Linux Turns 25, Is Bigger and More Professional Than Ever (arstechnica.com)

The Linux operating system kernel is 25 years old this month, ArsTechnica writes. It was August 25, 1991 when Linus Torvalds posted his famous message announcing the project, claiming that Linux was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu." From the article: But now, Linux is far bigger and more professional than Torvalds could have imagined. Linux powers huge portions of the Internet's infrastructure, corporate data centers, websites, stock exchanges, the world's most widely used smartphone operating system, and nearly all of the world's fastest supercomputers. The successes easily outweigh Linux's failure to unseat Microsoft and Apple on PCs, but Linux has still managed to get on tens of millions of desktops and laptops and Linux software even runs on Windows.Do you use any Linux-based operating system? Share your experience with it. What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?

Comments

"More Professional Than Ever"

[perpenso]

Of course it is "More Professional Than Ever". Its a corporate led project now, not a hobbyist led project anymore. Most of the development is corporate or corporate sponsored, either way corporations guide Linux's development.

Re:"More Professional Than Ever"

[rubycodez]

Nope, Linus still leads the project, and he is employee of non-profit 501(c)(6) trade association

Re:"More Professional Than Ever"

[perpenso]

Nope, Linus still leads the project, and he is employee of non-profit 501(c)(6) trade association

Linus no longer appears on the top contributors list. Developers are overwhelmingly corporate or corporate sponsored. What he merges into the official branch is overwhelmingly corporate directed development.

Re:"More Professional Than Ever"

[rubycodez]

You are confusing contributing with leading the project.

Re:"More Professional Than Ever"

[SpankiMonki]

Nope, Linus still leads the project, and he is employee of non-profit 501(c)(6) trade association

Yet for some reason, he has never been selected as "Employee of the Month".

Re:"More Professional Than Ever"

[rubycodez]

er, Linux is just the kernel.

The GNU utilities (not corporate) and other open source wares (let's analyze that a bit) that make up the rest of the OS, are the big pieces corporate controlled?

server:
apache web server and tomcat java ee server: 501(c)(3) charitable organization, Apache Foundation
PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, node.js., the big web platforms...nope
mysql - yes oracle, BUT
mariadb is now used more than mysql, community led
postgresql -
java - oracle, very corporate controlled really

desktop:
the major desktops are community led
mozilla foundation: non-profit
chrome browser - yup google
adobe flash - yup though going away in favor of html5

So on the desktop I could choose to be corporate-ware based, or not...

Re:"More Professional Than Ever"

[gweihir]

World domination for Linux has been achieved a while ago and it is obvious that it has been. All the Linux-haters seem to have some pathological mental condition where they are blind to reality. Possibly it is a combination of fear of the unknown and fear of losing the illusion of being the master of their machine, that makes them leash out irrationally.

Re:"More Professional Than Ever"

[brantondaveperson]

Look man, you just don't know how to use your operating system. Perhaps you need to go on a course. All the things you're complaining about aren't problems, once you know your keyboard shortcuts better. Windows alt-tabs through everything, which doesn't scale well with large numbers of windows. Mac alt-tabs through applications, and alt-backticks through windows within that application. Different approach. Being a mac, of course, there are loads of really nice tools that you can install to customise the behaviour of your system (contrary to popular belief). In your case, I suggest that you install Witch (Here). Yes, it costs money. The horror. It's nearly the price of two beers. Explain to me again why the hard work of software developers should be available to everyone for free, again? I forgot the details on that one. If you don't like the maximising behavour, there are tools to sort that out for you. I use BetterTouchTool myself.

It's ironic that someone who wants to install Linux, which pretty much entirely consists of little plugin tools to make stuff happen, hasn't bothered to go looking for the little plugin tools that can customise OSX for you.

Regarding your broken MBP, that's a shame. However, computers do break occasionally, and since you haven't bothered to look it up, you can hold down Cmd+V for a verbose boot, or Cmd+R for the recovery console, which will actually download an entire OS install from the internet and re-install your entire machine for you if you want - including pulling in your time machine backup (you have a backup, right?). Or, if it's something less drastic, you can start the mac in single-user mode (Cmd+S), or try some of the other tools from the recovery mode.

I mean, I get you don't like OSX, and that's fine. But nothing in what you wrote is actually correct, and so I hope I was helpful, and not too patronising, in correcting you. And what exactly don't you like about installing stuff on a mac? Sure beats windows installers - and apt-get on Linux just craps out half the time (I guess I'm doing it wrong... touche...). Android follows more of the OSX model, which is that everything lives in the application package, and you don't bother with sharing components between applications because it causes far more problems than it solves.

