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Linus Torvalds Speaks Out on Future of Linux
SlinkySausage writes "Linus Torvalds has laid out his plans for the future of Linux, including the 3.0 kernel [there probably won't be one], problems with the Linux release cycles and which distro he personally runs on his home PC. '"Compile everything by hand" ones simply weren't interesting to me,' Torvalds says."
But really at this point, even if he stops developing the kernel, someone else will just pick up where he left off. I don't think we can ever really expect to keep one final generation of the kernel. It'll always be changing and morphing to new cpu's, hardware, etc...
cb_is_cool knows where his towel is.
The one thing I really like about Linux is that it adheres more to a Unix tradition of doing things continually and incrementally. Like, it drives me nuts that on Windows, to talk to SQL Server in C++, one has had to go from db-library to odbc to either OLE-DB or ADO... whereas, in a Unixy type mindset, one might ask, what really needed to change about db-library that required a whole new way of talking to databases? And, the answer is, not a lot. It is absolutely wonderful that in Linux there is a core set of APIs that always work, aren't suddenly abandoned to make a new feature that frankly, most people don't need.
So, in my mind, to say that there won't be a Linux Kernel 3.0 or a Linux 4.0 or something like that, is actually a GOOD THING. If you want dramatic, shocking, breaking releases that require you to rewrite 95% of your code to do the same thing, if you want to find that what you used suddenly can't work largely because it isn't supported any more, then Microsoft has plenty of that.
So three cheers for point releases, and here's to the death of "major" releases.
This is my sig.
Not to be too pedantic (yeah right), but you end up with the same product, so that analogy is kind of flawed. More like the waiter asking you 40-50 questions about how you want each part of your meal prepared, to the point where you get really exasperated and say "Just give me the damn surf and turf and don't burn it please."
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
So you're saying AMD/ATI have a worthwhile open source video driver, eh? Oh, they don't? Gee, maybe THAT is why he said that. He may very well be an Intel lover, but that statement you quoted holds no proof of it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
It sounds like you don't grasp the simple brilliance of this. Rather than having the kernel handle these bits, forcing a one-size-fits-all approach, you instead have other teams working on this, developing the GUI, customizing it to the task at hand. Look at Enlightenment, GNOME, KDE, each one fills a need, but none of them are exclusive.
The phrase "My name is Legion for we are many" comes to mind.
Example, at work here, Fedora suits our needs perfectly. While at home, Ubuntu powers my sons desktop and Gentoo is my servers backbone. Yet, when I need to take apps from home, they run with minimal problem. They isolate the desktop from the apps that run on it, giving you infinite flexibility. Yes, it can be overwhelming. Yes, it does not look like a unified front. But by doing this, Linux can be, and is, whatever you need it to be! Hell, my gentoo box doesn't even have a monitor! I ssh in, or when that fails, I have an old teletype in case of emergencys.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I managed to read the slashdotted article, and I think you're sorta missing HIS point. Which is that he is a Kernel Developer, not an OS developer. He's not really interested in the other parts of the system, just like you're not really all that interested in the nitty-gritty of kernel mechanics (which is more than fine, btw).
In other words...you need a lot of different kinds of people to build an operating system. Linus never claimed to be the benevolent dictator of an operating system - just of the Linux kernel. There's a difference, and there can't help but be. Related, yes, but the same thing: No, and they can't be.
Thankfully, there are many people out there who want to focus on stuff like UI design and the like. I might even disagree with Linus that such things are "fluffy", but I don't really think his opinions on that have influenced anybody any MORE toward the side of "we just like to code kernels, we don't care about ease-of-use".
So - yes, but no. Ease of use is an obstacle to widespread Linux adoption: Yes, and everyone knows that. But No, this doesn't really have anything to do with Linus.
If stability means it's dying. As I see it, the current Linux kernel does all that it needs to, and does it quite well. There is no need to upgrade it, because to do so would be an upgrade for upgrade's sake. Anyone in IT will tell you that to upgrade simply for the sake of upgrading is stupid, and will lead to a multitude of problems. The only reason that the Linux kernel would need a version 3.x is because of a fundamentally new hardware technology. Currently, software is driving hardware development; games are written requiring advanced graphics cards. In the 90's, hardware drove software development; chip makers like Intel put out a new processor, and then software was written to take advantage of the advancements of the new chip.
Even advancements in multi-core technology would not require a 3.x series kernel (unless I'm mistaken in my belief that the 2.6.x series supports multi-core CPU's), simply because once you cam make a dual-core CPU functional with the kernel, expanding that functionality to 4, 8, or even 64 cores is simply an expanding of the current code. And even if the current kernel does not support multi-core CPU's, that would be more of a 2.8.x series, rather than an entirely new kernel version.
Anybody want my mod points?
As a Gentoo user since 1.4, I have to say that the common image is incorrect, though I know it's the common Gentoo joke.
I generally don't "compile by hand," I generally "emerge -atv (packageName)" to install or "emerge -atuvDN world" to update. Nor am I a ricer with my CFLAGS settings. It just plain works smoother than the other distributions I've used. Harp all you want to about "waiting for compiles," but I'm out doing other things while that happens. It's not as if you have to sit and watch the compiler activity scroll past. It's the computer's time being used, not mine.
