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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
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.
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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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.