Unix has been around for well over 50 years. The software industry was young at its birth in 1969. Surely some newer, better OS paradigm would come along.

It hasn’t. All modern general-purpose OSes are wannabe Unixes. There have been plenty of new paradigms but none have caught on. There doesn’t seem to be anything better as judged by the market – just Unix with various polishes and optimizations. Maybe the right way to build a general purpose OS was more or less obvious and discovered early. If a new winning paradigm was going to come along, probably it would have by now.

In the 1970s AT&T’s licensing policies (which they felt were necessary because of the anti-trust exception they had as the US’s telephone monopolist) prevented commercial adoption.

In the 1980s Microsoft nearly brought us Unix (‘Xenix’) but they had a deal with IBM to do OS/2 so flushed it, then built Windows and spent the next 40 years gradually retrofitting Unix into it.

In 2001 Apple gave in and just shipped Unix, calling it “OS X” (now “macOS”). But few cared – Apple’s walled garden kept it off most desktops.

For more than 25 years, the tech punditry has consistently predicted Linux (the modern Unix) winning the desktop, usually Real Soon Now. Over and over. Linux is still on ~ 3% of desktops.

So, a bold prediction: Linux will win the desktop. Eventually. Microsoft will eventually rot like all organizations rot, be made irrelevant by open source, or be replaced by a new player who ships Linux because of course.

This will take a long time. By then Linux GUIs will be at least as good as Windows and Mac GUIs (after 25+ years of effort, they still aren’t, because people who write open-source software care little about polishing GUIs). That happening is a prerequisite for Linux winning. But it can be done and eventually someone will do it.

And then Unix will stand alone on the desktop.

(This, like all my predictions and virtually all of everyone else’s whether they know it or not, holds only until the Singularity aka Rapture. Which could easily happen soon, or never. If it does, all bets are off, including this one.)