Ubuntu 16.10 To Be Powered By Linux Kernel 4.8 (softpedia.com)

Reader prisoninmate shares a Softpedia report: We've been monitoring the Ubuntu 16.10 development cycle for quite some time now to see what Linux kernel version the upcoming GNU/Linux operating system will be based on, and for now, it remains powered by the same kernel packages as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). Also, it looks like Ubuntu 16.10 has been switched to a universal local DNS resolver service. However, the Ubuntu Kernel Team published the other day a new installation of their weekly newsletter, informing the community that Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) would soon be rebased on the latest stable Linux 4.6 kernels. Then, it will move to the Release Candidate builds of Linux kernel 4.7, and after that, the operating system will finally be switched to Linux kernel 4.8.

Comments

The parent comment isn't flamebait.

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent comment should not be modded flamebait. It obviously isn't. It makes numerous true, although painful, observations about the sorry state of Linux distros today. Instead of trying to censor that description of reality, the Linux community should take it to heart.

The fact that Linux is at maybe 1% or 2% of the desktop/laptop market, with Windows at about 85% and OS X taking the rest, completely backs up what the parent wrote. This is even after the Windows 8, and to a lesser extent Windows 10, disasters, which gave Linux a perfect opportunity to take some of Windows' market share.

Some fool will probably come along and bring up Android at this point, but the reality is that it is nothing like traditional Linux distros. Android is basically just the kernel, with what's essentially a proprietary software stack running on top of it. This backs up what the parent is saying: Linux is only successful when all of the traditional software running on top of it (the GNU tools, systemd, X, GNOME/KDE/Xfce/etc) are thrown away and replaced, and the typical user has no idea at all that the Linux kernel is even present.

I was a Linux user for many years. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s I believed it really had a chance at becoming a viable alternative to Windows. But then it's like the Linux community decided to collectively go stupid and ruin their offering with shit like systemd, GNOME 3 and Unity. Linux became unusable for me. Now I use OS X, even if it is proprietary and costs more. At least it works.

Re:The parent comment isn't flamebait.

[Immerman]

I agree with the sentiment that Linux "went stupid", though we seem to be getting back to a competitive place again, and I understand why it happened.

Basically the existing infrastructure had in many ways been pushed to the limits of what it could achieve. It offered a solid, viable, mature alternative to Windows, but had very little room for further growth - basic design assumptions made a decade before were beginning to present serious challenges to offering further features, especially in the realm of responsive multimedia (I can't tell you the problems I encountered with sound and advanced 3D graphics) and general "bling". Largely irrelevant to serious work, but serious roadblocks to further competition for desktop users with Windows XP and beyond, with it's relatively solid kernel and focus on being multimedia and game friendly. It's important to remember that XP was itself a massive reworking of the Windows system and GUI to shed the limits of it's predecessors, but it benefited from massive corporate coffers that could fund extensive testing and "polish" before deployment. And it still took a few years and a couple major updates before it was really "ready".

Gnome3 and KDE4 were "answers" to the maturity issue. The previous versions were, pretty much, finished. They did pretty much everything well, and had been pushed about as far as they could be without seriously coercing things to do stuff they were never designed for, which makes for unpleasant coding, a major issue when development depends on volunteers. If you were a UI developer there was no longer much more to be enjoyed short of a major infrastructure overhaul to add massive new potential, aka Gnome3 and KDE 4. My only real complaint is that they were adopted as the default by so many major distros while still half-baked - at that point they offered little real benefit to either users or distro developers other than hype and "bling", and cost a great deal in stability and maturity.

SystemD on the other hand promised a huge benefit to distro developers in the form of offloading a whole lot of infrastructure maintenance to a separate project, and (ideally) few user-visible changes. It too was adopted before it was ready, but in that case it was pretty much necessary (assuming the eventual adoption was desired). System infrastructure requires testing across a wide range of hardware, which requires wide deployment. And unlike the GUI, it's too tightly integrated to just be swapped around as desired on a live system.

Niche distros are not a replacment for Debian.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those distros you mention are not replacements for modern, mainstream distros like Debian or Ubuntu in any way.

Slackware is ancient, and requires far too much work to get it reasonably usable. Maybe it's good if you're a hobbyist Linux user who likes to tinker on the weekend, but Slackware is just not an option for anyone who needs to get real work done quickly.

Gentoo isn't much better than Slackware. Its compilation approach isn't an option for most people, too. They don't want to wait minutes, hours or even days before they can start using software. They don't want to pay for the electricity needed to power the compilation. They don't want the extra wear-and-tear on their hardware.

CRUX is a niche distro. Niche distros aren't an option because they can be much harder to get support from when things go wrong, there's much less of a guarantee that security issues will be found and fixed promptly, and the long-term viability of these distros is very questionable. When there are only one to three people working on a distro, it's a huge risk to use it for anything serious.

Devuan is a fucking joke. I followed its early development, and the first few months were a lot of infighting. Certain factions would accuse others of being "systemd trolls" and nonsense like that. Debian, even with systemd, is still far better than Devuan is. Of the options you listed, Devuan is by far the worst.

While the shitty niche distros you mention aren't viable replacements for real Linux distros, it turns out that FreeBSD is actually an excellent replacement. It has a large user community. It has responsible and responsive developers, and frequent maintenance and releases.

We aren't seeing Linux users moving the shitty alternatives that you proposed. We're seeing them abandon Linux altogether, and moving their systems over to FreeBSD! That should scare the living hell out of the Linux community. It's losing some of its best users, administrators and developers to FreeBSD. Over the long run, this can be a disaster. These are the kinds of users that the Linux community needs to keep if it wishes to remain viable.