Slashdot Mirror
Linus Explains What Surprises Him After 25 Years Of Linux (linux.com)
Linus Torvalds appeared in a new "fireside chat" with VMware Head of Open Source Dirk Hohndel. An anonymous reader writes:
Linus explained what still surprises him about Linux development. "Code that I thought was stable continually gets improved. There are things we haven't touched for many years, then someone comes along and improves them or makes bug reports in something I thought no one used. We have new hardware, new features that are developed, but after 25 years, we still have old, very basic things that people care about and still improve... Our processes have not only worked for 25 years, we still have a very strong maintainer group... And as these maintainers get older and fatter, we have new people coming in."
Linus also says he's surprised by the widespread popularity of Git. "I expected it to be limited mostly to the kernel -- as it's tailored to what we do... In certain circles, Git is more well known than Linux." And he also shares advice if you want to get started as an open source developer. "I'm not sure my example is the right thing for people to follow. There are a ton of open source projects and, if you are a beginning programmer, find something you're interested in that you can follow for more than just a few weeks... If you can be part of a community and set up patches, it's not just about the coding, but about the social aspect of open source. You make connections and improve yourself as a programmer."
Linus also says that "I really like what I'm doing. I like waking up and having a job that is technically interesting and challenging without being too stressful so I can do it for long stretches; something where I feel I am making a real difference and doing something meaningful not just for me."
Linus also says he's surprised by the widespread popularity of Git. "I expected it to be limited mostly to the kernel -- as it's tailored to what we do... In certain circles, Git is more well known than Linux." And he also shares advice if you want to get started as an open source developer. "I'm not sure my example is the right thing for people to follow. There are a ton of open source projects and, if you are a beginning programmer, find something you're interested in that you can follow for more than just a few weeks... If you can be part of a community and set up patches, it's not just about the coding, but about the social aspect of open source. You make connections and improve yourself as a programmer."
Linus also says that "I really like what I'm doing. I like waking up and having a job that is technically interesting and challenging without being too stressful so I can do it for long stretches; something where I feel I am making a real difference and doing something meaningful not just for me."
Did more for computing than Gates, Ellison and Jobs combined.
Older and fatter huh? How come no one gets older and skinnier?
Good to see the nicer, less-abusive side of Linus.
AC explains what does NOT surprises him one year after Slashdot BizX buyout.
#DeleteFacebook
Mod this shits up!!!!!
Linus is still surprised daily that Linux is not on the desktop.
a week without dupes on /.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Hah, already modded to -1. Admins silencing anyone that calls them out. Yes, this article is a repeat.
Pathetic, isn't it? They seem to have the time to vote people down for pointing out how shitty they are.
This place used to be great.
he's still clutching that blanket.
The biggest bug in Linux right now is systemd. That is what is really annoying.
Do anyone know who is responsible for pulling funding to the SFLC at Linux Foundation/VMware after the Germany VMware GPL enforcement lawsuit? Was Paul Maritz involved for example?
I'm done with this site. As the user base, we get no say on the admins whom we all detest. The only way to get new admins is to stop giving them views.
Server only, don't waste your time with linux desktop.
Must be your own personal bug, because I have never experienced this.
I am thankful for the contributions of Linus and so many in the open source movement.
a cast of thousands of presumably talented software engineers spending enormous amounts of time and energy recreating what was done circa 1972.
it's ridiculous and frankly utterly unbelievable.
no advances in basic computer science, no fundamental change to the way operating systems interact with hardware, software, network, nor the users; instead, we have a version of unix with better sound drivers. pathetic security model, broken trust model, scaling problems, you name it, but don't worry someone will be along shortly to explain their latency measurements or the fact that distros outnumber cockroaches. no appreciation for the "negative code" concept, either -- just keep making it bigger and buggier and ever harder to improve in a thoughtful, structural way. a self-congratulating community that extols how the "jump to mobile" was indicative of some kind of unique quality.
you guys keep walking towards the mirage in the desert. it's definitely water, someone told you it was, so it must be.
must be those millennial drugs, take enough of them and suddenly git seems like an important computing milestone.
OP is making a bad joke in reference to https://www.cnet.com/news/wind...
It's turtles all the way down.
Amazon affiliated link spam. Please mod down.
...as I continue to struggle getting its applications work [consistently] across its numerous distros.
Folks, Linux will not cut it well for me and my colleagues till it has a "drop in" replacement similar to MS Office.l
http://vigor.sourceforge.net/screenshots/
there you go, now you have a complete replacement for office
The Linux kernel reboots or crashes every 47.9 days
So he got 49.7 wrong, hence the mod down?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Better to get the early history of Linux right from the source. The book "Just for Fun" is the story told by Linus himself.
