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This is why the Linux kernel runs and will continue to run the world. The No men is all that stands between us and the Yes men. Praise and salutations to the

This is why the Linux kernel runs and will continue to run the world. The No men is all that stands between us and the Yes men. Praise and salutations to the No men, God bless you.

tw04 10y ago
That's an interesting take... this is why Linux gaming sucks. I get the pragmatism but we also need to be realistic that they aren't going to maintain a completely separate driver for Linux when the Linux gaming market share is barely a rounding error.
- williadc 10y ago
  > I get the pragmatism but we also need to be realistic I think what you mean is "I get the idealism but you also need to be realistic." It's not pragmatic to stand your guns and ask a multi-million dollar company to change the code they submit to your open-source project.
  - ssutch3 10y ago
    Haha yeah, because the Linux Kernel is just another open source project.
  - omegaworks 10y ago
    Thing is, Linux was never intended to run the latest greatest desktop gaming hardware. It was intended to be an open architecture where people contribute from all around the world to make something larger then themselves. All of these people pretty much contribute their free time to it. If they can't make basic architectural decisions that improve the worst kinds of work (driver authorship and maintenance is awful drudgery) how can you expect them to feel any kind of ownership over their fate? You're asking unpaid people to do the work people get paid for. Even worse, when this work just gets dumped on those unpaid people by people who are paid quite well.
    - egil 10y ago
      Most work on Linux is paid[0]. However, asking paid people to do work that does not align with their employers interest nor the project maintainers, is on par with what you're asking. [0] 4.5 Development statistics https://lwn.net/Articles/679289/ https://lwn.net/Articles/679289/. Just google lwn Development statistics for more.
      - mixedCase 10y ago
        >However, asking paid people to do work that does not align with their employers interest nor the project maintainers, is on par with what you're asking. Oh but it is in their employers' interest. It's the price of admission for mainline. And if they want in on mainline, wether simply to harvest PR or to net a contract that demands a mainlined kernel; they have to pay it. Just another case of the well-known "cost of doing business". In the case of AMD I believe they want to reap the benefits of mainline (that is, not having to support the breakage that comes with being out of tree) and to be able to compete better with Nvidia; since AMD is unlikely to ever develop an OpenGL implementation as good as theirs but Nvidia cannot or is unlikely to be able to open source their driver.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      It might be different if AMD, Nvidia and Intel all agreed on a longer term HAL, but that isn't the case... and 100kloc is pretty huge for a single vendor.
  - broodbucket 10y ago
    It's not pragmatic to allow a specific vendor to dump 100k LOC in your project that you have to maintain indefinitely so their developers have an easier time writing for both Windows and Linux. In my opinion the existing AMDGPU code isn't exactly spectacular as it is. They barely have comments or commit messages and there's a ton of duplication. Linux has issues with keeping driver contributions up to snuff as it is, without enormous vendor-specific HALs everywhere.
    - izacus 10y ago
      There's also nothing pragmatic in one-sidedly denying contributions without understanding the case that rewriting a whole business stack for a minor player makes no sense. What I see here is (sadly, again) two groups of developers unwilling to meet halfway and understanding each others problems. Expecting AMD to support a completely separate driver just for Linux is unrealistic. Expecting a 100kLOC code dump do be accepted is unrealistic as well. I don't see anyone talking about how to get over this hurdle on lkml, I just see the single least constructive word: "No." Meanwhile, 3D support in Linux will remain a crappy tire fire which works well only if you use a completely proprietary nVidia driver.
      - tremon 10y ago
        I've only got one true power as a maintainer, and that is to say No. The other option is I personally sit down and rewrite all the code in an acceptable manner, and merge that instead. But I've discovered I probably don't scale to that level, so again it leaves me with just the one actual power. -Dave Airlie, in TFA.
      - Neliquat 10y ago
        This position is so self-defeating, I really don't know where to start. 1. There is absolutely value in rejecting bad, or even good but unmaintainable code from your codebase. How is this even an argument? 2. The 'devs' don't just all meet and then decide to blow each other off anyway, AMD is simply in a position with Steam where they want it to "just work" for most games at the lowest investment cost possible. They took a gamble and lost. 3. A updated proprietary driver is not ideal, but works better than making the OS worse. Again, not sure you can really disagree.
  - sangnoir 10y ago
    > It's not pragmatic to stand your guns and ask a multi-million dollar company to change the code they submit to your open-source project. The maintainer explains the pragmatism explicitly: > AMD can't threaten not to support new GPUs in upstream kernels without merging this, that is totally something you can do, and here's the thing Linux will survive, we'll piss off a bunch of people, but the Linux kernel will just keep on rolling forward, maybe at some point someone will get pissed about lacking upstream support for your HW and go write support and submit it, maybe they won't. The kernel is bigger than any of us and has standards about what is acceptable Rejecting half-assed patches is pretty pragmatic, no matter who the author is. Maintaining standards is pragmatic because 'your open-source project' is the one that will be maintaining (refactoring/rewriting) the code in the future, not the muliti-million dollar company.
