Linux 4.16 Released (phoronix.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Linus Torvalds has released Linux 4.16. Linux 4.16 integrates more of the VirtualBox guest drivers into the kernel, provides AMDGPU DC multi-display synchronization, continues with mitigation improvements for Spectre and Meltdown mitigation, tightens up access to /dev/mem by default, and many other improvements and changes.

Comments

Worst day to release a new kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this release an April Fools joke?

Re: Worst day to release a new kernel

[ThePhish]

That's because no one wants to try to top OMGPonies!

Re: Worst day to release a new kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

I thank you for the no jokes this year. I know it was a "thing" but it sucked so much.

Re: Worst day to release a new kernel

[antdude]

Maybe the lack of jokes IS the April 1st joke to /. since it was a tradition!

Re: Worst day to release a new kernel

[johnhennessy]

Well, i assume the %pCOW in printk.c is a joke?

But no one on slashdot reads the articles - so I guess itâ(TM)s pretty well hidden.

So much bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Monolithic kernels will eventually get too big for their britches. Whatâ(TM)s a decent alternative?

Re:So much bloat

[fibonacci8]

Mac OS L, HURD 3.0, or, BeOS Warp will probably exist around the time that monolithic kernels get too big for their britches. Get back to us when you've tried them, if you please.

Re:So much bloat

[F.Ultra]

Not discovered kernel modules yet or are you simply trolling?

Re: So much bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

HURD, lol... The OS in development for 30 years and still nothing to show despite all the work already being done. Classic GNU. Linux stomped the shit out of projects like that. That is, projects run by morons.

Re:So much bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Kernel modules aren't the answer to bridging the monolithic/modular kernel debate. It's all the same address space. The can has been kicked, but modular is making some inroads via virtualization. Paravirtualized interfaces presented by hardware running on drivers in monolithic kernels in VMs provides at least a little bit of the best of both worlds, though it really depends on the application. For security, it's a pretty good middle ground. For performance, well it remains to be seen if an adequate amount of performance can be squeezed out of hardware virtualization to make it a tenable solution.

Re: So much bloat

[q_e_t]

The user land tools in "Linux" are generally GNU, and GCC and associated tools hgaved been very successful, so your criticism seems off-base. If you had criticised GNU's terrible and ugly website, along with the failure of HURD, you might have a point.

Re: So much bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

But... But... HURD *identifies* as a kernel! We therefore must use the politically compelled pronoun, the hapless 'whirrrrr" sound as it tries to find any of its own hardware to confirm its own identity!

Come to think of it, it is just like Leah Rowe of the libreboot project. I thought I saw traces of the identity confused politics.

Re:So much bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Modular kernels (such as Linux) are a good and straightforward alternative to pure monolithic kernels.

Re: So much bloat

[byrtolet]

The user land tools in "Linux" are generally GNU, and GCC and associated tools hgaved been very successful, so your criticism seems off-base. If you had criticised GNU's terrible and ugly website, along with the failure of HURD, you might have a point.

I like GNU's website. It is fast.

I would take fast and ugly any time!

Re: So much bloat

[q_e_t]

Fast is good, but it could be fast and less ugly. I'd accept some CSS and a few images, but it would be nice to avoid fetching half the world's entire Javascript code base like some websites seem to do. I would think there is some middle ground between pretty and fast GNU could use. Some structural changes would be good too, but it's certainly not the worst structured site I've seen.

Linux 4.16

[Anonymous Coward]

For Linus so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Kernel that whosoever uses Linux should not perish, but have everlasting uptime.

Re: Linux 4.16

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you're not as smart as you think you are, faggot.

Re: Linux 4.16

[Anonymous Coward]

Read your own article, retard. Thatâ(TM)s Red Hat-only garbage.

Re: Linux 4.16

[Anonymous Coward]

The original troll stated that a kernel upgrade always means a reboot. That statement has now been shown to be false. So just shift that goalpost right up your poop-chute, smartypants.

