Torvalds told a crowd of about 400 people during a meeting of the Bay Area Linux Users Group Tuesday night that he personally would concentrate on the Linux kernel for many years to come. "A lot of the excitement is going to be in the user space," he declared.
"I don't expect the desktop to come quickly," Torvalds said. "It'll take time." He predicted the move would start slowly with desktop terminals dedicated to one purpose, such as those installed by Burlington Coat Factory.
High hopes for embedded systems "The strength of Linux is that it's flexible," Torvalds said, adding that it can scale down to embedded devices such as phones and set-top boxes. "It's certainly a very attractive market."
Torvalds also predicted that the next version of the Linux kernel would be out by the fall, though he said the date could slip. He also said that Linux versions would include USB support and the ability to scale to a larger number of processors.
One attendee asked Torvalds whether he was worried about the kernel fragmenting. Torvalds predicted various distributions of Linux would differentiate themselves by running better on different devices, but he said it wouldn't splinter in the same way that Unix has.
