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: center;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;"><img alt="Talk Bubbles"
src="https://www.askwoody.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/talk-bubbles-2022.png"
style="border: 0;height: auto;outline:
none;text-decoration: none;-ms-interpolation-mode:
bicubic;"></td>
<td style="font-size: 14px;text-align: center;margin:
0;padding: 3px 5px;line-height: 1.3;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;"><strong>Join the conversation!</strong> Your
questions, comments, and feedback<br>
about this topic are always welcome in <a
href="https://AskWoody.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=589ef6d038a469ebdf98dc000&id=5b9b9b10f9&e=0c37a0ed01"
style="mso-line-height-rule: exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust:
100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;">our forums</a>!</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="margin: 15px 0 10px 0;padding: 0;font-size:
12px;line-height: 1.3;mso-line-height-rule:
exactly;-ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:
100%;">Sandra Henry-Stocker has been using some form of Unix/Linux
since 1982 and has written more than a thousand articles and
several books on the subject.</p>
<p></p>
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