Re:"More Professional Than Ever"

[silentcoder]

>Explain to me again why the hard work of software developers should be available to everyone for free, again?
Nobody has ever said that. No really. Nobody ever said that. No. Not even RMS. Free software has nothing to do with price and a lot of free software does cost money. There is no rule against charging for free software and it doesn't make it any less free.

That said...why would I pay even the price of two beers for something that somebody else is offering me free of charge ? When the gratis one also happens to be free (as in freedom) then it wins on every count and there is no sane reason to want the for-pay one.

Anyway, customizing your desktop is such a fundamental feature that the idea that you need third-party tools to do it is a massive black mark against OSX. If you were trying to sell if by saying that, you failed miserably. I've never yet wanted to make a change to the behaviour of my KDE desktop that I could not do within KDE using tools shipped by the KDE project and included in the original install.

Re:"More Professional Than Ever"

[swillden]

You are confusing contributing with leading the project.

Determining what code is written, what new features are developed, is leading the project. Not merging the contributions after ensuring the code is well written.

Linus leads from behind. After a feature is developed, he decides whether it will be allowed into the kernel. It's the same sort of decisionmaking process as in most development workflows, it just front-ends most of the work.

In most development processes, someone will decide "the product should do X", and they'll make some slides and pitch the ideas and the leaders will decide whether or not to pursue it. If they decide to pursue it then the developers will build it, debug it, test it, etc. The process is optimized around conserving a scarce resource, developer time.

In the Linux process, someone decides "Linux should do X", and so they build it, write all the code, debug it, test it... and then they'll send it to Linus, who decides whether or not to merge it. Same process, the difference is that the leader decides on the basis of fully-implemented code, rather than slideware. In the Linux model, developer time is not scarce and the process does not optimize for conserving it.

Cat got my tongue (subjects are dumb)

[TFlan91]

>> I'm afraid that is 64 tasks max (and one is used as swapper), no matter
>> how small they should be. Fragmentation is evil - this is how it was
>> handled. As the current opinion seems to be that 64 Mb is more than
>> enough, but 64 tasks might be a little crowded, I'll probably change the
>> limits be easily changed (to 32Mb/128 tasks for example) with just a
>> recompilation of the kernel. I don't want to be on the machine when
>> someone is spawning >64 processes, though :-)

If only he knew...

It's not Linux

[DraconPern]

It's GNU software that runs on Windows.. There's not even a bit of Linux because it is a clean room implementation.

Professional level audio experience

[s1d3track3D]

What changes would you want to see in it in the next five years?

Still waiting for the year of the desktop. A viable alternative to osx (and ms) for multimedia work, specifically, professional level audio engineering work.

Re:Professional level audio experience

[Voyager529]

Ardour is great, and so is Reaper. The existence of a solid DAW on Linux isn't the issue at this point.

First, one of the major issues is inertia - Logic Pro, Ableton, ProTools, Cubase, Sonar, and FL Studio are all respected names in the field, with lots of users, forums, and ecosystems around them. Audio engineering is very susceptible to a herd mentality, because anyone who uses something different will be told to join the herd, rather than getting actual support.

Next, audio engineering is much more hardware dependent than most CS/IT disciplines. For us, 'input' basically consists of keyboards and NICs, which are interchangeable. Pro audio involves audio interfaces from Tascam, Presonus, M-Audio, and FocusRite, with MIDI controllers ranging from Korg/Yamaha keyboards to guitar pedals and drum pads. We'll circle back to the interface problems in a moment, but the MIDI controllers are largely USB now, meaning there are abstraction layers that may require specialized drivers, mapping software, and plug-ins.

Back to the audio interface question, amongst the major things we have here is that Jack/Alsa are fine for desktops with Realtek chipsets, but when you're dealing with thousand dollar interfaces that can record sixteen channels of audio in real-time with 1ms latency, Jack and Alsa just don't cut it. OSX has CoreAudio and Windows has ASIO, both of which are industry standards that work with those interfaces. Linux would need something similar to it, but even if such a thing were to come into existence, support by the hardware OEMs is certainly not coming into place overnight. Meanwhile, those OEMs need to sell gear, which means that CoreAudio and ASIO handle over 99% of the market, and no one seems to be chomping at the bit to write yet another audio system for Linux to even provide a viable target. Reaper and Ardour could well start on that, but now you have DAW devs stuck writing middleware that already exists on Windows and OSX.

