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Kernel 2.6.31 To Speed Up Linux Desktop
Dan Jones writes "As the Linux community looks forward to another kernel release, the kernel hackers have been working on improving the memory management so that the X desktop responsiveness is doubled under high memory pressure. The result is an improved desktop experience. Benchmarks on memory-tight desktops show clock time and major faults reduced by 50 per cent, and pswpin numbers (memory reads from disk) are reduced to about one-third. Another improvement coming with 2.6.31 is kernel mode-setting support for ATI Radeon graphics cards, enabling faster user switching and a more seamless startup experience. Peripheral developments that will also improve the Linux desktop experience include support for the new USB 3.0 specification and a new Firewire stack. Even minor Linux releases have heaps of new features these days!"
No, it doesn't imply that at all. It's simply saying that Linux desktop users brag about irrelevent new "features", while basic things that everyone else takes for granted don't work properly.
Whichever way you put it, the fact that this "basic thing that everyone else takes for granted" doesn't work is is Adobe's fault, not the Linux community's fault. It would have made a lot more sense if the complaint were about some actual bug in Linux distros, not a problem with a historically shoddy proprietary plugin.
It may seem to imply that, but that isn't the goal. The goal of that comic is to show the difference between linux gurus who can rebuild their kernel six times a day and get it right every time, and "your average XP --> Ubuntu switcher."
I'm a guy who took gentoo and rebuilt it in my home directory about fifty times with a set of scripts I developed, getting smaller and more specific every time until I could write it to a CF card and drop it in my embedded router that runs at 33MHz, and still run/startup faster than your average home router.
I have a friend who uses Kubuntu (which really is a terrible KDE distro) who is definitely more adept in linux than your average switcher, but he doesn't spend his time memorizing internals or rebuilding kernels either.
To me, I can see that comic and go "neat, that's a lot of CPUs" along with pegging Adobe for being a problem: "yeah, adobe sucks at cross platform." My friend goes "neat, that's a lot of CPUs" and "yeah linux is terrible in that area."
Both pairs of statements are true. (And don't call me on the technicality that "linux is terrible in that area." Quit being hyperliteral; that's my entire point!)
The kernel team is doing a pretty awesome job of speeding things up. Kudos.
Seconded. It also says good things about the state of the kernel and development team that they can focus on optimization and the user experience. It wasn't that long ago the focus was on getting wireless to work. We've come such a long way. Very impressive. Well done.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
As someone who uses Windows but has an open mind, I don't care who is at fault.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I would love to see somebody tell me what's wrong with X without referencing the UNIX Haters Handbook or anything else more than ten years old. I've been using it for a LONG time, in various proprietary and open-source incarnations, and it's come a long way. Xorg generally even works without an xorg.conf these days, and no other windowing system comes close to X's networking/remote-access features.
If you need a bleeding-edge card, you're gaming, and to be frank, Linux is not the best environment for gaming. If, on the other hand, you're interested in solid 2D work with decent acceleration, a solid older card is just the thing. I just picked up a dirt-cheap R400-based card myself. (I'd have stuck with my trusty Matrox G450, but the driver will probably never support modern multihead with xrandr 1.3.)
I disagree. Do you have any reason why you want to get rid of X?
X's code base is ugly at places, and writing pure-X11 applications isn't the most fun thing in the world, but I can't think of (m)any shortcomings that lead to any trouble in real world usage that can't be fixed. Also, X has to offer a lot of things that any new thing wouldn't have. You might not use many of the features you get for free with X, but some of us do. X's architecture can be seen as a shortcoming, but it's also an advantage in many situation. Remote X for example is a great thing.
The biggest problem is all the applications that are currently written for X. You can't rewrite everything, and it is not even worth it. Really. X is working fine, and it's getting better. The same goes for the drivers, and everything that's already in.
And if Google Chrome OS's windowing system doesn't support the X protocol, I can assure you I won't be using it.
The comic didn't imply the kernel. Purists that wash their hands while saying "Linux is just a kernel, not my fault if it cannot (run x, recognize y or perform z)" are the target of this comic which tries to explain why linux (as a whole OS-and-software alternative) is not ready for the desktop.
Hey, you want to know why linux doesn't have more desktop market penetration? Guess what, the average person would try linux and open their favorite youtube video and get pissed off at linux because it doesn't do full screen flash well.
You think that in the same situation Microsoft wouldn't have somone calling Adobe to get the full screen flash video working properly? They understand that it is always the operating system's fault when something goes wrong, no matter what the truth is.
Microsoft may be a giant corporate asshole, but they understand that people's perceptions no matter how misguided will impact the popularity of their product. Look at Vista, at release there were a lot of problems. Now at service pack 2, Vista is performing much better, but its brand name is still mud because of the problems. I personally think this was part of the plan. Windows 7 is coming out, and it is looking to be what Vista should have been.
In the end, the "Windows" brand hasn't been damaged, the "Vista" brand was. And Windows 7 will hit the market sounding like some sort of savior for computers.
Meanwhile, Linux advocates still want to know why the average person won't leave windows.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
What's broken here is that a completely closed off format has become standard on the internet.
ScytheBlade1 is right:
The comic didn't imply the kernel. Purists that wash their hands while saying "Linux is just a kernel, not my fault if it cannot (run x, recognize y or perform z)" are the target of this comic which tries to explain why linux (as a whole OS-and-software alternative) is not ready for the desktop.