(And if *you'd* read the article, you'd see that kpatch is not the only game in town and in fact there are several other, similar systems for runtime upgrades, some even implemented for other distros.)

improvements

[Hognoxious]

Is systemd part of the kernel yet? Or is it the other way round?

Re:improvements

[Billly Gates]

SystemD is a great OS. It just has a crappy startup daemon.

Re:improvements

[sconeu]

OK, I'll bite, troll...

He doesn't need to write a new init system. There's a perfectly good one out there called "init"

Re:improvements

[F.Ultra]

Haven't you guys moved over to BSD or Devuan yet?

Re:improvements

[The Evil Atheist]

If init was a perfectly good one, why were there so many competing replacements?

Re:improvements

[BadDreamer]

Corner cases, mostly.

Init is fine with daemons that work as intended, and are reasonably stable. It suffers with broken code, and most competing replacements are trying to address that, not any actual flaws in init itself.

Re:improvements

[Antique Geekmeister]

SysV init had a number of critical issues. One was the failure to successfully and automatically restart a crashed daemon. There have been several lighterweight, safer init systems. Upstart worked well, but never became popular.

Re:improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

Many sysadmins do not want daemons to automatically restart when they crash. Having that as a feature is of arguable merit.

Also, SysV init isn't a service manager so much as just an init system. If you want daemons to be managed you can use something like OpenRC on top of SysV init. So you could add extra stuff, like automatic service starts, to a SysV init system if you wanted, it's just not built in since init wasn't a service manager.

Re:improvements

[iggymanz]

Fallacy, if your daemon is crashing, like say mysqld does, it's a piece of shit. It's just going to crash again. Properly written daemons will have uptime of years. I know this is a shocking revelation to today's low watt bulb developers, with their unstable and shaky LAMP stack crap...

Re:improvements

[iggymanz]

indeed, that restart feature is a bandage for shoddy software, today's developers are largely an inferior species churning out unstable crap.

Re:improvements

[KiloByte]

indeed, that restart feature is a bandage for shoddy software

It's worse than that: it's a security hole with no excuse whatsoever.

A daemon never has a reason to crash. I don't recall the last case a daemon crashed for me (not counting failing to start), and I run unstable on a number of non-production machines. Code that goes into a proper distribution these decades is not hopelessly buggy.

If your company has some local daemon that requires a band-aid, you need to debug crashes ASAP as there's above 50% chance the crash is exploitable. Obviously, usually your management is criminally negligent and wants you to add features instead, but in such case it takes a single line to use runit or some other daemon supervisor.

Thus, auto-restarting crashed daemons is such a bad idea it must never be a part of an init system. Doing this anyway should be considered exceptional, and in such cases you need to take some extra precautions anyway.

Re:improvements

[q_e_t]

It depends on why they are failing. If they are failing due to a lack of a resource, that's not unreasonable. Ideally you would provide a suitable exit code on a crash and have a suitable monitoring system pick that up, and allow a configuration for that daemon decide on the next action.

Re:improvements

[gweihir]

Indeed. I use it. It works and not only can I fully understand it, I can also easily modify and extend it. Of course, it does not instill the irrational happiness of being protected by an all-seeing all-knowing benevolent demon that the systemd-fanatics seem to experience in its presence. Init just works and works well. For some people that does not seem to be enough though.

Re:improvements

[gweihir]

Big egos that want to leave their mark. Some people (bad engineers, all of them) cannot understand "if it is not broken, do not fix it". They think that it must be _them_ that obviously can do things massively better. Incidentally, that is pretty much what drives the systemd train-wreck. (Well, for variable values of "train-wreck". It will still take a long time until the systemd-morons have degraded Linux to the level of Windows. But why should I use something worse just to support the mental masturbation of some fuckup?)

