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ZDNet reports that from supercomputers to stock markets to smartphones, Linux dominates most computing markets, but Linus Torvalds still wants Linux to rule on one place it doesn't: The desktop. "The challenge on the desktop is not a kernel problem. It's a whole infrastructure problem. I think we'll get there one day," said Torvalds at the LinuxCon Convention in Chicago. "Year of the Linux desktop?" asked Kroah-Hartman. "I'm not going there," replied Torvalds with a smile.
Torvalds also discussed the issue of kernel code bloat as Linux is now being run in small-form-factor embedded devices. "We've been bloating the kernel over the last 20 years, but hardware has grown faster," Torvalds said. Torvalds wants to push the envelope for the embedded market despite some challenges. He noted that some of the small-form-factor device vendors have their own operating system technologies in place already, and those vendors don't always make hardware readily available to Linux kernel developers.
The issue of Linux code maintainers was another hot-button topic addressed by Torvalds, who noted that some Linux kernel code has only a single maintainer and that can mean trouble when that maintainer wants to take time off. Torvalds said that a good setup that is now used by the x86 maintainers is to have multiple people maintaining the code. It's an approach that ARM Linux developers have recently embraced, as well. "When I used to do ARM merges, I wanted to shoot myself and take a few ARM developers with me," Torvalds said. "It's now much less painful and ARM developers are picking up the multiple maintainer approach."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Tork on Friday August 22 2014, @08:05AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday August 22 2014, @08:17AM
Why, pray tell? What actually has changed, other than the covert substitution of NT for DOS/Win? And NT was a poorly conceived rushed attempt to copy Unix systems. Besides, did you every try to actually run Linux back around 1995? I was ecstatic if I could get a file manager to run on X! If only I had know about emacs right from the beginning. No, Linux zealotry was harder back then, not for the faint of heart or the weak of code. But that is the point, is it not? Freedom, as in free speech, and free hacking.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NoMaster on Friday August 22 2014, @09:40AM
We got a nice, stable, useable, Unix-under-the-hood-and-user-friendly-GUI-on-top in OSX?
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Friday August 22 2014, @01:21PM
You must mean Darwin.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 22 2014, @02:26PM
Darwin is Unix. They got the certificates to prove it and everything.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LaminatorX on Friday August 22 2014, @01:11PM
NT is a VMS/VAX clone, not a Unix clone. MS hired Dave Cutler away from DEC to build them a real OS kernel, and then built Win32 and COM on top of it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mechanicjay on Friday August 22 2014, @01:50PM
You beat me to it. Remember, NT used to run on Alpha processors as well, right up to Win 2K RC4.
I actually think Win 2K was the pinnacle of Windows, it's been downhill ever since.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 22 2014, @03:50PM
It ran on a lot of processor families. IIRC it was developed on MIPS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 22 2014, @08:47PM
Wow. Talk about damning with faint praise.
...then again, it didn't have product activation.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Friday August 22 2014, @08:45PM
Right, thanks for the correction. I must have meant to say "UNIX competitor".
(Score: 3, Funny) by Tork on Friday August 22 2014, @04:16PM
TThe daily reboot is long gone and BSODs are nearly extinct. Linux had a much weaker opponent back then.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday August 22 2014, @04:59PM
Yeah but today Linux's audio, network, dependency, and graphics support problems are pretty much gone. Linux was much weaker at the time too.
(Score: 1) by schad on Friday August 22 2014, @06:28PM
Try to get Optimus to work on a laptop, and then tell me the graphics support problems are gone.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday August 22 2014, @06:37PM
Optimus is still basically a prototype, and you're expecting it to just work on any random hardware that it was never designed for? Also, Optimus isn't really desktop.
Might as well berate Windows for not being able to run on a Raspberry Pi....
(Score: 2) by No.Limit on Friday August 22 2014, @09:32PM
It used to work pretty well for me when I used it (I only play games on my desktop nowadays).
Installing it was quite easy too.
But I believe you that others may have big problems with it. Just not everyone.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Sunday August 24 2014, @06:55PM
Network issues are mostly gone (unless you're talking about WiFi...in which case, they've improved, and are usually workable, but often still don't work upon an initial install, with no CLEAR method presented to the user outside of forum support), and audio USUALLY is fine, unless you're using some kind of specialized sound card. Graphics? Sure, if you use nvidia, or don't play games.
As for dependencies...it helps that we have always on Internet connection these days where downloading software takes seconds rather than minutes (or hours!). It also "helps" (ymmv) that there are so many distros with good binary package distribution so that there isn't so much compilation we're required to do (though for those of us who prefer compiling, it also helps that our CPU's and RAM are a hell of a lot faster now).
The idea that "we've made it" is premature. Vast improvements have been made, along with some missteps (wtf is systemd anyway? And do we really NEED pulseaudio to be in place for everyone, with all of the misconfigurations that distros seem to relish in rolling out, rather then leaving it just available for those who need the extra functionality it brings?). It's still not there yet for that broad class of user that does more than use a web browser but yet is unwilling or lacks time to do at least a little manual configuration.
Not that I think I care all that much at this point. Seeing the amount of abuse the ecosystem has taken by the idiot proofing projects, looking back, I wonder how smart it ever was to roll it out to the mainstream. I've been seeing some old Linux heads flocking over to *BSD as major distributions abandon the Unix philosophy en masse, and wonder what it is we're really gaining anyway. Nobody thinks Android is great (just perhaps better than the alternatives at this point), and yet we seem to be rushing to make similar mistakes in the desktop world as well.
Linus may want it, and frankly, it's his baby. But to those of us that have loved and used the free Unix-like system for all these years, I'm not sure it's something to be cheering for, at least in the form we're seeing it come in. What WOULD be a good thing to see would be OEM's rolling out more machines with Linux preinstalled, where a lot of the configuration that the end user ends up being responsible for doing could be handled before the system ever ships out. Linux has historically been hard to configure because of its biggest virtue: It runs on EVERYTHING. If you want to make it run on your specific hardware, you generally need to tell it what that hardware is, and how to interact with it, and that's, well, hard. Windows handles this by supporting the hardware it does run on all at once (regardless of not needing most of it on any system it's installed on), and the manufacturers love it because it means that each Windows version gets more and more bloated and thus people buy new computers (the agreements that frankly should be illegal under anti-trust laws if they aren't already don't hurt matters either). And so Windows is "easy", if not efficient. OEM installed Linux can very much be easy as well, provided the distribution(s) keep things sane, but then, this sentence poses two hurdles to move beyond...
Remember: OS X made Unix easy by shipping out with all of the necessary hardware support in place by default (easy, because Apple controls the hardware) as well as a sane for general use default configuration. They got financially successful as hell thanks to their marketing squad, but there's absolutely nothing about the making Unix user friendly process that couldn't be replicated by major Linux players, if they were inclined with the resources at hand. I can't imagine I personally would want to go near one of these setups, but if it brings better hardware support (or just hardware options to the market), as well as more useful software that I can throw on my own custom install, I wouldn't oppose it either, at least while Patrick Volkerding still roams the earth.