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Linux Kernel 4.2 Released
An anonymous reader writes: The Linux 4.2 kernel is now available. This kernel is one of the biggest kernel releases in recent times and introduces rewrites of some of the kernel's Intel Assembly x86 code, new ARM board support, Jitter RNG improvements, queue spinlocks, the new AMDGPU kernel driver, NCQ TRIM handling, F2FS per-file encryption, and many other changes to benefit most Linux users.
There's a long list of people who have contributed work to this, and I'd just like to say thanks to all of them.
John
We're getting to the point where the Linux kernel itself is superb, but everything built on top of it is becoming utter shit. This is unfortunate, because the kernel alone is not very useful. The kernel's actual usefulness comes from it laying a solid foundation for the great things that could potentially be built upon it.
Once above the kernel, things start getting pretty bleak. First we have systemd. Its ideological and architectural flaws are such that they cannot just be fixed. For example, you can't just apply some code changes and have binary logging start being useful. No, it's a broken concept, and thus any implementation of it is inherently broken as well. The same applies for pretty much everything else systemd does.
Then we have the desktop environments. KDE isn't too bad, and there are some lightweight alternatives that a quasi-usable. But the former star of the Linux desktop environments, GNOME, has pretty much destroyed itself with its GNOME 3 effort. This is one of the most stunning failures ever seen when developing software. The user experience has been ruined in a way that many thought would not be possible. Yet it has happened.
On top of all of that, we have software like Firefox. Like GNOME 3, its UI has been reworked in the stupidest ways possible, which has in turn destroyed its usability. Long-standing bugs and performance issues go unresolved while the UI gets worse and worse, and even ads have been injected into the browsing experience!
So now we have a fantastic kernel, but a userland that's totally awful from its very bottom to its very top!
This wouldn't even be a problem if we had some diversity among the major Linux distributions, but that has pretty much vanished, too. They're almost all using systemd by default. They're almost all using GNOME 3 by default. They're almost all using Firefox by default. The only ones that aren't, like Slackware and Gentoo, are rife with a different set of problems: they're goddamn impractical. The whole point of using a Linux distro is so that its maintainers do the work to integrate and compile everything, and provide a widely usable default configuration. Gentoo fucks up the compilation part to a large extent, and Slackware totally misses the boat when it comes to providing a usable system out of the box.
The saddest part is that it wasn't always like this. While the kernel has typically been top-notch, the other software running on top of it used to be pretty good. There were numerous init systems, including sysvinit, that were better than systemd. The whole notion of "services management" wasn't even needed because such things become trivial when doing things the UNIX way. GNOME 2 was once a fantastic desktop environment. Firefox used to have amazing usability. Thankfully the kernel hasn't fallen victim to the mediocrity and destruction that has ruined so much of the software that runs on top of it. But this gets us back to the original problem: an excellent kernel is useless without an excellent userland.
With the growing number of distros embracing systemd and systemd's continued march to get its tentacles deeper and deeper into the dependency tree such that it becomes a de-facto "requirement" (and once it's in your house it stays forever, and the next update includes who knows what), is Linux the kernel on its way out? I don't understand why Linus is not more concerned about this than he seems to indicate. People are ditching the system his kernel powers (and therefore his kernel) because of this. At the moment there are enough people still running older systems (e.g., Ubuntu 12.04LTS, 14.04LTS (and variants)) that it's not quite at critical mass yet, but the time will come soon enough that those of us still hanging out on those systems will have to vote one way or another with our feet. I don't want that, but it seems like it's going to happen.