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I'm glad someone, somewhere, is having this experience. I used Linux on the desktop from 1997 through mid-2003 (switched to Mac), and I switched back to Ubuntu last month. That's one of the things that has not changed: there's always something that doesn't work, and often multiple things that don't work completely (it used to be sound and network, and then it was graphics, wireless, and ACPI that always seemed to not work right, and after installing Ubuntu on my iMac, sure enough, it's the ATI video card and the wireless drivers that don't work correctly (though the gnome-power-manager also gets in the way, turning on my iMac's screen in the middle of the night for no apparent reason and leaving it on, but at least it'll stay killed until the next reboot, even though it doesn't obey the preference to not start on startup).

In the last six years, the Linux desktop has improved quite a lot (Gnome seems a lot more stable and somewhat faster, but not nearly as much faster as my machine is), but drivers are apparently still a major weak spot.

I'm sorry to hear about your experience. I'm glad that you at least are understanding and don't approach the topic with a combative or evangelizing attitude; both the Linux and the MacOS communities could use more people like you.

I won't claim that Linux driver support is perfect; hence the 99% rather than 100%, and yes, unfortunately video drivers are still a real sore spot. I'm not much of a gamer anymore, and 3D really isn't important to me; my biggest problems have been crashes due to binary video drivers, so you can understand the POV I'm coming from. As another data point, I recently tried moving my file/print server from i386 to armel, to reduce power usage as it is on 24/7. Everything was going smoothly until I tried to get a Brother MFC laser printer working. Turns out they don't support anything but i386. But if I had the source code, or better yet, if they had contributed a source to the CUPS project, this wouldn't be a problem. The fact that free driver development is offered makes this whole situation even more ludicrous than it should be. Why turn down a free service to support your hardware, done by the people who know the Linux kernel best? It makes absolutely no sense to me.

For now, it's lesson learned: never buy a Brother printer again.

It's possible for ZFS, but not really wanted. And it's also a HUGE job.

Btrfs (a work in progress for now) is better than ZFS: http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/

ZFS is protected by patents http://kerneltrap.org/node/8066. A binary compatible rewrite in GPL wouldn't be legal. Thanks again `Free as in Freedom' GPL ;)

It's possible for ZFS, but not really wanted. And it's also a HUGE job.

Btrfs (a work in progress for now) is better than ZFS: http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/

So in other words your answer is SCoN!

Nope. To be perfectly honest, the majority of hardware manufacturers just don't give a shit about Linux. Especially when they can get drivers and such implemented for free by just giving the specs. I'm not even exaggerating about this. This is nothing to do with the Linux driver models. Hell, there are user mode drivers that are fully implementable for various devices in Linux for the majority of devices including modems, scanners, printers and god knows what.. And guess what? No proprietary drivers, where they would work, so I deem the majority of what you have stated as complete bullshit. Especially since this is a rehersed argument that is only true for a very small amount of hardware that requires it to sit in the kernel with an unstable ABI and the hardware that does sit in the kernel is in the majority of cases, fully supported (graphic cards, ethernet, motherboard controllers).

Linux is all about freedom, right? So why can you only have RMS style freedom, and nobody else's?

You have the freedom to make your own distro that does that. Nobody is stopping you directly from doing this, of course, you'll probably continue whining instead of doing anything about it. Not that a stable ABI will really mean more support for graphic card drivers, motherboard controllers etc.

Now as for bad Windrivers...dude, that is what? 3 devices out of 30 million+?

When I was still doing computer service, quite regular actually. I'd say there is certainly a large amount of faulty ones.

Working in a PC shop I have seen just about every hardware/software combo you can possibly imagine, and in all these years I can name the amount of truly POS BSOD causing Windrivers on one hand with fingers left over.

