According to Linus, Linux Is "Bloated"

mjasay writes "Linus Torvalds, founder of the Linux kernel, made a somewhat surprising comment at LinuxCon in Portland, Ore., on Monday: 'Linux is bloated.' While the open-source community has long pointed the finger at Microsoft's Windows as bloated, it appears that with success has come added heft, heft that makes Linux 'huge and scary now,' according to Torvalds." TuxRadar provides a small capsule of his remarks as well, as does The Register.

Comments

Problem

[sopssa]

"Okay, so the summary of this is that you expect that 12 per cent to be back to where it should be next year, and you expect someone else to come up with a plan to do it," joked Bottomley. "That's open source."

That is also the problem. Everyone adds pieces and eventually it starts to become a mess. Then someone else should fix it.

Re:Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all software.

Re:Problem

[sopssa]

But when its open source, it's easier to think that maybe I cant be bothered to look at this now, someone else can do it. When its proprietary software and you get the assignment to look at it, you pretty much have to do it.

Re:Problem

[Galactic Dominator]

Properly managed opensource projects deal with this appropriately, some do not.

Properly managed proprietary projects deal with this appropriately, some do not.

Re:Problem

[bostei2008]

I agree.

The people hating messes are the developers which have to look at this day by day. Cleaning up code is never something managers care about - its always driven by developers with a sense for order and simplicity.

That means that Open Source software has a higher chance of getting cleaned up than propietary software, because there you have a higher percentage of truly motivated developers and no managers to bug them. Sigh...

Re:Problem

[Hal_Porter]

How does that work? In a proprietary project if your boss says "do this" you either do it or find another job. In an open source project you could just flame the hell out of the guy that told you on the public mailing list and carry on working on something else.

And in a proprietary project if customers want something fixed they can threaten to not pay which in even the most incompetent company will tend to make your boss tell you to fix it. In open source that mechanism does not exist.

Re:Problem

[renoX]

That's false of course:
1) the deciding factor for project management is the non-commercial/commercial status of a project, not the closed/open state of the source.

2) for non-commercial projects, both developers 'goodwill' and proper management are needed to avoid bloat; whereas for a commercial project only proper management is needed (as the management decides where the money will go).

Note that the Linux kernel is a blend of non-commercial and commercial projects as many developers are paid to work on the Linux kernel and many aren't.

Re:Problem

[Lumpy]

Cleaning up code is never something managers care about

Most managers care a LOT about cleaning up code. It's a waste of time in their eyes and most will write you up for wasting time if they discover that you are doing it.

They wanted it done last week, cleaning up code misses deadlines and is a waste of time as far as management is concerned.

Re:Problem

[DrgnDancer]

The same way people in raid guild do what they're supposed to in raids even though it's only a game and raid officers can't do anything to you really; or members of Civil Air Patrol follow military customs and courtesies toward their officers despite those officers having no actual UCMJ authority; or people in SCA listen to the nobles of their "Baronies" despite those people not having any real world authority. When you join a group or a project, you agree to abide by the rules of the group or project. If you eventually find that you can't, you generally either leave or are forced out. if the project lead on a properly managed project asks you to do some boring grunt work, you either do it or find a new project and someone else will be asked to do the work.

If the project is generally fun or personally beneficial for you to work on, you'll do the grunt tasks you're asked to do, because otherwise you'll eventually be off the project. If the project wants to keep it's user base (and most do) it'll fix as many problems as it can to keep the users happy.

Re:Problem

[sylvandb]

Why should Linus focus for Desktop Linux. It is a dead horse... Deal with it. Its a Dyeing market. Let Microsoft go down with that ship. Linux should be designed better for cloud/distributive processing, and server stuff. We are getting to a point we don't need desktops we need a thin client that can connect to the network. And let someone else do the work.

LOL

People have been denying the need for and predicting the death of desktop computing since before desktop computing existed (for at least 50 years, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquote).

