Slashdot Mirror
The Linux Identity Crisis
Jayze Calrtini writes "From an article from ZDNet:"If you've been following the current rift in the Linux community between Linus Torvalds and his minions squaring off against Con Kolivas and the mainstream Linux fanatics, you probably know that it's getting quite heated.
You also probably know that these two entirely different ideas could create three possible paths Linux can take for the future: stay geeky and appeal to the advanced tech guru in all of us; go mainstream and leave the advanced functionality and reliable kernel behind to compete with Microsoft and Apple; or face a "civil war" that could lead to total Linux annihilation."
I vote for total annihilation.
I mean, with Vista, who cares about Linux anymore?
The opposite of progress is congress
Two outcomes... Linux gets better or Linux dies. Either outcome is acceptible and should be to any other OSS "believer" as well. Survival of the fittest and all... even if the fittest isn't Linux.
Sounds like another storm in a tea cup. The linux world has had more flame wars than not, and will continue to do so as long as it exists. It's one of the characteristics of a democratic system that people have arguments. The "total annihilation of the linux world" is a load of incendiary exaggeration. Typical slashdot "editorialism", I guess...
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Come on over to *BSD. We're the 'big tent' OS. Room for everyone.
Don't like the direction the kernel is going? Branch the kernel and call it MyBSD. Whatever, no one is going
to get pissed.
Linux folks take themselves WAY too seriously, and besides, *BSD has a 'cool' factor with the chicks that
Linux will never have. You should see the honeys flock to me when I sport my FreeBSD tshirt.
Come on in to BSD, boys, the water is fine.
The article--no, make that rant--has nothing to do with the debate between Linus and Con. The author somehow thinks that this technical debate about the kernel's workings has something to do with "Linux" desktop usability. The author clearly does not understand that there is a difference between the Linux kernel, the thousands of programs that comprise a Linux distribution, and the distributors who glue all this stuff together. He says Linux shouldn't "go mainstream" (here I guess he means distributions) and ignores the fact that Ubuntu can go mainstream while Gentoo can stay geeky.
Total waste of time; prevalence of this crap on Digg is why I stopped reading it, and now Slashdot isn't too far behind it seems.
Penny - plain text accounting
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
One part of me likes the first two ideas. I mean, there could eventually be a Windows killer distro out there. And at the rate things are going, Ubuntu seems to be the likely candidate. On the other hand, Linux does have a place with hardcore geeks out there who like to tinker and tune the kernel.
A second part of me is wondering why we all can't get along. Linux isn't going to be annihilated. Even if Torvalds were to walk out in front of a bus tomorrow, development of the Linux kernel will not cease entirely. Businesses have too much riding on Linux for it to fail. I could be wrong; but I highly doubt the doom sayer's claims.
The game.
What really pisses me off as far as Colivas camp is concerned is that they equate 3D games smoothness to desktop performance and keep on quacking about "desktop linux performance". Their stuff has nothing to do with it.
It is just one tiny facet of desktop linux. Further to this, in order to demonstrate any of the performance you have to throw in two big unknowns - a binary only driver and a card without a fully disclosed and known specification.
Self-serving benchmarks for 3D game on local machines should not be used to claim superiority in all desktop linux tasks period. In fact they should not be considered at all at least until something comes out of the recent ATI and Intel spec disclosures. When non-binary 3D accelerated drivers become widely available there will be a point to start benchmarking towards 3D performance and smoothness. Until then this is a complete waste of everyone's time.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Why can't it keep the nerdy, hackable kernel and go mainstream at the same time? I though that was the reason why we have different distributions; obviously not everyone's going to be happy with Gentoo, luckily the casual user has Ubuntu and Linspire, and us network admins have our server distros. Do these people really have this George Lucas kind of power over the things they have released to the public, or is the community in the driver's seat enough to keep it working for everyone? I feel like it certainly leans more to the latter, although I guess I'm pretty far removed from the development process.
This looks like vaporous hype designed to try and make linux look unstable. Didn't Con Kolivas say last july he's leaving linux kernal development?
How did this make the
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Maybe. Maybe not. It depends.
Either way, it doesn't matter and we win. If the kernel doesn't fork, then probably some kind of compromise has been reached that brings the best of both worlds. If the kernel does fork, we get two independent projects, perhaps each geared at different requirements.
This has happened before. Firefox started as a fork of Mozilla Seamonkey. The needs of embedded developers have spawned small Linux kernels like ELKS. Ximian started as a GNOME fork that eventually was merged back in. Then there's egcs vs. gcc, and so forth...the list goes on and on.
In the end, the community wins. We get better code, and in some cases, we get new projects that meet specialized needs.