Re:improvements

[gweihir]

A direct lie. It is not the task of an init-system to restart a crashed demon. That is what you use a restart-wrapper for and it often needs to be customized for the demon in question in order to work well. And there are already such generic wrappers (where that is enough) that work well.

Re:improvements

[gweihir]

That, unfortunately, _is_ the sad state of affairs.

Re:improvements

[gweihir]

Very much this. A restart-wrapper around any demon that is reachable from the outside or from a lower privilege level is an invitation to hack said demon. Hence, if you need that restart, it has to come with carefully designed limits, logging of what happened and alerting that gets actually listened to. Having automatic restart as an easy to use standard feature is _not_ a good idea. It is a problem because many "coders" will just use this to paper over the defects of their shoddy software. Also, when a generic restart wrapper will do and is not a security problem, many already exist that work perfectly fine and are not integrated into an init system, were they have no valid reason to be.

This functionality if systemd is just another indicator of the cluelessness of the systemd people.

Re:improvements

[gweihir]

True. But the last thing you want in a resource starvation situation is an automatic restart.

Re:improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

> A daemon never has a reason to crash.

And "the code is the documentation". Sorry, but I've heard that one before, too, from people who don't actually run the software. You can either spend time trying to write a whole application specific suite of monitoring and restart h handling or you can let it *crash*, report the error, and let systemd or upstart or the like restart the service when they die. It's reporting the error that is often problematic. And customizing that for each daemon has been an amazing source of instability and confusion with the SysV init tools.

Re: improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

what is Linux? is it a part of systemd?

Re:improvements

[serviscope_minor]

A daemon never has a reason to crash.

I've had pulseaudio crash many times!

Re:improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

Why so much hate? What's wrong with choice? I thought that was what built the whole open source movement. At least for me, it was choice that brought me over from windows in the first place.

Re:improvements

[gweihir]

Whoever modded this down is apparently completely clueless. If you do automatic restart when demons fail because of resource starvation, you may well make the complete machine unresponsive and make it impossible to log into it too. That is a worst-case scenario.

Re:improvements

[gweihir]

Thanks to whoever modded this down for further demonstrating the utter cluelessness of the systemd morons.

Re:improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever modded this down is apparently completely clueless. If you do automatic restart when demons fail because of resource starvation, you may well make the complete machine unresponsive and make it impossible to log into it too. That is a worst-case scenario.

Highly unlikely.

When a program crashes due to resource starvation the OS frees all of the resources it had prior. If it comes back up, even if it does something crazy like reallocate everything it had prior, the kernel will just crash it again.

The system will absolutely not lock up. Whoever upvoted this is no sysadmin at all.

Re:improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

Preposterous, why not just have a standard way to restart daemons, and to declare what needs to happen in order to restart a daemon, and what options it supports and to pass to it?

Oh yes, that is systemd.

Why would you download 30 random scripts to wrap your daemons when your daemons can natively do it themselves through a standardized interface?

Your style of thinking is horribly outdated.

Re:improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

Big egos that want to leave their mark. Some people (bad engineers, all of them) cannot understand "if it is not broken, do not fix it". They think that it must be _them_ that obviously can do things massively better. Incidentally, that is pretty much what drives the systemd train-wreck. (Well, for variable values of "train-wreck". It will still take a long time until the systemd-morons have degraded Linux to the level of Windows. But why should I use something worse just to support the mental masturbation of some fuckup?)

There truly, really, is a reason why people far smarter than you have decided upon this. It is universal, every distro is moving to it, eventually every single one will. They are not idiots, they are huge corporations run by very smart engineers who know that this is better. If thousands of lead maintainers who have very different opinions about just about everything can agree that this is superior, then maybe there is in fact something to it.

Init IS broken. It simply is. There is no way to query, "Show me all of the SERVICES that are running and how much memory they are using and for how long and the next time they will restart due to a security patch" in init. It can't be done. Sure you can conjure up a super huge buggy script that needs to be manually updated any time you change something, but that is thinking of the past, dinosaur shit. Real sysadmins don't have time to write giant scripts filled with corner cases, real sysadmins want standardized interfaces.