The only thing that has happened is that computing has become more and more pervasive as people hold more computing power in their hand than existed in the computer room 50 years ago.

If desktop computing ever goes away, it will be because the desk is gone. People will still have their own computer(s), and every computer will need an operating system. That OS might as well be Linux as anything else.

Re:Problem

[ThePhilips]

Why should Linus focus for Desktop Linux. It is a dead horse...

And in some part is a dead horse thank to Linus himself.

Point is that "perfect kernel" from system developer POV, is "piece of useless junk" from POV of application developers.

Sound interface is at best dysfunctional. Video acceleration is constantly "under construction" (redone 5th time now or so). Real-time timers required for smooth multimedia and games are still at large.

Just look at Apple's Mac OS X on how problems have to be handled. Instead of debating about what should/shouldn't be in "perfect kernel," people concentrate their work on areas which actually relevant to application developers and of benefit to end users. Apple took the line "if we don't do it who else" while Linus' official line is something like "do it in userspace" or "do not care. don't have to. I'm system programmer."

Obvious weird Windows comparison

[dingen]

Of course nobody refers to Windows' kernel when people call it bloatware. Linus however is not talking about Linux as a distro or an operating system, it's just the kernel that's too bloated in his view. And with over 11 million lines of code, it's hardly even a flame.

Now if only he had developed a microkernel instead...

Re:Obvious weird Windows comparison

[dingen]

Well, if you just take a look at this monster I think you'll quickly will come to the conclusion that even providing the most basic functionality can lead to something quite complicated. And of course, "basic functionality" in 2009 means something else entirely when compared to 1991 when Linux started out.

It should be noted that of course the module-system works pretty good to keep things organised, so no developer needs to dig through millions of lines of code to make a few tweaks. But it's a monster nonetheless.

Specialist's bloat is not user's bloat

[Dystopian Rebel]

What "bloat" in software means to LT as the high priest of the kernel and what bloat means to me as a user are two different things.

To a user, bloat means awkward, slow, inefficient, and needlessly large (if my storage space or bandwidth is limited). But these are all *perceived*. I don't perceive Linux to be bloated.

In fact, I find *NIX with almost any window manager to be the most efficient computer OS I have ever used. Linux is the best of them, despite being a clone of the UNIX userland.

If an OS can boot from a floppy or small USB key and be totally usable, it is certainly not bloatware. Rewrite the Linux userland in MONO or Java and then we'll talk about bloat.

Re:Specialist's bloat is not user's bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I find Open Office to be bloated compared to MS Office.
KDE/Gnome to be bloated to XP.

That's why I use the best tools for me: MS Office and XP (in that order)

It's not perfect, far from it, but works the best for me.
KDE, Gnome, OO just feels like molasses everytime I try, and don't misunderstand:
I've spent years under KDE, but given up on it every time after spending ungodly hours fixing what should work out of the box.
OO has awful UI. I can't use it. Feels like a program from the early 90's which you can't figure out..

Fixing the bloat in KDE/Gnome and OO UI, would work wonders for many people..

Microkernels. Hmm...

[Viol8]

"Now if only he had developed a microkernel instead..."

It would be bloated AND slow.

But hey, it would look pretty in a high level UML diagram.

Re:Are too many added drivers really the cause?

[OzPeter]

I always thought that building drivers into the kernel was going to be Linux's downfall. There is an un-ending supply of equipment that requires drivers and they can't all go into the kernel without some repercussions. Let alone being a black hole that continually sucks up stuff and never deletes it. This design may work well for a small system with limited hardware but is doomed to fail at some point when trying to scale it up for the real world.

Re:Bloat is often moot

[natehoy]

Torvalds' use of the term "Bloated" in this case refers specifically to a loss of performance and an increase in size and memory usage, not of confusion.

I think there are two (competing) goals for the Linux kernel as a whole (well, there are as many goals as there are developers, of course, so the two competing goals are more of a continuum).