Indeed, the xkcd in question (a link to the page, not the image) doesn't hang on technical accuracy. It's absolutely a commentary on issues with the "Linux Desktop", with developers putting a relatively rare server concern such as support for thousands of CPUs ahead of something that pretty much every PC user expects to have (the ability to watch Hulu smoothly).
To nit-pick, however, the comic does seem to imply the kernel. In the alt-text you find:
"I hear many of you finally have smooth Flash support, but me and my Intel card are still waiting on a kernel patch somewhere in the pipeline before we can watch Jon Stewart smoothly."
The author is waiting on a Linux kernel patch to fix the Flash issues he has with his Intel card.
That's one of the more annoying XKCDs as far as I'm concerned. It seems to imply that the full-screen Flash video woes are somehow the kernel's fault. I used to like XKCD, but it seems to be getting dumber and dumber each day.
When Markansoft says the above, it's clear that he prizes technical accuracy in the comic enough to forgo appreciation of the general point of humour. However, is the comic's implication really wrong? I don't know much about how Flash works with hardware, or if it requires any specific support for a chipset. The author seems pretty sure he needs a patch for his hardware set up before he can get the same quality of Flash performance already enjoyed by other Linux users. That certainly doesn't remove Adobe and their cross-platform unfriendliness from the situation, but Linux distros are made from work arounds, and the comic's target is the priorities of developers, not Adobe's open source policies.
Troll. But I'll bite.
X11 is a whipping boy for anyone who's ever had a complaint about a Unix GUI. No matter whether it's a badly-designed application, an unstable driver, or poor kernel scheduling, or a deranged toolkit drag-and-drop model, people always fault X11. And no matter what the root cause of the problem, the solution is always to throw out the X protocol and design something else. People like you fail to account for the possibility that there's actually very little wrong with X, and that it can certainly be the basis for a modern, functional GUI.
There was a very interesting comment on Slashdot a few years ago by Mike Paquette (who wrote Apple's Quartz) explaining why Apple didn't use X11 for OS X. The funny thing, in retrospect, is that every single feature mentioned in Paquette's post has now been implemented for X11, and that's with volunteer work. If Apple had invested resources into making this happen for X instead of reinventing the wheel, everyone would have been better off. Yet despite these additional features, we still retain full network transparency along with full compatibility stretching back to the 80s.
Don't confuse "newer" and "better". X11's architecture is quite good, and is among one of the better designs for a windowing system ever created. It's clean, extensible, fast, and network-transparent. It defines mechanism, not policy, and does its job extremely well. That it's been extended to support all kinds of modern features is a testament to the strength of its original design.
If it weren't for the soul-crushing stupidity, it'd be hilarious that people claim X is slow. X ran quickly on computers with 1/000 the performance of even a modest desktop system today, but it's slow on these modern computers? That makes no sense. People claim that X's network transparency puts it at a performance disadvantage, but neglect that Unix Sockets, used for local communication, are among the faster IPC mechanisms in existence. Criticism of X as a platform is baseless.
I wish there were a Greasemonkey script for Slashdot that would remove from visibility any and all posts containing "XKCD". That way my view of the discussion would look like no such posts existed. While I'd love to endlessly debate the intended message of a guy who draws stick figure comics, it really doesn't have much to do with the latest improvements to the Linux kernel other than mentioning the words. That, and I just don't find XKCD to be endlessly interesting the way a lot of folks here do. It doesn't help that most of the ones mentioned here are quite stereotypical (like the whole "geeks care about things that average users don't, whodathunkit?!" theme). Even if I did find XKCD to be endlessly interesting, I wouldn't bring it up at every possible opportunity. Now go ahead and flame me because I don't think your trendy (around here, anyway) comic is all that clever.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
This is no excuse. The Open Source community has brought us Samba for goodness sake.
Reverse-engineering and making an open implementation of a simple web plugin should be harder than reverse-engineering and implementing Windows domain, RPC named pipes, and file sharing protocols? :)
Not to mention the fact that Adobe has made SWF, FLV, and RMTP open specifications.
> As someone who uses Windows but has an open mind, I don't care who is at fault.
Fair enough on one level but totally unfair on the one that matters here. If the criticism of the Linux community is they concentrate their effort on things that mortals care little for this one doesn't work since the performance of Flash Player is entirely out of their hands.
Flash sucks everywhere, just to varying degrees depending on platform. Go watch the fun in the netbook space as the Intel Atom is being unfairly blamed by clueless pundits for the inability of netbooks with the newer 1280x720 and 1388x768 displays to play full screen Flash video (on Windows XP btw.). We nerds on slashdot know better of course, the problem is Adobe being mindless idiots who can't figure out how to properly use a scaled video surface.
I'd like some green group to calculate how many YouTube videos have been played and how many GigaWatt Hours of electricity have been wasted on software colorspace conversion and scaling because Adobe can't figure out how to use well documented and commonly available features on every video card made in the last fifteen years.
Democrat delenda est
Well, with SVG and the video tag, that is about to change! Big time!
I'm a professional, and man, watch those demos in at least Firefox 3.5 (or something comparable): http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/
The ability to integrate Flash-like FX, Video and Audio SEAMLESSLY with (X)HTML and CSS (and every other supported XML language, like MathML), is just beyond words... It's what I'm waiting for, for at least a decade! And the performance of both environments gets closer and closer to being equal.
With that, soon nobody needs or even wants Flash anymore.
I'll just use those features, and frankly, I can stand "losing" even 50% of the users for it. Those are the dumbest part of the population anyway. You only have problems with those. They can go to AOL or whatever. I have enough clients. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.