I have worked in both shops and even free tech support services. The latter has revealed a lot of horrible, horrible crud you would not believe. Most people avoid commercialized support if they can, which is why I am not convinced you have seen as much as I have. Not only this, but I some how doubt you even go to the troubles I do to diagnosing the problems, I've ended up debugging problems where by the divx encoder codec was crashing, upon debugging extensively I found it was an issue to do with the fact the AMD's processor's errata for that revision, model of processor was returning bad responses to SSE2 instructions. I some how doubt that your 'support' even reaches the scale I have done. I mean seriously, when it comes to hardware and software support, comparing my own experience to what you have stated, and my knowledge of most common tech guys in shops, I am not convinced at all by your 'arguments'.

And as for the "high end graphics card" was an nVidia card, wasn't it?

Both ATi and nVidia cards.

This is why I warn my customers NEVER to buy bleeding edge hardware from the graphics card manufacturers, as BOTH have a nasty habit of making badass hardware and then punting it out the door with alpha quality drivers.

While some were bleeding edges, there were those that were not bleeding edge either, some hardware had been known to have such issues and was not fixed in later revisions of the same model, so your advice is not very helpful here.

unless that changes Linux will stay a niche hobbyist OS

Okay, now I know for certain you're a troll. Since you completely ignore everything from high end workstations using Linux (which is why nVidia to support it - due to large customers using these), commercialized servers, mobile phones, DVRs etc. all built with Linux.

I call bullshit on the majority of your argument.

FYI: I am platform agnostic, I hate all current operating systems.

Amazing this didn't get a response, right?

I see responses before yours?

And i love linux and i love hacking code, but he is right.

Right about what? The fact driver manufacturers should include drivers on the CD instead of just simply giving the specs out to Linux developers to get out-of-the-box-support for free?

Bad 3rd party hardware drivers are the cause of 99% of Windows Bluescreens.

And...

I don't understand your statement that the kernel should not contain drivers.

How do you consolidate these two thoughts in your brain?

As: Drivers should be managed by kernel people (which they do). If you wanted to move all drivers outside the (now micro-)kernel, you should have made that point clear.

The grandparent is right: Linux needs a standard and solid driver interface. Not only do hardware makers have to jump the hurdle of "Linux has very few users", the kernel developers have decided to throw in a whole mess of new hurdles which make Linux driver development *harder* than for commercial OSes.

That's just BS. It is answered by kernel developers several times: http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt

They also say:
"We have repeatedly found [Binary modules] to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses, and the greater Linux ecosystem. Such modules negate the openness, stability, flexibility, and maintainability of the Linux development model."
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/publications/kernel-driver-statement

For getting a Linux driver, you do not have to spend money/time at all. http://lwn.net/Articles/219791/

So, you start out behind because you don't have a huge user base, and you set yourself further behind because it's harder to write the driver.

Additionally, if you put the necessary scaffolding in place, you could create a system where no drivers run in the kernel, and thus no drivers are able to blue-screen the computer. BeOS did this in, what, 1994? Surely Linux can do it in 2009. Heck, Windows 7 is almost at that goal.

There are a lot of markets Linux can succeed in without addressing this-- ereaders, cellphones, etc-- but on the desktop? This should be priority one.

You can come up with proofs of concept for a lot of things, but the value of Linux lies in its code maintainance. Citing dead operating systems isn't helping. I'd say kernel panics are extremely rare.

http://lwn.net/Articles/342892/

Hope that give you the answers you were looking for.

Linux users (hardly ever) download and install software from the internet. We download and install packages from repositories.

Of course, repositories can never be hacked, that's unpossible!

No, it doesn't boot in 3 seconds, but in 7, and only with SSDs. And that's more than the 5 seconds we've already seen: http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/ Anyhow; isntant Linuxes in ROM are the future, so no use in scrapping milliseconds from boot-up to a capped down OS that has no applications.

If you think there are 0% Linux and Mac botnets and malware in the wild, you are seriously uninformed.

http://theappleblog.com/2009/04/24/mac-botnet-how-to-ensure-you-are-not-part-of-the-problem/
http://blog.trendmicro.com/more-mac-malware-in-the-wild/
http://lwn.net/Articles/222153/ - Linux botnets
http://blogs.computerworld.com/14723/no_more_linux_security_bragging_botnet_discovery_worry

This is just a small sample. Let's all take security seriously, and leave religion to the gods. (and to head of the claim that it doesn't count if the user has to install something, like a pirated malware-infected Photoshop for OSX, that is the most common Win vector these days as well. Malware is the problem, not viruses.)

