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

[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

[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.

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.

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*.