  - sjellis 10y ago
    > I think what you mean is "I get the idealism but you also need to be realistic." It's not pragmatic to stand your guns and ask a multi-million dollar company to change the code they submit to your open-source project. That has basically been Linus' Torvalds job for the last 20 years. People want to contribute to the Linux kernel to get support for the thing that they are interested in, but often the code that they are offering should not be accepted as-is, because it will make Linux as a whole that bit worse. See DBus for an example where clever people strongly put forward useful functionality, and got push-back. The end result was that they went back to the drawing board, and designed something better. AIUI, the reason that the AMD and nVidia proprietary graphics drivers are a terrifying mass of hacks on top of hacks is trying to say yes to everything. Years later, the vendors can only move forward by setting fire to the whole lot.
- lisivka 10y ago
  Android is Linux.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    No. Android is a Java based OS that happens to use Linux as a kernel. The majority of APIs are not exposed to NDK users, only to OEMs. Google could release lets say Android 8 with another POSIX compliant kernel and the only apps that would notice are the ones using non official APIs.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - lisivka 10y ago
      Some Linux distros are already using non-linux kernels, e.g. GNU Debian/kFreeBSD, so Debian Linux is not Linux then. Currently, Android is released using Linux kernel, ELF executable format, POSIX API's, and so on. There is no Android/kFreeBSD, nor Android/NT. Android games can be launched on Linux using android libraries (not all, but some works pretty well, see: http://www.shashlik.io/showcases/ http://www.shashlik.io/showcases/ ). Linux tools can be launched on Android systems (including X based tools, if X server is running). For most of practical purposes, Android is Linux.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        Nice try playing word games. Debian user space isn't the same thing as a kernel. Android kernel doesn't expose the same syscalls as a standard Linux. I am really keen in having Google replacing Linux with Magenta, then we can carry on this discussion about what Android is supposed to be.
        lisivka 10y ago
        Currently, Android can be ran at vanilla kernel: http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-7-2013/general/android-running-vanilla-4-5-kernel-t3351816 http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-7-2013/general/android...
- mVChr 10y ago
  And not being able to play A-grade games is barely a rounding error in the pros and cons of why most people use Linux, especially in the workplace.
  - xorxornop 10y ago
    And it is also why it will continue to be marginalised, and have generally shit, inconsistent UI.
    - foepys 10y ago
      I feel that any KDE distribution has a more consistent UI than the monstrosity that is windows 10 with their Metro/Ribbon/Windows 7 UIs.
      - andromeduck 10y ago
        consistently bloated, yeah
        scythe 10y ago
        Lol KDE has many flaws but bloat isn't one of them, I get the feeling sometimes that the presence of several ultra-ultra-light "desktop environments" on Linux causes people to think the major ones are "bloated" when in fact they're much smaller than the DEs on Windows/OS X. FWIW "slow under certain circumstances" does not necessarily imply bloat b/c a single badly implemented feature can cause slowness but that's not the same as bloat; try enabling compositing in some old versions of Xfce (basically right after it was added, maybe Xfce 4.2?) and you'll see what I mean real quick.
    - krylon 10y ago
      It is a matter of taste, of course, but compared to Windows 8 and Windows 10, common Linux/Unix desktop environments like MATE or Xfce are very pleasant to use.
  - OskarS 10y ago
- scythe 10y ago
  Reliable wifi and streaming video appeal to a significantly larger market than GPU-heavy video games. Having a good, easy-to-use image editor (competes with paint.NET and old versions of photoshop) and music player (competes with foobar2k et al/the surprisingly good performance of iTunes on os x) doesn't hurt. ("Do users do X often?" isn't the question; "do they get annoyed when they can't?" is the question, and hardcore gamers tend to have one computer for gaming and oftentimes other computers for other stuff; if they were even using Linux on those it'd be a paradigm shift)
pjmlp 10y ago
Other than the desktop. And before anyone mentions Android and ChromeOS, Google can replace the kernel and only OEMs writing drivers, most of them closed, would notice.
- pavanky 10y ago
  Sure it is the OS problem that Linux doesn't dominate the desktop. Nothing to do with Windows and OSX being bundled with the hardware /s
  - EpicEng 10y ago
    GPU drivers that work half as well as the competition don't help.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      They do, if that's what it takes to keep the qualities that make Linux different. If it turns itself into a shitty Windows clone, then one might as well use the original.
      - EpicEng 10y ago
        No, on the desktop, they absolutely do not. It may please a tiny subset of people who understand what the kernel is and read patch notes, but no one else.
        yoasif_ 10y ago
        It works fine for members of my family and extended family that have Ubuntu installs on Intel GPUs. Light gaming and more importantly, hardware accelerated YouTube works just fine. I'd be willing to bet that most people really only want windows to appear quickly, scrolling in web pages to work well, and to watch videos online. Lots of casual gaming has moved to mobile, and never left the consoles. Hardcore gaming -- not most people.

