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>Microsoft and Apple both have many employees and lots of money invested compared to Linux There are a lot of people who are paid to work on the kernel full ti

>Microsoft and Apple both have many employees and lots of money invested compared to Linux There are a lot of people who are paid to work on the kernel full time from Red Hat, Google, IBM and many others. If I had to guess I'd say there are probably more than the other two, it would be interesting to find out. But if you include people where it's not 100% of their job, but still an official part of their job, I'd say it's almost certainly more for Linux (not even counting unpaid contributions). Linux is the most popular platform for servers and HPC because most of the time it's the better kernel. It's so dominant that Apple has basically left the server area and the handful of showcase supercomputers built on Apple gear have long since faded from view. Linux went from having one supercomputer in the top 500, a fraction of a percent, in 1998 to 98.8% of the top 500 currently.[0] The other six seem to be IBM machines running something else. OS X's first release was 2001 and it and Microsoft offerings are simply not present in that top section of the HPC space. Linux is also the kernel on the most popular smartphone platform so it's not all computational either, when the hardware is tightly controlled it works fine. The problem isn't the number of developers on kernel or how hard it is to debug, it's that laptops and desktops aren't offered from a single company that can tie everything together. [0]http://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/1 http://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/1

stonemetal 11y ago
> Red Hat, Google, IBM and many others And they are all working on desktop\Laptop support right? Linux is great in the data center because it has big guns behind it in the data center. Linux runs well on cell phones because Google put in the effort. As soon as someone is willing and able to put in the effort on desktop Linux, it will be as good as it is in those other areas.
- spoiler 11y ago
  I think everyone can agree that Linux's biggest shortcomings on desktops/laptops are the graphical and audio part. So, even though I agree with "As soon as someone is willing and able to put in the effort on desktop Linux, it will be as good as it is in those other areas." I would replace "someone" with "every vendor". I feel like most vendors (NVIDIA/ATI/Wacom/whatnot) concentrate much more of their effort into supporting Windows and even OSX becasuse thay's their audience. Also, I remember reading somewhere that NVIDIA/ATI work closely together with Microsoft because od Direct X[citation needed, though]. I had the opportunity to work with Direct X (the new API) and I found it much more pleasant than working with OpenGL (even though I ended up using OGL in the end; I used Windows and DX to simplify prototyping, because doing the same thing in OGL required much more dev time, at first atleast). EDIT: Also, let's not forget how most of the majority of linux developer community neglects GUI and the overall end-user friendliness, and how the environment is in most cases quite hostile towards UX/GUI designers in general. There are, of course, exceptions, but those are few.
  - stonemetal 11y ago
    While it is a vendors issue, they don't just randomly support hardware. They go where the big guys are. As you say NVIDIA\ATI contribute to Direct X, but it happens because MS makes it happen. Google dragged the cell vendors into supporting Android. Desktop Linux just needs a backer that is big enough to make them put forth the effort.

stonemetal 11y ago

> Red Hat, Google, IBM and many others And they are all working on desktop\Laptop support right? Linux is great in the data center because it has big guns behind it in the data center. Linux runs well on cell phones because Google put in the effort. As soon as someone is willing and able to put in the effort on desktop Linux, it will be as good as it is in those other areas.

spoiler 11y ago
I think everyone can agree that Linux's biggest shortcomings on desktops/laptops are the graphical and audio part. So, even though I agree with "As soon as someone is willing and able to put in the effort on desktop Linux, it will be as good as it is in those other areas." I would replace "someone" with "every vendor". I feel like most vendors (NVIDIA/ATI/Wacom/whatnot) concentrate much more of their effort into supporting Windows and even OSX becasuse thay's their audience. Also, I remember reading somewhere that NVIDIA/ATI work closely together with Microsoft because od Direct X[citation needed, though]. I had the opportunity to work with Direct X (the new API) and I found it much more pleasant than working with OpenGL (even though I ended up using OGL in the end; I used Windows and DX to simplify prototyping, because doing the same thing in OGL required much more dev time, at first atleast). EDIT: Also, let's not forget how most of the majority of linux developer community neglects GUI and the overall end-user friendliness, and how the environment is in most cases quite hostile towards UX/GUI designers in general. There are, of course, exceptions, but those are few.
- stonemetal 11y ago
  While it is a vendors issue, they don't just randomly support hardware. They go where the big guys are. As you say NVIDIA\ATI contribute to Direct X, but it happens because MS makes it happen. Google dragged the cell vendors into supporting Android. Desktop Linux just needs a backer that is big enough to make them put forth the effort.