Slashdot Mirror
Negroponte says Linux too 'Fat'
Cadef writes "According to a story on CNet News.com, Nicholas Negroponte says that Linux has gotten too fat, and will have to be slimmed down before it will be practical for the $100 laptop project. From the article: 'Suddenly it's like a very fat person [who] uses most of the energy to move the fat. And Linux is no exception. Linux has gotten fat, too.'"
We're creating 100$ laptops to donate to third world countries that cannot even feed themselves so they can use linux and surf wikipedia? Right. Why not SELL the laptops instead of making them exclusively for third-worlders? I don't care about the third world at all. If they cannot feed themselves then I certainly don't want to have anything to do with them much less give them free laptops.
How moronic; we develop the laptops just for violent and unappreciative third worlders. I say we ignore 'em and focus on bettering ourselves
It's a big bloated OS not unlike Windows and OSX. Anyone who can't see that is a zealot. In fact, Linux is ugly too so a diet won't really help it. losers.
It takes forever to start Linux on a PC compared to Windows98. And after giving the command to shut down, it scrolls dozens of lines of incomprehensible text showing its 'shut down process'. And all the distributions that I've tried work like this. I feels like I'm shutting down the entire Pentagon.
Jeez, guys, this is supposed to be an appliance. It doesn't take three to five minutes to shut of a color TV set.
Linux isn't going to be taken seriously until you'all fix this shit. A PC should be ready to work with within five seconds of power on and should shut off within three seconds. This is not an unreasonable goal. It just seems that way because everyone that is the Linux headspace is still thinking in terms of 1970's Unix mainframe mentality. Like "this is a computer system, it is very complex, it runs very important things, it is very powerful, it must not be fucked with for any trival reason, it does not shut down, it does not go down, it does not fail, it is a manifestation of the power of the gods, kneel, peasent!"
This is a horseshit attitude nowdays when 32-bit processors cost less than an hour of minimum wage. But it lingers on and on. We all have fast hard disks that load megabytes in seconds, so it's no big deal to load what we need only when we need it. And we all have flash disks that hold 256 Megabytes in non-volatile memory in a chip the size of a toenail. So there's no reason to wait and wait and wait while megabyte after megabyte is transfered from one computer memory section to another every time the power is turned on.
Negroponte is right. Linux is too fat. And it loads too slowly, and takes forever to shut down. And if we can actually fix this situation, then you'll be able to count on your fingers and toes the number of quarters before Microsoft evaporates like the memory of vile fart.
Both software and hardware grow. Software grows in terms of functionality,
Bullshit. Linux programmers have mainly gotten lazy with the amount of RAM and disk you can get for dirt cheap these days.
Want an example? strace konsole and see how many bloody files it opens : nearly 200. TWO FRIGGIN' HUNDRED FILES simply to open an xterm!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They don't need cheap laptops or Internet access. That's the least of their concerns.
What they really need is some good basic education and someone to teach them that there are OTHER countries in the world besides USA. Most of them actually have nice people residing in it and many of them are nice to live in too. Better in fact.
Besides, if you want "light" OS, just go get yourself a copy of OS/2 or eComstation. 500MB is more than enough for OS and applications and room for data (and it still works better than KDE or GNOME).
In bulk, the cost would be less than the cost you need for a bigger HD and more expensive (i.e. higher-power) equipment.
The Linux kernel is fat. It's a helluva lot more fatter than what it was 5 years ago. Feature inclusion always leads to bloat. Not only that, but the 2.6 kernel tree has been the most unstable that I can remember (from 2.2 onwards). People call Microsoft Windows bloatware, but you might want to take a look at Linux before throwing mud - some of it will stick to you. Now, freeBSD etc, are much more slimmer kernels, but you do get less features. This all being said, it's about the same level of "fatness" as Microsoft Windows is in all honesty. Just because it's fat, doesn't mean that it's any less unreliable either, it just means it'll consume more memory and system resources to run the kernel. For most modern computer systems, it's not a big deal.
/proc/meminfo
If you don't believe me, grab something like Redhat 5.2. Grab an old Pentium 100 with 64mb of RAM. Load Redhat 5.2. Console only, no X. Check memory usage of the kernel etc, via:
cat
Now - install Fedora Core 5 onto this very same desktop, again, without X. Run the same command again. See how much more memory that kernel loads. For the sake of things, keep the setup simple, mouse, monitor and keyboard only, nothing else.
You'll see that I've proven my point about memory usage quite nicely by then. And memory usage is directly related to kernel bloat (and of course, features). The same thing applies to Microsoft Windows as well (compare Windows XP to Windows 95 on the same machine - of course, you can't easily turn off the GUI).
Dave
Slashdot can go and get fucked.
Here's an alternative.
For example, try telling your mother (or his) that she 'uses most of her energy to move fat.' Would you expect this to be received well?
It's true that Linux has evolved into something not suitable for his project, and that everybody knows this, and that most people are quite happy with the fact that Linux does nice things on modern hardware. But his reaction to this state of affairs is not a mere description of "what the challenges of the software side of his project are," it's an insult that he hopes will persuade someone to turn Linux into something that IS suitable. This demonstrates a remarkable lack of social skills on his part.
This does not bode well, coming as it does from the leader of a project whose success depends on hundreds of millions of dollars of charitable donations. And regarding an area that depends on a loosely knit organization of people who write code for the fun of it.