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Linux Kernel to Fork?
Ninjy writes "Techworld has a story up about the possibility of the 2.7 kernel forking to accomodate large patch sets. Will this actually happen, and will the community back such a decision? "
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Oh, man. You hit a button... I F-ING HATE PACKAGE MANAGERS UNDER LINUX. I try and update program X. Oh oh, dependency. Chase that down. That creates two more dependencies. Chase those down. Soon it cascades into a total nightmare. And then, I frankly give up, and just download the source, recompiled it in parallel to the package, and just delete the package.
Funny how, under Windows, I NEVER have to do this. I download the binary, install it, life is good.
And, BTW, have you ever noticed that little pesky message on you beloved Windows "unable to locate foo.dll"?
Never. I just install programs, and they -- well, just work. Look, I like Linux, but it is seriously f-ed up when it comes to clean installing of applications.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'm not blaming anyone here, just exposing a fact. Don't get me wrong...
Microsoft doesn't need to make drivers for every hardware because they make it very easy for the manufacturers create and distribute them... API compatibility, standard library base. Some weeks ago I could make a video card work in Windows 2000 with win98 drivers. If i'm using linux 2.6.5 and switch to 2.6.8, many things stop working.
Many manufacturers doesn't make drivers for linux because it's hard to distribute, hard to mantain... or you release the source code or you have to compile one version of your driver for every version of the kernel * every kind of distribution.
Didn't say it's perfect. I said it's a better way to solve things for most user. Believe, most users will prefer to download 400Mb or to wait 1 weeks for a CD (you can call HP and ask for them) than downloading 4 or 5
Don't take critics as offense. Instead, try to understand why people complain about it and try to make it better. Apps like Gnome/KDE didn't get where they are by ignoring what users want...
You don't understand. I don't WANT to go through all this bullshit. I just want to download a program, and run it. I don't want to update 200 other barely-related packages at the same time. I don't want to have to understand package management. I JUST want to download a program and run it.
Just like on, say, Windows.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If we want to maintain the quality and stability that the Linux kernel has, we need to resist binary drivers. Many of the stability issues remaining with Windows today I believe are in fact driver issues.
Yes, most stability issues come from drivers. But is Linux different? Anyway, based on my personal experience, I don't think Linux is more stable than Windows.
to countless programmers who may or may not have special interest in improving Linux specifically
This idea that there is countless people doing the quality control stuff is simply whishful thinking. Sure, important drivers do get tested and reviewed. But for the less common hardware, there's only a few people doing all the work. Are those few people better than the one working for the hardware company?
It might even lead to someone eventually getting into a position where they could charge for an essential part of the system thus rendering it non-free even in the beer sense.
Computers are tools, nothing more. Most people don't mind paying for softwares and most people don't care about being able to have access to the source code of a driver. Even in the Linux world, people don't mind using Nvidia and ATI binary drivers.
There is one fact. Linux is not succeeding on the desktop. Can you tell why?