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Torvalds Switches to a Mac
renai42 writes "Linux creator Linus Torvalds said this afternoon that he's now running an Apple Macintosh as his main desktop, mainly for work reasons, although partly simply because he's a self-described "technology whore" and got the machine for free." And yes, he is running Linux on it ;)
I got a mac too. So what? It runs Linux just as fine as on any other mashine.
This has been known for a while. Read it and he discusses why he runs PPC instead of x86, just to have a different view on kernel development. Plus it's not like he runs OS X or something.
Torvalds is showing 2 things :
a) Linux on PPC is at least as good as on any x86 CPU.
b) Apple hardware is desired over your Average Joe's box from Dell or HP.
Wrong
Apple includes full Developer's TOols with every version of OS X, including a customised version of GCC. So there is a compiler, and much more with OS X.
Actually I find OS X runs surprisingly well on old Macs (perfectly working on my 350MHz G3 iMac) but if you want to use Linux, that's cool too. Just don't make inaccurate statements about OS X.
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In fact, 2.6 kernels are fully useable on PPC & PPC64 machines without any patches - so PPC kernels are 'keeping up' fine already.
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
Which is a shame. Booting into OSX once in a while might give him an additional perspective.
He has repeatedly said that he doesn't care about userspace.
He has also said that Mach, which is the microkernel OSX is based on, is a "piece of shit". Read "Just for Fun", his autobiography, for full details.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Sheesh, he's been using the G5 for over a year now.
I'm trying real hard not to boot Windows but I keep doing it day after day even though I'm wasting all of my free time trying to assemble some usable "free desktop".
Now, now, while Linux is definitly not "ready for the desktop" no matter how many of the zealots tell you it is, I really can't say that it "takes all available free time to assemble some usable 'free desktop'".
Gnome and KDE handle this rather well in recent years and they come pretty standard with most distributions and even bootable CDs... Perhaps your requirements are different than others?
Yeah, it's easier to use all that crap in Windows because you're comfortable with it and it happens to work better in most ways but it's certainly not as difficult as you make it out to be to do it in Linux.
Apples do not come with a C compiler. Here at work, I have an iBook I bought in October
Funny, my wife's iBook, purchased in December, came with a compiler. It wasn't installed by default; I had to install it from one of the CDs that came in the box, but that only took a few minutes.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Long ago, long before most folks were using Linux, Linus got into a fight with Andrew Tanenbaum about Linux and its design as a monolithic kernel. This is one of the more famous debates of linux lore, so it doesn't hurt read it and its annotations.
The quick summary is that Andy Tanenbaum proclaimed Linux dead way back in '92, saying, "While I could go into a long story here about the relative merits of the two designs, suffice it to say that among the people who actually design operating systems, the debate is essentially over. Microkernels have won."
Linus on the other hand much preferred the monolithic design of linux, for a variety of reasons. Mr. Tanenbaum even went so far as to imply that Linux wouldn't be a passing project for his class. Ironic, no?
Even so, Tanenbaum did and still does have some good points about the Mach microkernel. I can't exactly imagine Torvalds is the most impartial judge of the mach microkernel.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
OS X and X both rely upon IPC message passing for the basis of their windowing system. The biggest difference is that X servers generally come with transport mechanisms other than shared memory that offers network-transparent usage.
Over local connections, images are stored in shared memory segments, messages are sent via shared memory over unix domain sockets, and hardware accelerated 3D is performed optimally.
Loss of performance? None. It is not uncommon for an X server to have considerably superior performance to that of GDI or Quart2D. It's also not uncommon for an X server to perform badly, because its drivers are poor.
It's even more common for toolkit authors to create radically suboptimal decisions, such as with Gtk+ and Qt.
In short, you have no idea what you're talking about. Presumably you've never written a display server, and thus don't really understand how they work.
I don't know, I'm just saying that the talk about an OS tax, as usually applied to deals Microsoft has with OEMs, seems to not-quite apply here any more (or less) than it would apply to talking about the OS tax on a Palm device.
Even if you somehow manage to obtain OS X without the dev tools, you can download them for free from Apple's site (after signing up for a free online ADC account).
"is that every microkernel, kernel, etc. is a piece of shit."
What a truly ignorant statement. Microkernels are more stable than macro's (theoretically) but come at the cost of speed.
Its a tradeoff.
I know shit about kernel design as well but the arguments I see are as follows....
With kernels getting huge, microkernels could be easier to write and maintain since they have to be bugfree and stable. Macrokernels are easier to write generally but when huge can lead to problems. A kernel that has a bug brings down a machine unlike a userspace app. What is Linux? 70 million lines??
In this day and age of fast hardware and very bloated software and kernels, the argument to use a microkernel is quite strong. More userspace and less code touching the hardware can make sense. Also the speed difference is less and less of an issue today.
Qnx is a microkernel and so is AIX. Both are the most stable operating systems out there besides OS/390.
http://saveie6.com/
I think it has been admitted that though technically it would be a good idea, the encouragement it would be to hardware makers to produce binary modules would damage the linux kernel more in the long term, since it would lead to something comparable to the windows world, where there are no open source drivers.
Currently the cost of maintaining a closed-source driver for linux is prohibitive, so any hardware maker that wants their hardware to work on linux is strongly encouraged to release their hardware specs, and plenty of them do. With a solid binary-only framework in place, there would be little to no encouragement to release specs, and so most drivers would end up being closed source.
To sum up: technically good, politically bad, so no go.