2014: The year of the Linux car?

Summary: You read that right: Not the year of the Linux desktop, the year of the Linux car. Major automotive companies are investing in making Linux their cars' operating system of choice.

When you think about Linux, you probably think about servers, desktops, and Android smartphones and tablets. What you almost certainly don't think about is cars, but Linux is already running under the hood of many cars, and it may play a much larger role soon, too.

Say hello to Linux running under the hood of your car. (Image: Linux)

That was the message Matt Jones brought to the Linux Foundation's Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, California. Jones is a senior technical specialist for Jaguar Land Roverinfotainment systems and VP of a non-profit automotive industry group driving adoption of an In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) open-source development platform, GenIVI Alliance.

Jones said that Jaguar Land Rover had asked their customers what they wanted, and they didn't want much — just a full-featured home entertainment network in their cars. Of course, while you can put a HDTV-quality display on the front-dashboard, providing the high-speed networking in city traffic is a problem well outside the automobile industry's purview.

What the automotive businesses can do, and are working toward in the Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a Linux Foundation sub group, is providing a common operating system and application programming interfaces (APIs). With this, car manufacturers can focus on delivering applications and not worry about operating system infrastructure. After all, as Jones said, "When was the last time you bought a car based on its operating system?"

During his keynote, Jones announced that AGL had released a prototype IVI & remote vehicle interaction operating system and application development package. This is a Linux-based open-source image for creating an IVI system along with a controller area network (CAN), a vehicle bus standard, API; a HTML5 application framework; and sample user interface.

Jones said, "We [Jaguar Land Rover] are involved with AGL to enable open source and Linux within automotive as a whole, and focus on making it easier for developers with reference hardware and software platforms. Such technology has long been available in lots of vehicles, but nobody has given it away before". So if you're ready to "hack" a car, the AGL has the tools you'll need.

AGL and Jaguar Land Rover are also giving developers reason to start car hacking. The pair have announced a developer contest: 2013 AGL User Experience Contest. The winner will get the chance to work with the AGL and Jaguar Land Rover.

There are three categories: Best user experience, best visual appearance, and best new concept or additional feature. The contest runs April 15 — May 17, and winners will be announced at theAutomotive Linux Summit in Tokyo at the end of May. If you want to work with Linux and cars, this seems like an ideal chance to get in on the ground floor.

Microsoft's Windows 8 Plan B(lue): Bring back the Start button, boot to desktop

Summary: Microsoft may be moving toward bringing back the Start Button and allowing users to boot straight to the desktop with its coming Windows 8.1 release later this year.

What if Microsoft relented and granted users who are lukewarm about Windows 8 two of their biggest requests: Allow those who want to boot straight to the desktop, and bring back the Start button with Windows Blue, a.k.a. Windows 8.1?

Though supposedly not part of the original plan for Blue, these two UI options are looking more likely.Reports from a couple of different forums from this past weekend raised the possibility that Microsoft might be moving toward allowing users to skip booting into the Metro-Style Start menu and instead start their PCs in desktop mode. (Winbeta.org noted the thread about this on April 14.)

One of my sources confirmed this is now looking like the plan and added that Microsoft is also considering bringing back the Start button as an option with Windows Blue.

It's not 100 percent sure that either/both of these options will be baked into the final Blue release, which is expected to be released to manufacturing on or around August 2013. I guess we'll have a better indication once the next milestone build, a.k.a. the Blue Preview, leaks — or when the public version of that preview goes live around June."Until it ships, anything can change," said my source, who requested anonymity.

Microsoft officials have publicly maintained that users are not confused by the new Windows 8 interface and that they find it "easy to start to learn," especially on touch screens. I, myself, have adapted to the new UI well on my touch-screen Surface RT, but like a number of business users, I find the new UI more of a curse on non-touch-screen machines. As a result, I am still running Windows 7 on two of my three Windows devices.

If Microsoft does end up adding the Start Button and boot to desktop options to Blue, it won't be the first time in recent history that the Windows client team has gone back and changed the Windows UI based on user dissatisfaction. Remember how users balked over the way Windows Vista first implemented User Account Control (UAC), the "most hated feature" in a hated OS release? Microsoft ended up changing direction with UAC in Windows 7, based on beta tester outcry.

What do you think? Would adding these two user-requested options soften resistance to Windows 8, especially among Microsoft's much-needed business user camp? Or would this be too little, too late?