A quick Google search found this interesting article from August of this year.

There's actually nine rootkits out there for Linux?

The rootkits in question are:

• adore-ng 0.56
• eNYeLKM 1.2
• sk2rc2
• superkit
• Phalanx b6
• mood-nt 2.3
• override
• Sebek 3.2.0b
• hideme.vfs

Some of them are in the wild an some are just for research. For more information, I would check out this page.

and forkable.

MySQL will be Sun's Oracle's property in name only.

If you think udev and devtmpfs conflict, you don't know what each of them are supposed to do.

If you read about them, you'd know that devtmpfs just populates /dev as devices are discovered by the kernel during boot. Which means udev doesn't have to spend several seconds parsing /sys to populate /dev with information the kernel already had.

Now during init, udev's job is to parse udev rules and add user configuration plus fix the permissions of nodes in /dev. Afterwards it also monitors device addition and generates events which apps can monitor (recent versions added a gobject interface too), and adds device nodes according to rules, if any.

In essence, devtmpfs's job is to allow a bootable system without the need to maintain a static /dev or depend on udev for a recovery shell.

devfs was bad, really bad because there was no naming system back then, and every driver did something different causing utter chaos (which led to different distros patching the kernel in different ways to change the node names). Now there's uniformity, and the kernel knows what to call the basic device nodes created by the drivers.

If you think udev and devtmpfs conflict, you don't know what each of them are supposed to do.

If you read about them, you'd know that devtmpfs just populates /dev as devices are discovered by the kernel during boot. Which means udev doesn't have to spend several seconds parsing /sys to populate /dev with information the kernel already had.

Now during init, udev's job is to parse udev rules and add user configuration plus fix the permissions of nodes in /dev. Afterwards it also monitors device addition and generates events which apps can monitor (recent versions added a gobject interface too), and adds device nodes according to rules, if any.

In essence, devtmpfs's job is to allow a bootable system without the need to maintain a static /dev or depend on udev for a recovery shell.

devfs was bad, really bad because there was no naming system back then, and every driver did something different causing utter chaos (which led to different distros patching the kernel in different ways to change the node names). Now there's uniformity, and the kernel knows what to call the basic device nodes created by the drivers.

During 2.6.31, they were responsible for 6% of the changes to the kernel.

That's 6% of non-author signoffs. It's not 6% of changes. I'm not saying they don't contribute, but the manner of their contribution isn't what your suggesting.

Yes, they do. Since they use older kernels and have... unique... needs, they aren't a huge contributor like RedHat, but they do a lot.

During 2.6.31, they were responsible for 6% of the changes to the kernel.

The standard way to remove setuid requirements from ping is to implement the capabilities API, which was finally done in 2.6.26 even though the basic idea goes back to the 2.1 kernel in 1998. A good intro is available from IBM.

That is being solved with Filesystem capabilities. Fedora 11 still has ping as setuid, not sure if Fedora 12 beta already switched it

Linux Weekly News (LWN.net) has managed to keep going by having a temporary paywall. That is, you pay to get immediate access to articles, and after a week, anyone can see them. This might work in some cases, at the least, you could generate some revenue if people were willing to pay for immediate access, while not driving away the authors who want many readers. I will say that for LWN, they're making some money but they certainly aren't rolling in it, so even if that works, it will not bring back the massive money inflows that these organizations are used to.

Let's be honest: There is a glut of news organizations, and consolidation WILL happen. The internet has permanently changed the market. I don't see that the U.S. government needs to get involved; we have NOT lost the ability to receive news. Yes, many news organizations are going out of business, and in the future we will need fewer of them. But that's simply how competition works.

