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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.
"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.
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.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
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.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
(1) Large feature set
(2) Compact/optimized
(3) Fast to market
Pick any two...
I come here for the love
more hardware support and more functional tasks with scope creep means larger code base. nothing to see here, move along.
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*.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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"
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