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Is Linus Torvalds Speaking for Linux Anymore?
An anonymous reader writes to tell us CNET is currently running a story asking 'Is Linus Torvalds even speaking for Linux anymore?' It examines both Torvalds' recent public statements on other operating systems and his current approach towards Linux. The author wonders if his utopian view of how an operating system should be viewed and used is just too alien from what the majority of users are really looking for. "if it were up to Torvalds, beauty and intuition would take a backseat to functionality. But when you look at distributions like Ubuntu or OpenSuse, it looks like no one is paying attention. 'An OS should never have been something that people (in general) really care about: it should be completely invisible and nobody should give a flying [expletive] about it except the technical people.' Sure, that statement makes some sense, but in the grand scheme of things, it's the design and usability factor that makes the operating system much easier to use. And while both Mac OS X and Windows have their issues, for the average person, it makes more sense to use those than Linux."
STFU, you don't know a damn thing about the politics & semantics of FOSS & Linux & Linus Torvalds...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
another idiot reporter confusing a quote about the kernel
Dear CNET Kernel!=OS
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Linus Torvalds and others have said time and time again that the operating system he and the tech people speak of is the kernel of a distribution that end-users really shouldn't care about. Ubuntu, OS X, Windows are just "distributions" of a mixture of applications on top of a kernel (i.e OS). End-users are shielded from all the applications' (Gnome, KDE, OO.o, FF) abstractions built on top of kernel. It is in this sense that Linus believes that users shouldn't care about the OS (read as kernel) because it is expected to "just work". I think this pretty much wraps up the debate here. Go home now, nothing to see here.
Linux is a kernel, not an operating systems. Tack on GNU and you have some pretty good functionality. Add X or xorg and you get pretty pictures. Rip the fabric off your couch and you find a great deal of comfort has been sacrificed for functionality. You can also find $2.73 in loose change and some old peanuts. Ubuntu isn't Linux, it's the pretty fabric stretched across a framework of functionality. -Skip
Correct. If you want to talk about design and usability, go talk to the GNOME people, the KDE people and the FreeDesktop.org people. That's their department. Linus is just in charge of the kernel, a tiny subset of a complete operating system distribution that end users never see and never directly interact with.
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I think the word is "sarcasm" actually.
To the end user, the OS is all the stuff that came in the OS retail box. Applications are things that they have to purchase in a store or download off a website. Now, Linux distros come with package managers. The user doesn't ever have to download an install file or purchase another cd. It's not surprising that new *nix users assume that the whole kitchen sink is "Linux".
You recall wrong: Linux doesn't use any assembly syntax (unless you mean the Linux source code, which indeed uses AT&T syntax in the places where it uses assembly). The assembler syntax you use depends entirely on the assembler you use. If you use gas (which you also do if you use gcc inline assembly), you of course use AT&T syntax. However, if you use nasm, you use Intel syntax (or something very close). Of course, the assembler isn't part of Linux either.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You don't use int 80h any more to make system calls. Instead you jump to an entry in the Linux Virtual Dynamic Shared Object (VDSO) at the top of the 4GB address space of a process, which then takes care of executing the code to enter the kernel, usually the "sysenter" instruction on recent enough x86 platforms.
Except FUD actually stands for Fucked Up Disinformation....
At his point we are arguing something that doesn't really need arguing. The GUI is not necessarily part of the Operating System, as X11 + KDE/Gnome/etc can run on completely different Operating Systems. The BSD series for instance. The terminals are not part of it either - please tell me that the BSD system console is the same thing as the Linux console - they follow the same standards but are completely different - just like the Solaris stuff.
Just because Windows (and used to be Mac as well) ties the GUI to the kernel with more ropes than a Bondage House doesn't mean that the two are not separate.
I maintain my view that the Operating System is invisible to the truly average user, excepting extreme cases such as crashing and troubleshooting. When is the last time the average user surfed around in the SYSTEM registry hive of Windows?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...