Learn about init, learn about systemd, before you make 30 posts talking about why it's shit...

Re:improvements

[HiThere]

Well, it's an overstatement. But if a daemon crashes without being asked to then there's clearly an error. Either a software error or a hardware error, but an error. And errors are frequently the kind of place that a malicious actor can use...so trusting them to restart is unwise...unless you told it to crash for some reason.

So. Overstatement, but not actually wrong. Now the question is, what do you do if you need to run the daemon, but it has errors that occasionally cause it to crash without being asked? The best thing to do would clearly be to fix the error, but this may be infeasible, so the next best thing is to have a monitor process that restarts it. But this probably shouldn't be a part of the init system, and certainly shouldn't be applied to all daemons by default.

Re:improvements

[HiThere]

Why so much hate? Because systemD is being shoved down people's throats. I know of nobody who asked for it. I sure didn't. I haven't yet switched to a distribution that doesn't use it, but that sure doesn't mean that I wanted it. It doesn't even mean I won't switch in the future.

Re:improvements

[gweihir]

You really, really have no experience with modern systems. Or you may just be completely clueless.

Re:improvements

[q_e_t]

Yes, resource starvation is definitely a time you'd not want a restart, unless it's a case of something like a lack of licences served by FlexLM, but you wouldn't really want to design a system with a daemon depending on an externally served licence that is pooled with other consumers of that licence type.

Re:improvements

[q_e_t]

The issue is not necessarily the daemon that is failing using the resource, but potentially some other process. So daemon quits, resources freed, other process uses the resources.

However, not all OSes free all resources on all crashes.

Re:improvements

[iggymanz]

If there is not enough resource a human should be looking at that system, not just restarting a daemon

instead the majority of the use cases is unstable garbage like mysql that doesn't even belong in a business.

Re:improvements

[Hognoxious]

You could say that about anything. Ask yourself why there isn't only one car manufacturer or one brewery.

The answer, for the hard of understanding, is that some things suit some people and other things suit others. On top of that there's ego (NIH syndrome).

However all the other competing init systems have one thing in common; you can pick and choose them at will. They aren't forcefully bundled by building in an arbitrary dependency with other random components.

Re:improvements

[Hognoxious]

Sounds like you're advocating tools that do one thing and do it well.

It'll never catch on.

Re:improvements

[The Evil Atheist]

So?

The claim was made that init was a "perfectly good one".

The fact that any other init system exists alludes to the fact that, no, init was not perfectly good.

It's like the hatred for systemd is so irrational that people would go the other extreme and say init is "perfectly good" that other people couldn't see shortcomings in init.

Re:improvements

[Joey Vegetables]

Excluded middle fallacy here. That initd needs replacement does not imply that systemd should be that replacement.

Re:improvements

[iggymanz]

Yes it can, you are speaking in ignorance, I admin hundreds of systems with 1.5 million users. The systemd way is wrong.

Re:improvements

[gweihir]

Funny. And completely off the mark. But I guess you are a paid, honor-less propaganda shill, so you cannot actual acknowledge the truth anyways.

Re:improvements

[gweihir]

Indeed, thanks. The systemd propaganda lies are as transparent as always. Also, that init is limited in some scenarios does not imply it needs replacement. It implies that it needs an alternative for those scenarios. Unless init is broken in most or all scenarios (which it is not), there is no reason to do a replacement. It is not a problem with clean startup scripts to support several different init-systems.

Re:improvements

[q_e_t]

If there is not enough resource a human should be looking at that system, not just restarting a daemon

Ideally, yes. Sometimes scale or staff availability makes that difficult, though. But it might lead to instability without analysis. Whether that is acceptable depends on the business's risk appetite and risk management processes, although analysing the risk can be non-trivial, especially in complex architectures that can, more-of-less, exhibit emergent behaviour.