I look forward to it happening, but it's a pipe dream right now. Hardware OEMs are targeting ASIO and CoreAudio, plug-in writers are targeting Ableton, Protools, and VST hosts, industry standard DAWs are targeting Windows and OSX, and a soup-to-nuts Linux ecosystem would require cooperation from everyone at the same time for a market segment that's super picky at best.

User friendly

[Iamthecheese]

If I may, and even if I mayn't, I'm going to rant about the same thing I always rant about in these stories: usability. Desktop Linux is a great operating system for those who have put in the many hours needed to understand its quirks. It's a great operating system for people who never so much as install a new sound driver. For the remaining 80% of users it's a usability nightmare. The wide range of distro's running the Gnome and KDE mean many common interactions differ between computers. And the Linux/Unix ideology of each program doing one thing (and doing it well) means which programs a user will have is unpredictable.

This, in turn, means it's all but impossible to provide a simple, straightforward instruction to a user for how to do something with her machine. Even something that should be dead simple. As soon as a user has to modify a config file or open a command prompt that's a huge roadblock. And no I'm not saying "be like Windows". That implication is a cop-out.It's not about doing things the way Windows does them, it's about making it "just work", and when it doesn't offering highly intuitive graphical interfaces for changing the way it works.

The Linux development community has made huge strides in this direction, but more is needed. Write drivers that interface with Gnome and KDE environments and provide GUI's for every setting. If a driver doesn't gave a Gnome and KDE GUI that covers 99.99% of use cases it's not finished. Make it so a user never, ever has to open a command prompt. Stick to the top three or fewer interfaces, and make them rock solid. No more installing interfaces to install interfaces to install decompressers to compile drivers. Do this and you shall see the year of Linux on the desktop.

Re:User friendly

[F.Ultra]

So why then is there always a post in every Windows article describing how you disable something by adding some strange named variable fifty levels deep into the registry? Windows can keep on doing shit like that and no one cares because it's Windows. That is the stronghold you get on the user base from creating a monopoly in the 80:ies and 90:ies.

Re:User friendly

[MightyMartian]

Wake me up when even Windows follows that paradigm. In fact, Microsoft is, at least in the enterprise, moving explicitly away from the GUI, and pushing Powershell for many tasks. But really, it's always been that way. GUI configuration tools in Windows have always presented only a portion of the configuration options, and many settings have had to be adjusted via the Registry. Even with GPOs, many settings can only be accessed via the Registry.

Like any system, whether it be Windows, OSX or Linux, everything works great out of the box... until it doesn't, and at that point the user is forced to go to some pretty daunting places. I've had enough fun trying to install drivers in Windows, or trying to solve problems on everything from screwed up profiles to getting the damned thing to time sync properly to know that Windows "ease of use" is more a marketing slogan than reality.

Re:User friendly

[tlhIngan]

The other problem is resistance in the Linux community to complex tools - because the problems are complex to solve. Even if you apply the "do one thing and do it well", it ends up as a complex tool (see SystemD). And no, sysvinit scripts are not the solution (question - why does /sbin/init provide a perfectly usable daemon manager that no one uses? I mean, it will monitor daemons, if they die, it will restart them. If they die too quickly, it will pause restarting to let the admin have CPU time to fix the problem).

System initialization isn't easy - Apple has tried many different forms of system initialization daemons until settling on launchd (they started with sysvinit at first, then migrated to SystemStarter and a couple of others). And the BSDs have tried to port launchd over as well.

Then there are other use cases - networking for example. NetworkManager is a solution to a problem users have - they may connect to different networks with different network settings. Because without it, handling the simple case of a user going from home wifi to public wifi is much harder. At least to Linux's credit, when it detects public wifi, it can auto-start a VPN client, or even prevent unencrypted traffic in the narrow window between connecting to public wifi and before the VPN starts up. Or even something as minor as going from static IP to DHCP.

Then there's PulseAudio, a framework made necessary because users are complex. Such as being able to switch audio devices while the program has the audio device open. E.g., VoIP - user might be having it on the main audio device waiting for it to ring. The moment it does, users plug in a USB headset (new audio card), and have the call audio automatically routed to the headset without the controlling application (VoIP program) having to do a thing. Or a user switches from onboard audio to a Bluetooth headphone and being able to do it transparent to the player application.

