Linux Experts on Linux, Netbooks and the Future

Arnaud Laprévote, CTO & Head of Research Projects at Mandriva, and Aaron J. Seigo, KDE developer and KDE Foundation member, are interviewed by Charbax of techvideoblog.com at this year's Netbook World Summit in Paris.

They talk about the current state of Linux on Netbooks, why Linux is important, how it influences the market of low cost, ultra-portable devices, and which role Linux may play in the near future.

Aaron Seigo explains that Linux's market share on mobile devices depends a lot of where and how you look at operating system distribution. Whereas there is of lots space for improvement in North America and Western Europe, Linux does exceptionally well in South America, Asia, and some parts of Europe like Germany and Russia.

Aaron mentions that the entire public school system in Brazil is using KDE and Linux, that is 52 million students. He says that Linux's world-wide market share is about 30 to 35%, which is backed by a recent study of ABI Research projecting that in 2009 Linux will represent 32% of netbook sales.

Moreover, Laprévote and Seigo see the ARM processor architecture as a big opportunity for Linux on netbooks and Seigo assumes that ARM based netbooks will almost exclusively ship with Linux based operating systems.

One thing that is very important is that the success of Linux on netbooks depends on the people who buy these devices, that is you. You will decide about the future of Linux on netbooks, other mobile devices, and computers in general. So how do you see Linux's future?