[Rustington] The State of Linux in 2022

[Stuart McFadyen]

The state of Linux in 2022
Sandra Henry-Stocker

/By Sandra Henry-Stocker/

Linux continues to play a major role in a number of market segments, 
from everyday embedded devices to supercomputers.

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.

Let's take a stroll through Linux and see where it stands in 2022!

Linux dominates supercomputing

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (10^18 ) 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 (10^15 ).

Top 10 Supercomputers
*Figure 1. Top 10 supercomputers* /Source: top500.org 
<https://AskWoody.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=589ef6d038a469ebdf98dc000&id=9267d6a46a&e=0c37a0ed01>/

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.

Linux and its role in cell phones and embedded devices

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.

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.

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.

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.

Linux has made a jump forward in many areas. It now manages:

  * 96.3% of the top million supercomputers
  * 96.3% of the world's highest-usage web servers
  * 90% of the cloud infrastructure
  * 85% of smartphones
  * 39.2% of websites

Linux security

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.

That doesn't imply that the use of open-source is free from risk. A 
report this year from Snyk and The Linux Foundation 
<https://AskWoody.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=589ef6d038a469ebdf98dc000&id=60bd47d595&e=0c37a0ed01> 
focuses on the risks resulting from the widespread use of open-source.

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.

New distributions in 2022

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.)

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.

Special-focus Linux distributions

With hundreds of distributions and access to source code, it’s no 
surprise that many distributions with a special focus have come into being.

Some of the best distros for security and privacy include:

  * Kodachi — routes connections through VPN and Tor
  * Qubes OS — provides security by isolation
  * Septor — routes all traffic through Tor
  * Tails — anonymizes connections using Tor
  * Whonix — anonymizes connections using Tor

Tor provides a secure, encrypted protocol that uses a series of layered 
nodes to hide IP addresses, online data, and browsing history.

Linux for Developers

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.

Some of the distributions recommended to developers include:

  * Arch
  * CentOS Stream
  * Debian
  * Elementary
  * Fedora
  * Kali
  * Manjaro
  * openSUSE
  * Pop!_OS
  * Raspbian (now Raspberry Pi OS)
  * Sabayon
  * Solus
  * Ubuntu

Rocky Linux and Peridot

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.

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).

Wrap-up

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.

In addition, according to GlobeNewswire, the Linux market is expected to 
have a significant compound annual growth rate that will land it at 
$21.05 billion by 2030.

Talk Bubbles 	*Join the conversation!* Your questions, comments, and 
feedback
about this topic are always welcome in our forums 
<https://AskWoody.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=589ef6d038a469ebdf98dc000&id=5b9b9b10f9&e=0c37a0ed01>! 


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.
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