My blog
I actually agree with Con's assessment that Linus' refusal to accept these performance enhancements shows that the desktop is not a priority in the core Linux kernel, just as embedded devices are not. What I don't understand is why there's so much controversy over creating a kernel variant to address this. It's been done before, and these variants seem to coexist more or less peacefully with the core. You have uClinux handling embedded devices, while SELinux has a following among the security community, RTLinux does realtime stuff, and so on. Why should a "DeskLinux" with Con's performance enhancements be any different?
Just another article spreading FUD by making it appear that some internal rift will cause the downfall of Linux.
This whole thing scheduler issue and Con thing regarding focus on the desktop is rather funny.
This is linux we are talking about here, don't like the direction feel free to change it. If no
one will listen patch your own kernel and call it my ultimate desktop edition. It certainly would
not be the first time a focused distro has been developed.
Bottom line, there is no rift in the community somebody cried because there scheduler got beat out. I assume this is because it did not make the cut for some reason, however if I wanted to run Con's scheduler I would just patch my kernel and run it.
Got Code?
I don't see the point. Every problems needs a specific solution and there's enough room for both solutions.
The article confuses Linus Torvalds' Linux (just a kernel) with distribution.
No matter what Linus thinks, there are still out there very geeks oriented distro like Gentoo and Slackware with "let the user configure himself everything" in one end of the specturm and Ubuntu, complete with its "means 'I can't install Debian' in african dialects" types of joke.
The TFA is just a meaningless rant.
For me the two outcomes are without linux dying, because each variant is fittest for some specific usage pattern (geek vs. joe 6pack). And thus both outcome may happen simultaneously.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I do not consider myself a nerd of geek. I use Linux because it works for me, because I avoid vendor lock in, because it is easier to admin and secure.
The FUD machines are still running at full speed and spewing loads of irrelevant lies, damned lies, statistics, and general crap. It's done because it is rather effective on the uninformed masses of managers who have little depth of knowledge and simply want "safety".
Seriously, the Linux kernel is in no danger of imploding any time soon. The community is rather strong and resilient. Really, the big difference is that the development process is visible, as opposed to proprietary software houses where these conversations are inside the walls of the company. The debates we're hearing about are a normal part of development and will eventually lead to a solution that works for everyone.
Desktop Linux vs. "Server Linux" is a total non-issue at the kernel level. The userland tools and interfaces are far more important, and really the only real roadblock right now is a few hardware manufacturers' active resistance to working with free software. This isn't so much a conspiracy to lock out certain operating systems, it's just a way to manage their obselecence cycles to ensure future sales. After all, if customers can keep using that printer until it actually wears out then quarterly profits will see no replacement sales bump when the next Windows release comes out.
This resistance is starting to fray around the edges, and we can see the evidence in AMD/ATI's starting to open up chip specs and Dell's entry into the desktop Linux market. It's beginning to become a non-viable business model to actively impede interoperability with open source software.
Mainstream a Linux desktop, and by mainstreaming, I mean make it commercial. Make it so Joe Notageek, and his grandmother, can install it with less clicks than it takes to install Windows. Provide apps for it.
This is a vastly overblown issue. Normal people don't install OSes. Normal people don't even understand what an OS is. They buy computers, not OSes.
This is the biggest difference between Joe Average, and geeks. To a geek, a computer is a collection of (mostly replaceable) components. To Joe Average, it's an appliance like his microwave, iPod or DVD player. How many people do you know who upgrade the coil in their microwave ?
You should check out www.groklaw.net. There has been a lengthy article just recently about the latest anti-Linux FUD campaign. Now that SCO is bankrupt and nobody believes anymore that there is any Unix code copied into Linux illegally, they had to come up with something new. The new campaign is: Linux is self destructing! Sources are the usual suspects, like ZDNet in this case.
However, if you think about it, there are several thousand Linux developers, and with that many developers, occasional arguments are unavoidable. The same arguments happen within Microsoft software development, except that you don't read about them on some kernel development newsgroup, and the press doesn't pick up on it.
The article is from ZDNet. The author probably stumbled upon kerneltrap for the first time and thought, "OMG! There's a real *war* happening here! This is news!" -- not realizing that the "war" was business-as-usual.
Another thing the author doesn't seem to realize is that Linux code (the kernel) is forking all the time. It may be support for real-time embedded or support for MMU-less processors, etc. The point is, people experiment, discover something interesting (fork), then try to get the interesting part back into the mainline tree. Happens a lot. Let the code fork in a big way? It will later merge and improve, yet again.
I recommend to anyone covering geek news: Be a lurker for longer than ten minutes and try harder to understand what you're writing about. From the article: "Much like Republicans and Democrats, Linux is dominated by two factions with entirely different ideas." In psychology I think that's called "projection".