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posted by martyb on Tuesday June 16 2020, @02:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the whole-lotta-changes-coming dept.

Bigger than big: Linux kernel colonel Torvalds claims 5.8 is 'one of our biggest releases of all time':

All going well, the stable release should appear sometime in August.

Introducing the release candidate, Torvalds said it was "right up there with v4.9, which has long been our biggest release by quite a bit in number of commits." That said, the 4.9 kernel was "artificially big" because of a couple of special factors, whereas 5.8 is a "more comprehensive release."

Torvalds said: "The development is really all over the place: there's tons of fairly fundamental core work and cleanups, but there is also lots of filesystem work and obviously all the usual driver updates too. Plus documentation and architecture work." He added: "We have modified about 20 per cent of all the files in the kernel source repository. That's really a fairly big percentage, and while some of it _is_ scripted, on the whole it's really just the same pattern: 5.8 has simply seen a lot of development."

While the code for the kernel is large, only a small part of it ends up in any individual system, since the kernel source contains code for every chip architecture and hardware it supports. In early 2018, maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman said that "an average laptop uses around 2 million lines of kernel from 5,000 files to function properly." At the time, there were 25 million lines of code in the kernel, whereas now there are over 28 million.

See also: Linux 5.8 Kernel Features Include New Intel/AMD Capabilities, Security Improvements, Optimizations.


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 16 2020, @05:00PM (3 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 16 2020, @05:00PM (#1008737) Journal

    Chromebooks are very popular. Isn't that a Linux desktop?

    Chrome OS has been beta testing Linux apps (eg, GIMP, Inkscape, LibreOffice, etc) for a couple years. I believe the end point of this is that there will be a curated "app store" of Linux desktop apps. End users won't know or care that these are Linux apps.

    Linux on the desktop may arrive and nobody will even notice.

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday June 16 2020, @05:28PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 16 2020, @05:28PM (#1008757) Journal

    If you use Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/... there's long been a curated "app store". Actually, the same is true of Red Hat versions, though it's a different store. Also, I believe, for Gentoo and affiliates, though there it's a source repository. The only exception I can think of off-hand is Slackware, and even there there's a selection of applications available on the system repository. It just doesn't (didn't?) have a package manager.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @08:13PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2020, @08:13PM (#1008823)

    I heard that it is suspected that MS might be working on making WINE compatibility good enough that they they can just switch over to Linux and not let anyone notice. This would let them cut down on dev costs as they can basically outsource it all. They aren't making their money selling Windows the Plebes anymore so it kinda makes sense.

    • (Score: 1) by petecox on Tuesday June 16 2020, @11:03PM

      by petecox (3228) on Tuesday June 16 2020, @11:03PM (#1008898)

      The parent post mentioned Chrome OS, which is now collaborating with Parallels to access Windows software.

      Windows 10S & their Chromium-based browser could indicate a similar trend toward cloud Windows.