[gnulinux]

My sense is that it'll be a lot worse, Y2K was only a data format issue, whereas 2038 issue has to do more with underlying hardware. It really all depends, and we'll see. Certainly, many old software will stop working in 2038.

[iforgotpassword]

I'd say both are a data format issue, y2k was usually at a higher level and occured in custom data formats of individual software, while 2038 is in the OS and basic libraries, or even in hardware.

I do think though there were some bioses that messed it up too, so that's rather low level too.