Of course, there's a Linux that does all this transparently to the user - we call it Android. And all this stuff is complex because it has to be - there's no simple way to have a system do these tasks.

Re:User friendly

[dbIII]

Make it so a user never, ever has to open a command prompt

We are still seeing this shit after MS Powershell came out?
Look up "grep", "sed" and "awk" and you'll see why some people dealing with CSV files or similar are happy that there is a command prompt instead of having to wait for someone to write a special program for them.

Wow has it been that long?

[Anon-Admin]

I remember when Linus posted it. I downloaded it and played with it a bit.

When Slackware 0.99a came out I gave it another try. It was not long before I was converting my Minix boxes at the house over to Linux.

In 1995 I switched from Windows 3.11 to Slackware and never looked back. To this day I run linux on all my systems at home save a small laptop that runs Windows XP though it is just to manage the spectrophotometer which does not have a linux driver.

Linux has come a long way and I am always amazed at how much of the world runs linux from Cell Phones, to routers, to supercomputers.

Re:Wow has it been that long?

[UnknownSoldier]

Agreed. It is pretty phenomenal that Linux runs on over 2 billion device. You're absolutely right on scalability: from cell phones all the way up to 99.4% of supercomputers. WOW.

Hopefully nVidia and AMD will continue to support OpenGL on the desktop so that Linux can continue to make inroads into high performance heterogeneous computing & gaming.

What's ironic is for MS to have once called "Linux is a cancer" to now admitting that they use it on 33% of their Azure servers!

* http://news.microsoft.com/byth...
* http://fossbytes.com/33-micros...

Not bad for the little OS that could. :-)

eh

[nomadic]

I first ran Linux back in the mid-90's though it's been a while since I did much with it (maybe like 5 years). Back when I started it was 2 generations ahead of Windows at least, destroyed it in terms of performance and stability, and was just a lot more fun to use. Fast forward to today and any lead has pretty much evaporated. Recently when I got too annoyed at how slow Windows 10 was running on a cheap laptop I picked up (4 gigs of RAM, AMD a4-6210 and a SSD), I decided to replace it with Linux and was honestly pretty underwhelmed. Performance was about the same, and this was a Linux Mint distro running XFCE with bells and whistles turned off. It was still sluggish to the point that it was annoying. The user experience was pretty much identical to what I remember from 10 years ago. Honestly, if I installed a 10-year-old distro it would probably scream. I'm not a programmer so not sure what could be done at this point; even Torvalds has admitted the kernel is bloated, and as a user it seems like the graphics system is just an increasing number of layers, managers, and toolkits piled on top of each other.

Re:When will it get a "real" memory manager?

[F.Ultra]

Instead of whining about it you could disable the memory overcommit by adding "vm.overcommit_memory=2" to /etc/sysctl.conf and run "sysctl -p" (so that the setting takes immediate effect so you don't have to reboot).

What a long painfully joyful trip it's been...

[gosand]

I ditched Windows back in 1998 and installed RedHat 5.1. It was awesome! Then I upgraded. Wow, what a nightmare. Dependency hell. I struggled with it for a few years, but hung in there because I just loved it and had no interest in going back to Windows. Macs make my brain hurt.

Then along came Mandrake which took away some of the pain. That was great as well, really liked KDE. Upgrades were still painful, but much better.

Then I started hearing a lot about Ubuntu so I made the leap to Kubuntu 6.06. I went through about 8 in-place upgrades over time (minorly painful) until I finally things got unstable enough that I did a fresh install. Things were much better... but I kept having issues with KDE wigging out on me and pegging my cpu.

So I installed XFCE on top of Kubuntu. XFCE spoke to me - I realized all the UI flash didn't matter to me. I would flip back to KDE, but the problem kept happening and I was happy with XFCE. Eventually I heard about Mint around 2011, and had to try Mint XFCE - I have been there since. I have decided to not do rolling installs anymore, but I am configured pretty well to do full installs. I just installed over my Mint 17 XFCE release and was up and running on Mint XFCE 18 in about an hour. (my / partition is 55 GB and only uses about 12, and I have a separate partition for home). This was the smoothest linux system update I have ever had - even no issues with the Nvidia proprietary drivers!

Installs aside, my Linux system does everything I want it to do. Seeing all the various applications on it grow and blossom, and really cool things like bootable distros to embedded linux to mini systems to android. It has really been great to see it all flourish.