I've used Seamonkey as my default browser for a long time now, mainly because I like the user interface better. Seamonkey 2.0 now uses Firefox's printing system, though, and this is one of the main things I don't like about Firefox. I use lpr for printing, not cups, and I liked the fact that earlier versions of Seamonkey (and "Mozilla" before it) remembered any changes I made to the "lpr command" in the print dialog. Firefox uses gtk-print, which reverts back to the default lpr command every time you click print, even in the same session. I've reported this as a bug in the Seamonkey bugzilla.

Regarding crashes, I've seen another report of this at LWN.

This post really needs a link to:

http://lwn.net/Articles/355149/

"Do you want to trust your data to a closed source file system implementation which you can't debug, can't improve and — most scarily — can't even fsck when it goes wrong, because you don't have direct access to the underlying medium?"

This is what you get with a flash drive at the moment unfortunately - a closed source filesystem that presents a single "file" as a block device over sata. And this firmware update is a filesystem driver change. Ouch.

As a developer, I also care about the fact that the new MAEMO APIs are scheduled for deprecation before its release. Having a stable, well documented API matters. A lot.

Please elaborate on this?

I don't know if things got clearer since this article was written. Anyways, this is what I was referring to:
"""
Furthermore, the difficulty of the toolkit switch between Fremantle and Harmattan is compounded by the fact that Fremantle will break compatibility with the Maemo 4.x-series, thus forcing two consecutive rewrites onto developers."""

http://lwn.net/Articles/341391/

Apple bad, Nokia good when we are talking about mobil phones. Nokias N900 has great Linux Comunity, and they are writing a Free cell phone communication stack ofono.

I had to read this a couple times, trying to figure out why an open sourced free cell implementation on a phone would get you so excited.

Apple bad, Nokia good when we are talking about mobil phones. Nokias N900 has great Linux Comunity, and they are writing a Free cell phone communication stack ofono.

http://lwn.net/Articles/355542/

Do you mean the BKL? It's hurt, but it's still there

Actually, BFS performance is shitty. No, really shitty.

http://lwn.net/Articles/355542/

Linux Weekly News has a nice summary of Linux Audio from the Linux Plumber's Conference:

http://lwn.net/Articles/355018/

"The history, status, and future of audio for Linux systems was the topic of two talks--coming at the theme from two different directions--at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). Ardour and JACK developer Paul Davis looked at audio from mostly the professional audio perspective, while PulseAudio developer Lennart Poettering, unsurprisingly, discussed desktop audio. Davis's talk ranged over the full history of Linux audio and gave a look at where he'd like to see things go, while Poettering focused on the changes since last year's conference and "action items" for the coming year."

The slides from the talks are also available as one LWN commenter pointed out - http://linuxplumbersconf.org/2009/program/

The guy who wrote Jack says you are wrong.

Actually

"For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time."

http://lwn.net/Articles/262570/

You have JavaScript disabled or are using a browser without JavaScript. This Plugin Check page does not work without the awesome power of JavaScript. Please enable this Content Preference and reload the page. Or disable all your plugins and keep JavaScript disabled... you'd be in good company, that's how RMS rolls.

Read the article, the web conference is hosted by the "license-sniffing", Microsoft partner Black Duck software.

stacked panels are an ongoing tactic of M$.

Anyway, the GPL has already been proven more than a few times in court on both sides of the Atlantic.
First U.S. GPL lawsuit heads for quick settlement
A GPL compliance case against Iliad

The article is from 2007 but I guess it's news to most nerds.
Arxiv link: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0701237

Now we just need to figure out if this has any impact on Ultimate Physical Limits of Computation as linked to in LWN: http://lwn.net/Articles/286233/

I can't find the link, but I remember reading an interview with him where he said he doesn't use web browsers but instead has some script that goes out and fetches a website he wants to see and e-mails it to him.

It wasn't an interview, it was a newsgroup post.

everyone having their own DLL would be the same as just statically linking everything. you'd have tons of code duplicated and loaded. have no easy way to patch common code system wide.

Actually, using private, but separate DLLs is much better than static linking. First of all, if there's a vulnerability, it's much easier to find the vulnerable code.

Also, just to play devil's advocate, private DLLs don't necessarily require more memory and disk use. it'd be possible for the operating system to notice two applications are using identical versions of a DLL and to share their pages, even if the two applications are using DLLs that reside in separate files. That'd help on the memory pressure front.