Oh, I get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, very funny, Linus!

VirtualBox? MS owned VirtualBox?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is sackralige.

Re:VirtualBox? MS owned VirtualBox?

[Anonymous Coward]

VBox is owned by Oracle, dumbass.

Re: Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

Its the other way around. You'll get windows with a linux interface - shortly before ms collapses. Powershell is a start....

It's a square release

[Anonymous Coward]

4.16 = 4sq = 16.

Barely on version 4?

[Anonymous Coward]

At this rate the Lunix will never catch up to Windows, which reached version 2000 EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO!!!

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Billly Gates]

When?

How Microsoft made Linux run on Windows was by adding hooks through an abstract layer. Unfortunately, Windows was designed with a HAL (hardware abstract layer) from the beggining when David Cutler wanted to make it portable across hardware. Win64 and wow32 (win32onwin64) are really layers on top of the kernel for runtimes. Linux is another one.

Linux is a macro-kernel so this would be messy (reminds me of the old Linux is obsolete it isn't a micro kernel debate from Andy Tannabum) but could be I guess possible if someone wanted to a winapi including NDIS and lord knows what else hooks into the linux kernel itself.

Then a daemon could use those hooks and launch the inverse of WSL that is on Windows 10 to run binaries.

Also keep in mind at this time only console linux apps work on Windows. This is because the OpenGL and device driver API and ABI's have not been ported yet. On Windows everything is gui based :-(

So this would not be easy or possible unless one wants to just run win32 powershell scripts and dos commands.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[F.Ultra]

WSL is not Linux on Windows. It's GNU/Windows, nothing more.

Ubuntu 18.04

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu 18.04 better get this!

Re: Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never had to admin windows networks. There's a lot of bubblegum and nailing wire between you, your products, and your customers if the entire ecosystem between them is windows based.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

WSL is not "GNU" anything. It's proprietary, it's a compatibility layer, and it's not complete enough to actually make most Linux based code work. If you think I'm kidding, try any X based application, sshd, and httpd.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Kjella]

It depends on what the question is, if it's Microsoft doing a kernel swap while keeping all their binary blobs nVidia-style I imagine they could do it fairly easily. Like if all you want from the Linux kernel is totally generic functionality like allocating memory, mapping IO, catching interrupts etc. with blob drivers and blob libraries providing most the API, kinda like using winetricks to install the real DirectX libraries from Windows. It wouldn't really be Linux as you know it though, it'd be more like that deep, deep buried in OS X is the BSD kernel.

Anyone use this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep hearing about this Linux thing, is it any good?

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Antique Geekmeister]

I'm afraid that this is not remotely possible. The kernel and the critical libraries, for Windows 10 are proprietary and Microsoft does not follow the published API's.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post really misses it. The Windows kernel and the Windows API are two different things. The whole reason you "can't" run Windows on Linux isn't because you can't--there's been at least a few examples of people replicating the NTOS kernel and running stuff on that, for example. It's because a large part of what makes Windows Windows is the user API. Note that Microsoft didn't recreate and X server and Konqueror.

The whole point is they can make freely available code run on top of an ABI--stuff like GL stuff would be harder but plenty of companies have ported Xorg and once that work was done most GUI apps would mostly work--there's still some Linux stuff they're not implementing completely enough, but it's all in the realm of relatively basis and doable. The reverse isn't true because the only way to duplicate the Windows experience would be to duplicate the vast majority of the library software. That's precisely what WINE has been doing.

To that end, I'd point out the obvious: what the GP was asking for already exists in WINE. Not to the degree of 100% compatibility, but then WINE is chasing a massive moving target without any reference source code. I can only imagine how long it'd take Microsoft to duplicate KDE/Gnome, Libreoffice, etc without the source. Regardless, there's little point to making an NTOS duplicate to run Microsoft code for Linux because virtualization is consistently better--except for 3D graphics--without worrying about subtle implementation details. The reverse is mostly true for Linux and Windows. If there were any real desire to support Linux seriously, it'd be in the same scope of XP Mode* and that integration.