On one side, there is a desire for the Linux kernel to support more features so distros can be built to be more like popular mainstream operating systems like Windows and Mac. Ease-of-use, a pleasant user experience, separation/insulation from the dreaded Command Line, pretty graphics, massive hardware support, and support for more "oddball" configurations like multiple screens, etc. So it's desirable to have lots of driver support and lots of hooks into the operating system to support fancy stuff.

On the other, there is a desire for Linux to be small, sleek, and fast, particularly for embedded projects.

The former has been running the show for a while, and I think that's healthy and positive, but the kernel has gotten larger and slower at its basic job. For desktop users, this is good news since a lot of things that had to be done at "higher" levels can now be accomplished directly in the kernel, so they might actually have a faster user experience, and they've got resources to burn since most PCs are specced out for Windows, so Linux has a lot of spare growing room in that hardware.

But for embedded/minimalist supporters, it means they need to add more hardware to their machines to support the now-larger kernel, chock full of features they'll never need or want.

Pick two

[justthinkit]

(1) Large feature set
(2) Compact/optimized
(3) Fast to market

Pick any two...

obvious

[walshy007]

more hardware support and more functional tasks with scope creep means larger code base. nothing to see here, move along.

Ah, the ever quotable Linus.

[hey!]

This is like the salesman's nightmare, where you take the guy from engineering to visit the customer. Things are going great, the engineer can answer all the customer's questions.

Then you realize, *the stupid bastard is answering the questions honestly*.

Honesty is a basic requirement to be a halfway decent engineer. Persistent and incurable dissatisfaction with how you did the last job is another. Even if you *know* you did a great job, deep inside part of you knows you could have done it *better*.

Re:Simple solution

[coryking]

Clearly whoever modded you up has never tried what you are suggesting. I can only name a handfull of open source projects that backport security fixes to old versions and of those, they only backport to versions a few years old.

In fact, I'd say the longest lived "old version" is probably Apache 1.3. The 2.x series has been out for, what, forever and yet they continue to push out fixes for 1.3 (last was Jan. 2008).

I'd wager the biggest complaint I have with most open source is the a) dont understand what true stability means and as a result they b) rarely support old versions. It was one of the prime reasons I switched to FreeBSD. If I install FreeBSD 6.2 today, I know I'll get security fixes for at least a good half decade and probably a bit more if I track the 6.x series.

Yeah yeah yeah, debian, yeah yeah... but dont get me started on the other reasons I switched (cough crappy docs, cough, crappy unstable kernel, cough

Re:I've met the enemy

[sumdumass]

Bloat isn't a problem

Until it causes system instability, slow performance, or increases the size of the code without adding any new features or fixing a problem. Bloat can become a problem, but it doesn't have to be. I thought I would just point that difference out because "isn't" seems to be an absolute which it shouldn't be.

Re:Are too many added drivers really the cause?

[QuantumRiff]

the kernel modules are not its downfall, they are its biggest asset.

I have a laptop HD with my copy of Ubuntu running on it. I popped it into another model of laptop yesterday, (from a Dell D630 to a Lenovo T400) everything worked fine.

I plugged a printer in a week ago, worked fine. Connected my Cannon camera, it popped up and asked if I wanted to import the photos. I plugged in my wife's ipod, and it asked if I wanted to open Rythmbox.

On windows, I would have had to go to countless websites, download drivers (or itunes) install, and troubleshoot. With linux, all of that just worked. On XP it was a pain in the ass to switch between AHCI and compatibility mode on my laptop. With linux, I can switch whenever I want.. it just works..

Microkernel

[bluefoxlucid]

Next year he's going to claim that Minix was doing it right all along. We've seen a lot of Linusisms to that effect... $X needs to be outside the kernel... $Y shouldn't happen the way I've been screaming for years... I told $Z to fuck off because he's stupid but he was right and we need to go do that yesterday ... it's just how Linus is. He's an opinionated fat bastard, and then one day he realizes he's fucking wrong and just goes, "SHIT! Well let's do that then >:O"