Now that is the most interesting question anyone here asked.
It looks likely it could take all the big software companies with it, and all the big cloud providers. It may well kill most GPU vendors, most datacentre and hosting companies. Industrial-scale LLMs are propping up the entire cloud business, and that itself was bloated and overgrown. SaaS was a mistake. Anything -aaS was a mistake.
I'd _like_ to see this kill off MS, Oracle etc.
Intel is teetering. NVidia is probably screwed. AMD may follow.
There's geopolitics here too. China wants Taiwan and has actively been divesting from Western hardware and software. So has Russia. Lots of Linux growth there: it's free, it works, they can just take it.
And there's rapid climate change too, which is starting to become visible.
Everyone who manufuctures in Taiwan may well be doomed. But ditto everyone in the tropics, in the newer tech centres: Malaysia, Thailand, etc.
Everyone who gets chips from Taiwan is probably screwed. Everyone who assembles in PacRim and SE Asia too.
That will take down most Western companies.
Apple might weather it: it sells hardware, and it has its own unique OS family. But others make its hardware for it -- in those areas.
Chinese tech may bloom.
Small scale individual FOSS will be OK.
Stuff reusing legacy tech, that can run on old kit.
Everyone's deprecating x86-32. That may bite them hard.
Everything dependent on virtual stuff and public cloud, everything dependent on K8s and remote datacentres, everything you can't run locally on kit you own that sits in premises you own.
That includes a lot of the games industry.
Non-commercial OSes will be OK.
Bad times for RHEL and the clones. Bad times for SUSE and maybe Canonical.
Maybe OK for Debian. Good for Arch & Alpine & Slackware.
Stuff that needs GPUs, bad. Stuff that works fine in standard def on CPU graphics, good.
But I am just indulging my own biases and skepticism here, I freely admit.
I don't think for example MS will be doomed so fast. Even when they loose all their investments and a lot of money. They still have their software, and contracts with nearly every company.
I'm not so sure I want MS to go away though. While I'm not a fan of MS and I've never even really used a Windows computer beside it being mandated in school and university, I don't want Windows to go away.
When the masses come to Linux, it will simply become worse and locked down. There are already enough companies invested who will want to do so as soon as it becomes feasible and enough influencable users are on Linux.
Windows is better then mac OS in terms of user control, so I also don't want the masses to go to mac OS.
What I would welcome is, Desktop Linux to not be a rounding error and the OS market to become more competitive, so that MS needs to improve Windows and can't ship whatever crap of the day they want.
I would have liked the solution proposed by the Department of Justice's original judge in the 1990s anti-monopoly case, though: to split Microsoft into separate companies: one for apps, one for OSes (maybe with development tools). These days, maybe another for public cloud services.
Mostly forgotten now but the fact that this Brit can remember the names of 2 US judges over 28 years later shows how important this case was at the time.
It is why MS bundled Internet Explorer 4 into Windows 98, calling the result "Active Desktop". That flawed broken "Windows Explorer with built-in Web rendering" was the design that the KDE project copied when it created the KDE desktop – as opposed to the much simpler cleaner desktop of Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.
In other words the ripples have not died away. That court case affected the design and implementation of FOSS OSes today built by programmers who hadn't been born when the lawsuit happened.
I don't know exactly why Microsoft chose to combine a browser and the file explorer. Maybe it was solely to keep their monopoly. However exposing the Internet as a file system is not so far fetched. Most protocols (e.g. HTTP, FTP) are about the transmission of files. To me it sounds totally sensible to implement HTTP as a file system driver and then have the "browser" only consist of rendering, without any network features. Honestly that sounds like a really cool idea. It results in a browser that transparently browses from websites hosted on servers to websites hosted on the disk. Saving websites could be really simple. Uploading also.
Passing parameters to a website could be the same, as executing a program. page?foo=bar&baz would be ./page --foo=bar --baz. su -c "systemctl enable --runtime" becomes path://root@/systemctl/enable?runtime . Of course you need a secure sandbox, otherwise you just built remote code execution as a service to anyone.
It looks likely it could take all the big software companies with it, and all the big cloud providers. It may well kill most GPU vendors, most datacentre and hosting companies. Industrial-scale LLMs are propping up the entire cloud business, and that itself was bloated and overgrown. SaaS was a mistake. Anything -aaS was a mistake.
I'd _like_ to see this kill off MS, Oracle etc.
Intel is teetering. NVidia is probably screwed. AMD may follow.
There's geopolitics here too. China wants Taiwan and has actively been divesting from Western hardware and software. So has Russia. Lots of Linux growth there: it's free, it works, they can just take it.
And there's rapid climate change too, which is starting to become visible.
Everyone who manufuctures in Taiwan may well be doomed. But ditto everyone in the tropics, in the newer tech centres: Malaysia, Thailand, etc.
Everyone who gets chips from Taiwan is probably screwed. Everyone who assembles in PacRim and SE Asia too.
That will take down most Western companies.
Apple might weather it: it sells hardware, and it has its own unique OS family. But others make its hardware for it -- in those areas.
Chinese tech may bloom.
Small scale individual FOSS will be OK.
Stuff reusing legacy tech, that can run on old kit.
Everyone's deprecating x86-32. That may bite them hard.
Everything dependent on virtual stuff and public cloud, everything dependent on K8s and remote datacentres, everything you can't run locally on kit you own that sits in premises you own.
That includes a lot of the games industry.
Non-commercial OSes will be OK.
Bad times for RHEL and the clones. Bad times for SUSE and maybe Canonical.
Maybe OK for Debian. Good for Arch & Alpine & Slackware.
Stuff that needs GPUs, bad. Stuff that works fine in standard def on CPU graphics, good.
But I am just indulging my own biases and skepticism here, I freely admit.