The point, though, is precisely to implement just the minimal text console stuff to placate Linux people just enough to use Windows. Any serious effort towards that end would be like XP Mode*.

* You remember XP Mode, right? That thing they dropped in Windows 7. It was meant as "a short term application compatibility solution". Ie, it was a way to excuse Windows 7 intentionally breaking bad, old designs but with no real intention for long-term support or improvement. I mean, do you really think MS dropped all the backwards compatibility just so they'd have a whole other OS--XP--to support indefinitely? That'd only drive home the point you're better off just using XP natively indefinitely. Just like Linux.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

WSL is not "GNU" anything. It's proprietary, it's a compatibility layer, and it's not complete enough to actually make most Linux based code work. If you think I'm kidding, try any X based application, sshd, and httpd.

httpd compiles and runs fine on WSL

Every x apps I tried runs fine as well, didnt try sshd though.

No AI?

[110010001000]

What? No AI engine? What about a smart assistant? This Linus guy obviously doesn't know much about operating systems.

Re:No AI?

[gweihir]

I want cloud integration, were the kernel runs in the cloud!

Re:No AI?

[Anonymous Coward]

4.16 brings Clippy the Microsoft Assistant back.

Re:No AI?

[Anonymous Coward]

> What? No AI engine? What about a smart assistant?

Now about a smart ass assistant? that would bring it up a notch.

Re:No AI?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't remember its name, but there is a AI based (reinforcement learning) OS. You do something and it performs a action in response. You say yes or no if that was the action you wanted and it slowly learns what you want. Make sure you backup often.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Billly Gates]

WSL is not Linux on Windows. It's GNU/Windows, nothing more.

You know there is more to FOSS than Gnu? It is popular on Debian circles and in groups here but Apache, LibreOffice, clang, and others use more free MIT/BSD style licenses.

Re:I want a firewall inside of my laptop ...

[Anonymous Coward]

They sell it in the same shop as the phone with two USB ports and GNU/linux, and the offline game console that plays AAA games, and the steam-powered car without power steering.

New German refrigerator control subsystem

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does the Linux kernel need a subsystem for refrigerator control? Does every device get it's own "subsystem" now?

Re:New German refrigerator control subsystem

[Anonymous Coward]

yes

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU/Windows, not GNU Windows. The GNU operating system running over Windows. Just as GNU/Linux is the GNU operating system running over the Linux kernel - or did you think RMS was claiming the Linux kernel was a GNU project?

was not dying *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Year 2020: *BSD and Linux systems are fusioned into only one OS (to forget derivative works, to forget licenses, ..).

I'm planning a new programming language for the kernel that deprecates the weak C. The big problem is that those MLOCs have to be rewritten from the scratch for this new programming language and some modules are deprecated for the modern devices.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[ArchieBunker]

Give me the FreeBSD kernel with the Windows 7 interface. Clean and no systemd bullshit.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[q_e_t]

The essential core of the userland tools in what people call Linux us from GNU, which is the point the OP was making.

Re:Forget Linux

[q_e_t]

Freer in what way?

Re: Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[spongman]

the ubuntu 16.04 sshd works just fine on wsl. You do have to open a port in the firewall.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[MSG]

You know there is more to FOSS than Gnu?

The POSIX operating system you are familiar with is GNU/Linux. GNU and Linux provide the (mostly compliant) interfaces that POSIX requires. Everything else is an application.

If you're running GNU on WIndows, then the POSIX OS is GNU/Windows.

Yes, there are applications on top of GNU. There are also applications on top of Windows. Their presence doens't change the name of the OS.

