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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.
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.
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!").
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