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Benjamin Herrenschmidt On PPC/Linux, Apple and OSS

Posted by Hemos on from the talkin'-bout-my-eople dept.

MacBoy writes "The folks over at ResExcellence have a great interview with Benjamin Herrenschmidt, kernel guru for the PPC/Linux camp. He offers up some history of Linux on Apple and PPC hardware, and some discussion on Apple's current and past contributions to the open-source and Linux communities. He makes some interesting comparisons of Linux on PPC vs. Intel hardware, such as the ease of getting important patches into the kernel on PPC compared to Intel. It's an interesting read, especially if you are amoung the many who covet the new Dual-CPU GHz G4 Macs and want to know a little more about the PPC/Linux community."

1 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Question: by jtdubs · · Score: 5, Funny

    The funny part is thus:

    Scenario:

    Pretend that OS X and linux are functionally equivalent. All of a sudden linux introduces accelerated support for alpha blending and better looking fonts and a beautiful animated GUI that blows OS X out of the water.

    Linux communities response:

    Woohoo! We are so much more l33t and advanced than OS X. Our fonts are better and everything is animated and pretty. We win!

    Scenario:

    Pretend that OS X and linux are functionally equivalent. All of a sudden OS Xintroduces accelerated support for alpha blending and better looking fonts and a beautiful animated GUI that blows linux out of the water.

    Linux communities response:

    Stupid Macs are so slow now. So they are pretty, but all those features are really worthless and just suck up RAM. The GUI just hides you from the command line, the fonts are just way to easy to read and take the challenge out of using unix, and the alpha blending is just a way to force me into buying more expensive hardware just to get the GUI to be responsive.

    Justin Dubs