Re: Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

We get Windows with a Linux shell. (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

If there was a system with Windows 10 kernel with XFCE UI, it would be much more usable than stock Win 10. Imagine a OS, where all the win32 applications would run and the OS' UI would not be dumbed down to a Microsoft Windows 1.0 with less colors and functionality.

Re:Forget Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean slower, wonkier, more open to incompatible splits and even worse developers who are certified nutjobs? No thanks.

FreeBSD is dead, nobody really cares about it anymore. It's just a carcass which gets cannibalized for usable parts by people who are terminally afraid of having to give anything back to the people whose shoulders they are standing on.

Re: Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no Linux interface. It is a kernel.

Re: Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU is a free software operating system.
Linux is a free software kernel.
Microsoft Windows is an operating system with its own proprietary kernel.
Now what are you talking about?

Re: Forget Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

No blacks and homosexuals in the "community" pushing divisive sjw politics.

Re:Forget Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Freer to use in commercial projects.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have Xming or Xmanager running on your Windows machine, then you can run any GUI linux program you like - and it works (on WSL)!
So it is just not true that you can only run "console programs" on WSL.

Re: Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

You want windows 10 ui on Linux? ..with or without systemd?

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[serviscope_minor]

Give me the FreeBSD kernel with the Windows 7 interface. Clean and no systemd bullshit.

Give me the GNU/HURD kernel with the OS/2 interface.

I agree, just like 'watchdog timers'...

[Anonymous Coward]

in embedded systems that reboot if they're not reset periodically by the
operational firmware. I've never seen one help with anything, and have
seen cases where they cause problems. Get the code right and it will
run forever.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me Windows 10 with the XP interface and all Metro apps disabled, telemetry disabled, control on updates (e.g. I want to automatically download security updates, manually review the others). This is a rhetorical request, we won't have it.

That's what we used to have, comprehensive control on our hardware and software, on DOS, Win 9x and XP. Where you were free to uninstall Real Player, do an anti-spyware wipe, or just reformat a small C:\ partition again and be up and running quickly enough.

I had to flee to linux, not so much or not only because free open source begets more freedom and security, but because I want some of the freedom we used to have on microsoft OSes (which ran on the most free hardware platform : the IBM PC/AT compatibles)

I'm very bored for now. Waiting for Mint 19 to be out (so that to have Ubuntu 18.04 graphics and wifi drivers on whatever I'll be using ; I'll try the latest Wine 3.0 or 3.x then, and some whatever software). If something sucks I'll be stuck with it for monthes/years.
Still waiting for a smartphone that you can trust connecting to a network.

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd totally get behind a project to bring Workplace Shell to Linux. That interface was awesome!

Re:Forget Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

they're afraid

Is this supposed to shame bsd devs into supporting gnu/communism?

Re:Forget Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

yes

At least some of them will see the way and contribute to Linux which is used in more devices than Windows, MacOS and iOS put together. Linux is the way of the future. When was the last time FreeBSD came up as the OS of a device? That's right.

Re: Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called windows 7 and gets security updates until 2020. You should try it.

Re:Forget Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

In the Nintendo Switch, running nvidia proprietary driver and high end video games on a handheld?

Re:Windows 10 interface + Linux kernel

[Joey Vegetables]

That *BSD* style licenses are or are not "more free" is a matter of perspective. My view is that non-copylefted licenses may do too much to preserve the freedom of those who would embrace/extend/extinguish Free Software, while copylefted licenses encourage the protection of the users' freedoms instead. This distinction would be moot if there were not evil, rent-seeking organizations and individuals who wish to extort the users of formerly free software, plus "laws" that empower and embolden them. Free would simply mean Free. However, there are, and, for as long as there are, I do view copyleft as an vital mechanism to ensure that the most important pieces of software remain free.

Re:Forget Linux

[UnknownSoldier]

> When was the last time FreeBSD came up as the OS of a device?

Sony PS3: FreeBSD
Sony PS4: FreeBSD
Sony Vita: FreeBSD / NetBSD
Nintendo Switch: FreeBSD