The operating system could even statically link identical copies of the same DLL (or use a copy-on-write approach) to cut down on disk use.

See also this LWN article: http://lwn.net/Articles/351053/

He shows how he straightened a picture he took and also mentions the SIFT algorithm which is disabled by default because of software patents. He says:

Your editor, being a daring sort of person, decided that he wanted to find out just what sort of functionality is being denied to hugin users by the oppressive US software patent regime. As it happens, Fedora users can get around patent-based repression by installing the autopano-sift-C package from the rpmfusion repository and tweaking the program preferences to use the real autopano tool. The difference is striking: with autopano-sift-C installed, the program proceeds immediately from image selection to a preview window; the whole "control points" and "optimization" process just sort of goes away. This package does a great job of finding control points, at least on your editor's sample image set.

http://lwn.net/Articles/354891/

Otherwise, OpenSSH is fantastically secure. :)

OTOH, Windows has its vulnerabilities baked right in, as shipped.

Apparently so does Linux.

But there is no special relationship between this bios and Windows 7, meaning that Linux can't also start-to-boot in 1 second!

The Upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 is going to start up in 10 seconds, meaning that from you hit the power button until you have the system ready are only 11 seconds on this system.

Indeed, 20 seconds to boot is not "incredibly short" by any means, unless you've been trapped in Windows for so long that your standards have lowered. Fedora has been at the 20 second mark for a while now. On "retrofitted" platforms (similar to what is used in the article), Linux has achieved five second boot times.

It's worth noting that in the Linux world, "Done booting means CPU and disk idle" as per Arjan van de Ven, whereas in the Windows world your computer is still loading up services and anti-virus programs even after you get to the desktop. So Linux is booting up faster despite measuring itself against a tougher standard. Hmm...

This whole thing is a non-story except to sufferers of inferior operating systems. The so-called "incredibly short" boot times are merely normal on alternative operating systems, and have been for quite some time.

Like Olympus cameras.. see the grunpy editors experience with hugin and the discussion of distortion at the bottom of http://lwn.net/Articles/351053
and avoid crap likey Olympus cameras.

You can always try to make a color copy of some money - don't forget to zoom! because, yes all the pictures are labeled. just not for your benefit.

Really?

Ah, right, sorry about that. They changed from KDE-by-default to "Choose what you want" in 2005, and now back to KDE.

It is odd for the kernel guys to accept something which isn't the superior design choice, they are perfectionists like that to an extent.

Define "superior". This article claims that the weakness of Linux ASLR keeps the system from becoming excessively slow.

Uh, RMS doesn't use a web browser.

Well, it seems that stupid people actually *build* linux too!

And it runs Linux!

There is a modified Android image growing in popularity, for those willing to root their phone, called Cyanogen Mod. The developer has incorporated the BFS scheduler, by Con Kolivas. By replacing CFS with BFS, the performance boost and latency decreases is said to be HUGE; contrary to the petty retort by Ingo Molnar, to which I linked. While both Cyanogen Mod and BFS are still actively developed, IMO, they do wonders to validate Google's approach. First and foremost, is the fact it runs Linux, which is freely available and heavily developed. Secondly is the fact, both Linux and Android are open source which allows for such pairing and experimentation. I fully expect both camps will be richly rewarded from shared cooperation.

This is, because FUSE is slow as hell. And there is no chance to make it faster.

Is it really? I'd always heard it was pretty fast, and a quick google throws up links like this. Do you have a link showing its poor performance?

At present you run into an issue where you could mount an ext2 or ext3 drive as a certain user, write files to it, and be unable to do anything with those files if you have a different UID on a different system.

A kernel patch has been proposed to allow you to remap ext2/3 UIDs when mounting a disk so that a standard UID can be mapped to whoever mounts the drive. This way, you'll be able to use ext2 or ext3 as your flash filesystem, preserve capitalization (another vfat weak point) and permissions (modulo the remapping) and still have decent interchange between different Linux boxes where you have different UIDs.