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."

Comments

FUD alert

[Captain Splendid]

One of the replies in the comment thread of TFA sums up the response we'll see in this thread rather well IMO:

No, the truth of the matter is that Linux was originally developed because some kid in Finland wanted a better Unix clone on the 386 than Minix could provide. The "counter-culture" happened because he wasn't alone in that desire and so people joined in on Linux. Linux quickly gained popularity because at the time BSD was embroiled in a legal battle with AT&T and the FSF/GNU were completely unable to get their Hurd kernel out the door.

No one person in the open source community speaks for the entire community - most everyone speaks for themselves. There are a few people who can speak for individual projects (such as Linus and the Kernel) but no one can speak on behalf of everything. A few people have claimed that they speak for everyone, but they're just being deluded (and I say this on behalf of everyone in the open source community :-).

More CNET FUD if you ask me. Although I'd probably do the same thing in their position. After all, their business is closely tied to the PC and, to a lesser extent, the Windows OS, so for every bit of ground gained by Linux, they can either risk losing relevance or have to expend time and money keeping up.

Re:FUD alert

[spitzak]

After all, in Unix, terminals and other IO devices are a part of the core OS

Oddly enough, this is one of the worst aspects of Unix design and easily disproves your whole argument. In fact the Unix tty interface is the perfect argument why gui should *not* be in the system!

An intelligent system would have made the tty driver deliver the bytes unchanged directly as the user typed them to the application. Line editing and echo and so on would be done by the process.

On Unix it is an incredible pain to get the terminal put into "raw" mode so you can get single characters (as any on-screen editor wants). We also have bugs that should have been fixed ages ago, such as the fact that backspace often does not work, these cannot be fixed despite the apparent trivialness due to the fact that there is a complex api that basically dictates the implementation of the user interface (in this instance there is a single "what key does backspace" field, and you cannot add a new one without being incompatable). Also if you want to do *anything* more fancy than the normal io, such as every shell in the world that now does history editing, you have to force the terminal into raw mode and thus you are forced to replicate all the ui code in your own program anyway, thus defeating any possible reason for it to be in the system! It is also why there are "pseudo ttys", these are a horrible hack so that your terminal emulators can work, because all programs were designed to talk to this specialized tty driver, rather than being able to be connected to a plain pipe, which they would have been if they used raw tty i/o.

Putting the GUI into the system is exactly the same mistake as the Unix tty driver. It is pretty sad that nobody is learning from mistakes made 37 years ago and is repeating them even today. Yet they are...

What does Linus have to do with Linux?

[Prien715]

Linus writes/maintains the kernel last I checked. It's not the kernel that makes an OS easy to use, as the Mach Kernel isn't drastically different from an API standpoint, but OSX is much easier to use.

If we think Linux is hard to use, why not blame the people who write the higher level utilities rather than the kernel itself?

I don't think this is a real argument

[riley]

I don't think the term "Operating System" mean the same things to all people.

Linus was talking about the things that truly are invisible to the average user: the API, the filesystem, etc. Not the user interface. When you are speaking about operating systems with someone who has written one, it must be realized that all the terminology is not the same. Ubuntu is a distribution of linux, with a lot of work put into the UI. That is a good thing, but it is not the same thing as talking about device drivers.

OS X is, at that level, a BSD operating system, with a really good UI and a sort of half-assed filesystem (no flames, I use OS X boxes, and they work well, but the filesystem is really from an earlier era).

There is nothing that keeps the functionality of the low level OS from the elegance of a well crafted UI.

Understand the Customer

[PPH]

Perhaps the writer of TFA doesn't understand the s/w business in general or the Linux business in particular.

Linus (should) speak to his customers, the "technical people" who build the distros or some other product where they need to get down into the nuts and bolts of the O/S.

Each of these "technical people", the creators of Ubuntu, OpenSuse, or some product with embedded Linux needs to speak to their customers in turn. That's the beauty of Linux. Its a tool that can solve multiple problems without bothering the end user with the details of the underlying implementation.

Off-topic bit starts here:
That's why Google succeeds and Mic-Yah-ro-hoo-soft will fail. Microsoft expects all of its consumers to be immediately aware of the existence of the Microsoft brand name in all of their interactions with third party applications. Google, OTOH, does quite a bit of business with third parties, but in many cases, its difficult to tell unless you happen to watch the browser status bar when a Google domain name zips by, loading an ad. Most third party vendors don't want their market presence prefixed by a big, flashing banner Brought to You by Microsoft: and then their business name below that in small print.

Its the same with the Linux kernel.

Re:Sorry, you're wrong. The OS IS the user interfa

[jon3k]

No.

"An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources."

That's like saying a car is a machine with 4 wheels, cruise control and A/C because mercedes-benz uses those, so that becomes the definition of all cars. I have quite a few Linux servers without a GUI - is Linux no longer an OS?

FOSS is BIGGER than Linus -- or anyone else

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Linux is bigger than Linus, and he's perfectly willing to admit that. FOSS is bigger than Linus Torvalds, or Richard Stallman, or any of the other luminaries whose names we hear bandied about from time to time. It's bigger than any of us, and that's the way it should be.

Linus never claimed to be the standard-bearer of a new era of computing. He never claimed to be the successor to Richard Stallman (or to Bill Gates, for that matter). He never claimed to be the chief architect of an open source operating system. He's a kernel developer. And a damn good one, too -- but at the end of the day, that's all he is, and all he claims to be. And he's fine with that.

And he knows that the job of a good piece of software is to get its job done without calling attention to itself. Linux does that admirably. It is unfortunately a lesson that Microsoft will never learn.

he never has been

[nguy]

Linus is heading the Linux kernel development and he's doing a pretty good job at that. He does not, and has never, "spoken for" the Linux community as a whole.

Re:FUD alert-Plug leak.

[Vectronic]

Im not sure what your point is... as I said: "Operating System's influence on this is rather limited" I didnt say that it was completely irrelivant what OS the GUI was running on... how the GUI looks and performs is based on how the Base window system is coded (ie: X11) however you can add layers to this (ie: GTK+, or DirectX) which allow even more possibilities.

Your TCP/IP example proves this....

HTTP, XMPP, SSH are all based on TCP, TCP is based on IP... so no matter how "unreliable" IP may be, its reliability can be improved depening on the layers added themselves, or how many layers are added, at the expense of certain things like Performance. such as StarDock WindowBlinds can achieve many many things that Windows Interface unto itself cannot, however at the expense of performance.

Given the choice....

[moosesocks]

Given the choice, I'd pick Torvalds over RMS any day.

Although the analogy's not perfect, Torvalds is the Steve Jobs of the OSS world, whilst RMS is Ballmer.

(And please don't view this as 100% of a flame. RMS's contributions to the Open Source world have been vast. However, I don't think he's particularly good as a spokesman or to be "at the helm" of Open-Source development. He's also a bit too stubborn on his ideologies, as shown with the GPLv3 debacle.)