Back when I was on RedHat, I'd see "package X" that wasn't part of the official distribution. So I'd find an rpm and try to install it. Then I'd find that I needed another library, and go searching for that rpm. Sometimes then things would work. But sometimes I'd find that some package was looking for things in SuSE layout instead of RedHat, or I was grabbing an rpm from somewhere that didn't play well with RedHat for some other reason. There was a non-trivial set of packages that I never could get installed and running.
On Gentoo I've had far fewer problems getting things to run. In fact, I've only had 1 intractable problem compiling from source, and that's been Doomsday, which isn't released for amd64. I've had a few transient problems with source-based packages that have soon gotten fixed. But by and large, my biggest problems have been related to binary-only packages.
Oh, and there's nothing about the usually-disruptive "upgrade to the next release." My system is just up-to-date. A few times a year they issue a new profile, but that's generally about as disruptive as upgrading any other package. The only really disruptive upgrades have been things like udev, gcc and xorg, but even with those it's better to take them one-at-a-time and cope, instead of the usual "practically everything has undergone significant changes" of a distribution upgrade.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Because the FreeBSD community did not propel itself to fame on the back of a bunch of "CFLAGS just kick in, yo" kids, maybe?
Because the FreeBSD community as well as the FreeBSD developers [i]generally[/i] tend to have outgrown the fanboyism displayed by most Gentoo followers? (I'm not knocking the gentoo devs here, btw -far from it- I'm going out of my way to exclude them from the 'fanboy' label.)
Oh, and also because FreeBSD doesn't base it's core OS on a fluxating set of packages that can -and do- hose your system on a regular basis if you try to keep it up to date (meaning FreeBSD has a binary patch mechanism instead of "make 'fuck up my system with the latest packages from sourceforge -k?' ".
Mind you, I don't run FreeBSD (haven't since 4.6), but there's a reason why people who have used Unix for a while look down on Linux in general ("it's friday -time to gratuitously change the scheduler again!") and Gentoo in particular ("more CFLAGS means more vroom!").
This is true, it's technically illegal.
/. community a bit of a service even still, because it provides an archived copy of the article for later perusal. The need for this may be less than it was in the past, but as someone who occasionally goes back and reads "the best of Slashdot" from past years, it's frustrating to have a whole discussion archived but with a dead link to TFA, because somebody didn't think anyone would care about their blog in three years time / had a server crash / changed their URLs.
... like it should always be posted as a first-level comment, not into a thread, it should always have the subject "Article Text", should always be posted AC, etc. If you do that, it generally gets buried -- so it doesn't divert traffic from the real site (unless the site gets Slashdotted) -- but it's there for anyone who's really looking, later on.)
However, I've always felt that it does the
Slashdot is a better, more stable archive site than most places on the internet (its track record is basically as good as the Internet Archive's), so it does make a certain amount of sense to keep a copy of the article text around. It's one of those areas where copyright law just fails miserably to encourage an outcome that's useful in the long term.
(Personally I've always felt that there should be a de facto standard for posting article text
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yes, because the machine doesn't know that it isn't a build server that should be pushing generic x86 packages to every server on your network and therefore shouldn't optimze for quad-core Opterons.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Well, there's a good reason not to automatically set it in this case. Maybe you don't want your binaries fine-tuned for your CPU type. For example, which I was in college, I set up a system for my room mate. It was older, and so I didn't really want to compile everything on it. Instead, I had my Gentoo computer set a CPU type slightly less than it actually was, recompiled everything, and then had his system just download the packages from me.
Anyway, Gentoo isn't the reason Windows users don't switch. I would *never* recommend a new user use Gentoo, and even though I've been using Linux for longer than every other OS combined at this point, once I started working I switched away from Gentoo since I just didn't have the time. (Yes, as easy as Gentoo is once set up, it's still not as easy as Ubuntu. Sorry guys.)
Thank God for evolution.
I mean, real collapsable threads. Because one asshole says "gentoo" in a FP and 99% of what was supposed to be about a Linus interview goes to Hell in a handbasket. So I wish it was possible to click on a "[-]" button the second I saw "gentoo" and be spared of all this.
Nothing against Gentoo, but this was a horrible example when this would've been a really useful Slashdot feature.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
People who claim that Torvalds should be doing this or saying that should examine their own positions and honestly consider if they're not simply trying to use him and his position within the community to try and further a particular POV.
This "you have no business compiling..." nonsense is just baseless elitism. Your list has a lot of subtle variants, and the differences between some of them are inconsequential for most users. I've got a couple of compile jobs running at the moment (regression testing patches before I commit them to a subversion repository), and I don't know the CPUTYPE on all of the machines. The finest distinction I usually make is x86-compatible vs. PPC vs. MIPS/SPARC/Alpha/etc. and 32 vs. 64-bits. If I were compiling a high-performance numerical app, it might be worth tracking down more information (e.g. what sort of vector-processing unit is available), but it usually doesn't matter. In a given day, I might be testing my code on Linux on an x86, Opteron, or Itanium processor; on Darwin on a G4, G5, x86-compatible, or x86_64 compatible processor; on AIX/Power5, or perhaps something more obscure. I'm certainly not going to waste a lot brain cycles figuring out the difference between the itanium or itanium2 CPUTYPEs when I've got real work to do.