At work I use Windows 10, and I get by. But it brings me no joy. At home I run Linux, and it brings me joy. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to it.

Use Android and Chrome OS at times.

[aussersterne]

I am a big fan of Linux in technical terms, but not a big fan in terms of UX (basically, the social end of computing, where collaboration across large teams is basically required for a high quality product).

Android is illustrative of what Linux *can* be, but on the desktop has never managed to be because of the obvious differences between the social (i.e. people and hierarchy) infrastructure behind Android vs. behind the Linux desktop.

I used Linux from 1993 through 2010. Early on I used the same .twmrc files with TWM that I used on my HPUX and SunOS boxes at CS school. At the time, the Linux desktop was *light years* ahead of the Windows desktop. 16-bit color, high resolutions, fast, lots of very powerful applications from the Unix world and experimental desktop projects like InterViews that seemed very promising. People with MS-DOS or GEM or Windows 1/2.x computers were envious.

Later on I used FVWM. Then I switched to KDE in the KDE Beta 3 era. But then (mid-late '90s), Linux on the desktop had already been outrun by Windows 95 and Mac OS. The level of integration amongst services and components wasn't that of a coherent system like it was for Mac OS and Windows; the Linux "computing is a network" philosophy—very good for things like business and scientific computing—was obvious in comparison.

When KDE 4 was released, I tried to use it for a while but it got in my way. I had to rebuild my entire desktop over and over again as objects were lost, lost their properties, etc. After about two weeks on KDE 4 during which I mostly nursed KDE along rather than doing my actual work, I switched to GNOME 2.x. I see that as something of a golden age for desktop Linux—basic parity with what was going on in the Mac and Windows worlds if you used a polished distribution like Fedora. Install was different, equally demanding of skills, but the actual install and setup process for the desktop OS on a bare machine involved approximately the same amount of work as was true for Windows, and the result was basic feature and experience parity.

Then, the bottom fell out. I suspect that a lot of the need for the Linux desktop with experience parity to Windows was met by an increasingly revived Mac OS, and users flocked there. Myself included, in the end.

GNOME 3 came out and KDE 4 was finally becoming usable and there was something of a battle, but both were behind the curve relative to the stability and seamlessness of OS X, and OS X had end-user application developers already. They screamed and moaned during the transition from legacy Mac OS, but most of them hung on and redeveloped their applications for OS X, and there were a bunch of new application developers to boot.

On top of that, the major applications of the business and academic worlds made their way out for OS X as it became a viable platform. You now had a seamless desktop OS that offered all the big brands in user applications, plus stability, plus easy access to a *nix environment and command line if you wanted it.

I was busy fighting Linux during that "instability era" just as KDE4/GNOME3 happened and duked it out. Things were changing very quickly in many facets of the Linux base installs, in hardware, etc. and every update seemed to break my Thinkpad T60 which at the time ran on Fedora. I was spending a lot of time fixing dotfiles and scripts and trying to solve dependency problems, etc. Meanwhile, lots of new things that were starting to become commonplace needs (cloud services, mobile devices, etc.) didn't yet work well with Linux without lots of command line hacking and compiling of alpha-quality stuff from source.

A couple of fellow academics kept telling me to try Mac OS. Finally I did, I installed a hackintosh partition on my T60. By mid-2010, I realized that I was using my OS X boot, along with the GNU tools environment from MacPorts, far more than I was using the Linux partition, and that there were Mac applications that I was *dying* to start using on a daily basis, but ha

Linux is of age

[Sheik Yerbouti]

I switched to Kubuntu in April on my main laptop. I am running 16.04 and it works great. I have not found anything I cannot do. I switched after I realized that Microsoft had renamed and re-enabled the telemetry service with a forced automatic update. You can put up with that kind of control from Redmond if you like but I will have none of it.

I keep a VMWare Player VM of Windows 7 around just in case but have not fired it up in a good while.

I am also a gamer and I have about 140 games in my steam account that work on Linux and for those that don't I stream them from my Windows 7 media center PC. I have not gotten rid of MS entirely but at least finally there are real transition solutions available.

The thing I would like to see is the tech class to wake up and throw off the yoke of Redmond and go ahead and switch at this point. A truly open OS with real competition between distros is the only solution to corporations trying to take over your computing experience for their benefit. I think if my fellow techies realized that we could start a real step change on the desktop. That would result in better support for Linux overall (drivers and apps) . The Linux Desktop OS is ready as near as I can tell. Just the people who aren't.