It's called LibreOffice (also OpenOffice, based upon the same code, might be substituted too.) While not perfect, that is a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office. It's also installed by default on almost all desktop GNU/Linux distributions, which makes me wonder whether you've even bothered to try using any real distributions, despite the implication of your first sentence.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
He got the operating system wrong, you ninny.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Calc still has problems with complex xlsx files. Pivot tables seem to be the worst (and they seem to be popular where I work).
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If OpenOffice can ever match Excel, then you might be right. But until then, it's not a replacement.......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
When I saw 'less' being updated two days ago on Mint I was quite amused.
"Folks, Linux will not cut it well for me and my colleagues till it has a "drop in" replacement similar to MS Office.l"
And who created this problem? Don't blame Linux.
Professor Tanenbaum, is that you?
You forgot,"Get off my lawn".
And tell me, sir, what did you bring to the world today?
If you are finding it so hard just use static binaries like the pros do in far more difficult cases than you are whining about.
Are we in "workman blaming tools" territory or in made up examples territory? Not very impressive either way.
Bill Gate et al? Jobs et al? Who? You are so vague...
Try this. Create a complex ODS file in Calc with lots of features and see how Excel goes opening that? You can't really blame Calc for not being able to open what is essentially a proprietary file from another software project. Yeah, yeah, but MSOOXML is a standard! It's documented in over 6000 pages but still manages to be an incomplete and inconsistent specification with too much wiggle room for putting in undocumented binary blobs.
He got the operating system wrong, you ninny.
I suspect that that was the joke...
Linus = obsolete
Different distros have different versions of LibreOffice. 4.x, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 etc.
I wished to mention it.
LibreOffice doesn't have an integrated email client, not sure about a calendar or integrated meeting scheduling. MS Office has Outlook, calendar, scheduling meetings, booking conference rooms, integrated skype conference calls ... Where I work we live and breathe by meetings. LibreOffice will not be able to displace MS Office without these features.
On my personal systems Libre Office works just fine:
[djl@antares ~]$ uname -a
Linux antares 4.11.6-201.fc25.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 20 20:21:11 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
So quick to plug LibreOffice (terrible name, by the way) that you missed his point. It's fair to say that some people feel LibreOffice IS a drop-in replacement for MS Office. However, his point was that Linux is NOT a drop-in replacement for Windows.
Making fun of creimer is soooooo last week. It's gone from fun to cringe....
Your excessive use of dots aside, what you're missing is that google docs suite is rapidly becoming a significant replacement for large parts of the office suite.
Not sure if you've ever used it, but by the standards of even libreoffice, it's bloody afwul. It's slow and missing tons of features. The saving graces are online backup (which doesn't matter much in corporate environments with automatic backups), collaborative editing (which is so-so, but not a freature I use much, if ever) and runs in a browser.
95% of the people who won't use libreoffice because they "know word" don't know word, even slightly. The same applies to spreadsheets.
Sure there are some spreadsheet wizards out there for whom it isn't a replacement. But LO is generally muc hbetter than google sheets, and the latter is very popular now.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So, like about 5 or 10 years ago?
youtube? vimeo?
Looking back, Linus is surprised he didn't have women throwing their panties at him all the time. He figured making an operating system from scratch should count for something with the ladies.
An adult would respect the contributions of all parts of the industry: hardware, software, businessmen, designers...
That's true, for non-corporate use, people have no reason to pay for Word.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's true, for non-corporate use, people have no reason to pay for Word.
And corporate? the corporation I'm employed at currently seems to mostly use google docs. I think some departments use the Office suite, but not any of the ones I deal with day to day.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
A lot of corporations just install the office suite on every computer by default.
Mainly I'm frustrated that over the last decade, with incremental improvements, OO could have completely matched and surpassed MSOffice, even in Excel, but they haven't.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"I agree." - Karen Carpenter
LibreOffice is a "drop in' replacement that's as good if not better.
It's cross-platform and won't cost you a dime if you're too mean to contribute.
Whassa matter with people today?
Jeez . . .
creimer was always cringe, starting with the link he posts to his homepage, which has his photo
Two decades later and STILL no proper DirectX? This OS is a joke.
I'm not an admin, but I have mods points.
I mod down pointless crap that doesn't anything interesting to the story that's posted.
If you want to bitch about duplicate stories, contact the people who post the stories in the first place.
And, yes, I am perfectly fine if I see this modded down for being offtopic too.
9fans? :)
git didn't create any new CS but it was the first of its kind and infinitely better than the competition. git is the only VCS that I found intuitive to use.