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Take a walk down memory lane...
This is going to be long and rambling. If you're going to read it, you may want to wait until you're ill, and can't get out of bed, and your head is filled with cotton, and you're eating painkillers like they were candy. I don't want you to feel pain while reading. Being unconscious and having a speech synthesizer read it to you at high speed is an even better option.
Linux is 20 years old this year. That's a long time. Since I was there from the beginning I thought I'd share some memories of what's happened.
In 1988 I graduated from high school, and got accepted into the University of Helsinki to study computer science. The studies started in September, and also in September I got invited to join Spektrum, the Swedish speaking club for those studying math, physics, chemistry, geography, or computer science.
Spektrum is a social club, which was good, since I was, and remain, shy and socially awkward, and the club provided me with a way to easily meet people when I'd moved into a new city. That's also where I met the only other Swedish speaking new CS student of that year, a guy named Linus Torvalds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @04:04AM
Given that I started with linux in 96-97 and it was old hat by then (I'd tried to download it with a 2400 then a 14.4k around 93-94 from the one local board that carried it, but couldn't manage it in time under their 'free access' limitations.) I am pretty sure that 2012 was the 20 year anniversary. Slack 3.0 was old by 98 when I got my first book on linux and by '99 I was more or less TAing my first college class which was basic Linux System administration (taught out of a SysV Unix book no less. While the scripting parts were fine, half of the tools and output were incorrect for a GNU-based system, especially a libc5 or early libc6 one!)
I certainly did have fun during those early years, back when it was new and exciting, and I was too sheltered to understand all the design shortcomings that each unix had while trying to tout its superiorities. On the other hand, today I loath it. Despite the ever increasing march towards a technical monoculture (x86/ARM + Windows or Linux) all those same technical and incompatibility issues from the days of dozens to hundreds of different types of systems and software remain, only without the excuse of dozens of different implementations and difficulty in cross-communication to offer a reason for regressions, underdocumented standards, or improperly implemented features.
What is the excuse now for all those things happening, when almost everything is running on a far more homogenous hardware platform today?
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Thursday December 22 2016, @05:08AM
The article says
So yes. Sorry.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday December 22 2016, @06:57PM
A lot of this is because Linux grew up in a computer word in flux. The big Unix vendors were at their peak in the early 90's while Microsoft was just ramping up. By the time Linux was mature enough to be production ready, it found itself in a world swallowed by Microsoft. Everyone who wrote Unix software (and even Apple software) were jumping ship to MS. Linux then became busy trying to play catch-up to compete on the desktop. But it never got its shit together.
Half-assed desktop software that is never as functional as its commercial counterparts. Sometimes the developers just give up and a few people hack it to add functionality or keep up with library changes while adding oodles of bugs (I'm looking at you cheese, a complete POS). Ever changing desktop where people think changing a save icon from a 3.5" disk to a fucking arrow is somehow intuitive. Or moving the maximize/minimize buttons to the left like OSX (again, Linux is never original). Or how the Linux community never developed a complete and easy to use alternative to Active Directory. And lets not get started on Pulse Audio, systemd, or Gnome3 (all products of Redhat).
Every OS sucks at one level or another. Linux sucks in the fact that it has the potential to be a flexible, clean, free, secure OS but it lost it's way a long time ago. The kernel is bloated. The desktop is bloated. The libraries and layers of bullshit have left it a fat pants shitting mess. Yea it works, but no better than Windows or OSX. It's only advantage is its Unix heritage and even that is under attack.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Thursday December 22 2016, @10:39PM
Or how the Linux community never developed a complete and easy to use alternative to Active Directory.
Did you try FreeIPA?
> Yea it works, but no better than Windows or OSX.
In Netcraft's list of "Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in November 2016" (http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/reports/performance/Hosters?orderby=epercent&tn=november_2016 [netcraft.com]) Linux puts in 23 appearances; Windows is listed once and OS X not at all.
The big Unix vendors were at their peak in the early 90's [...]
[...]
[...Linux] has the potential to be a flexible, clean, free, secure OS [...]
You're not the only one who sees that potential in Linux. The customers of DEC, H-P, SCO, SGI, Sun, BSDI, Coherent and IBM saw it too. RIP, proprietary UNIX.
In my opinion Linux still has that potential, and matches that description far more closely than we can ever expect Windows or OS X to.
The kernel is bloated. The desktop is bloated. The libraries and layers of bullshit have left it a fat pants shitting mess.
What bloat are you seeing in the Linux kernel? I haven't kept abreast of it, but when I last checked, it could be configured to be extremely bloated, svelte, or in between. If you're talking about the sheer quantity of code, that also can be a factor in its favour, when it has support for a piece of hardware, a protocol, or a file-system that we want to use. If you're talking about unavoidable, inefficient use of memory or processing while the kernel runs, that's a different matter and I'm not aware of what misfeature(s) you're alluding to. If your only complaint were with the Linux kernel, I would suggest Debian/kfreebsd, which mates a FreeBSD kernel with glibc; or Illumos (based on OpenSolaris) or *BSD. However, those have the same desktop environments and applications as Linux does. Did you try LXDE? It aims to be light-weight and succeeds well enough for my purposes.
It looks to me almost as though Microsoft wants to ruin Windows (to the perennial licencing hassle they are now packaging updates in monthly bundles, adding telemetry, and changing to the interface formerly known as Metro); OS X, the last I heard, is only licenced for Apple computers (so much for flexibility) but for those who need an emoji bar it's the only realistic choice.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @06:46AM
The kernel bloat is mostly undocumented. A lot of the new features added over the years are implicit rather than explicit with configuration options.
One notable complaint for me is: They are taking hardware Kconfig patches without vetting their system/bus ifdefs.
As an example: many ARM SoC GPUs show up in the graphics config options on x86 and other non-ARM ARCHes. On some of the other platforms bus options show up which were never offered on that platform, or are explicitly x86 hardware that wasn't properly scripted in Kconfig to be omitted on non-x86 platforms.
The rest of the examples would be in network protocols like ipv6 and ipv4 where new (but unnecessary) features are being added into the core rather than as options, leading to an inability to update kernels on older especially embedded hardware using the same exact build options you did in the past.
Another big problem is many new pieces of hardware are being configured to default to Y (not even *M*!) in the Kconfig files, which it is niche items that the rest of its particular configuration tree defaults to N and as a result pulls in parent dependencies you may have previously configured out, but gets pulled in by default when using your old config on a new kernel version (and doesn't prompt on all new options as it should!)
Having said that, thanks to musl, libcs are actually smaller today than they were back in the 90s when gnu libc 6 took over. And musl is generally much more compatible with legacy applications/compilers than newer versions of glibc without an encyclopedic knowledge of glibc changelogs, special gnu-specific compiler features and added hardcoded function symbol version identifiers to get it to use a particular old flavor you need the quirks of.