This is why the Linux kernel runs and will continue to run the world. The No men is all that stands between us and the Yes men. Praise and salutations to the No men, God bless you.

tw04 10y ago

That's an interesting take... this is why Linux gaming sucks. I get the pragmatism but we also need to be realistic that they aren't going to maintain a completely separate driver for Linux when the Linux gaming market share is barely a rounding error.

williadc 10y ago
> I get the pragmatism but we also need to be realistic I think what you mean is "I get the idealism but you also need to be realistic." It's not pragmatic to stand your guns and ask a multi-million dollar company to change the code they submit to your open-source project.
- ssutch3 10y ago
  Haha yeah, because the Linux Kernel is just another open source project.
- omegaworks 10y ago
  Thing is, Linux was never intended to run the latest greatest desktop gaming hardware. It was intended to be an open architecture where people contribute from all around the world to make something larger then themselves. All of these people pretty much contribute their free time to it. If they can't make basic architectural decisions that improve the worst kinds of work (driver authorship and maintenance is awful drudgery) how can you expect them to feel any kind of ownership over their fate? You're asking unpaid people to do the work people get paid for. Even worse, when this work just gets dumped on those unpaid people by people who are paid quite well.
  - egil 10y ago
    Most work on Linux is paid[0]. However, asking paid people to do work that does not align with their employers interest nor the project maintainers, is on par with what you're asking. [0] 4.5 Development statistics https://lwn.net/Articles/679289/ https://lwn.net/Articles/679289/. Just google lwn Development statistics for more.
    - mixedCase 10y ago
      >However, asking paid people to do work that does not align with their employers interest nor the project maintainers, is on par with what you're asking. Oh but it is in their employers' interest. It's the price of admission for mainline. And if they want in on mainline, wether simply to harvest PR or to net a contract that demands a mainlined kernel; they have to pay it. Just another case of the well-known "cost of doing business". In the case of AMD I believe they want to reap the benefits of mainline (that is, not having to support the breakage that comes with being out of tree) and to be able to compete better with Nvidia; since AMD is unlikely to ever develop an OpenGL implementation as good as theirs but Nvidia cannot or is unlikely to be able to open source their driver.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    It might be different if AMD, Nvidia and Intel all agreed on a longer term HAL, but that isn't the case... and 100kloc is pretty huge for a single vendor.
- broodbucket 10y ago
  It's not pragmatic to allow a specific vendor to dump 100k LOC in your project that you have to maintain indefinitely so their developers have an easier time writing for both Windows and Linux. In my opinion the existing AMDGPU code isn't exactly spectacular as it is. They barely have comments or commit messages and there's a ton of duplication. Linux has issues with keeping driver contributions up to snuff as it is, without enormous vendor-specific HALs everywhere.
  - izacus 10y ago
    There's also nothing pragmatic in one-sidedly denying contributions without understanding the case that rewriting a whole business stack for a minor player makes no sense. What I see here is (sadly, again) two groups of developers unwilling to meet halfway and understanding each others problems. Expecting AMD to support a completely separate driver just for Linux is unrealistic. Expecting a 100kLOC code dump do be accepted is unrealistic as well. I don't see anyone talking about how to get over this hurdle on lkml, I just see the single least constructive word: "No." Meanwhile, 3D support in Linux will remain a crappy tire fire which works well only if you use a completely proprietary nVidia driver.
    - tremon 10y ago
      I've only got one true power as a maintainer, and that is to say No. The other option is I personally sit down and rewrite all the code in an acceptable manner, and merge that instead. But I've discovered I probably don't scale to that level, so again it leaves me with just the one actual power. -Dave Airlie, in TFA.
    - Neliquat 10y ago
      This position is so self-defeating, I really don't know where to start. 1. There is absolutely value in rejecting bad, or even good but unmaintainable code from your codebase. How is this even an argument? 2. The 'devs' don't just all meet and then decide to blow each other off anyway, AMD is simply in a position with Steam where they want it to "just work" for most games at the lowest investment cost possible. They took a gamble and lost. 3. A updated proprietary driver is not ideal, but works better than making the OS worse. Again, not sure you can really disagree.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > It's not pragmatic to stand your guns and ask a multi-million dollar company to change the code they submit to your open-source project. The maintainer explains the pragmatism explicitly: > AMD can't threaten not to support new GPUs in upstream kernels without merging this, that is totally something you can do, and here's the thing Linux will survive, we'll piss off a bunch of people, but the Linux kernel will just keep on rolling forward, maybe at some point someone will get pissed about lacking upstream support for your HW and go write support and submit it, maybe they won't. The kernel is bigger than any of us and has standards about what is acceptable Rejecting half-assed patches is pretty pragmatic, no matter who the author is. Maintaining standards is pragmatic because 'your open-source project' is the one that will be maintaining (refactoring/rewriting) the code in the future, not the muliti-million dollar company.
- sjellis 10y ago
  > I think what you mean is "I get the idealism but you also need to be realistic." It's not pragmatic to stand your guns and ask a multi-million dollar company to change the code they submit to your open-source project. That has basically been Linus' Torvalds job for the last 20 years. People want to contribute to the Linux kernel to get support for the thing that they are interested in, but often the code that they are offering should not be accepted as-is, because it will make Linux as a whole that bit worse. See DBus for an example where clever people strongly put forward useful functionality, and got push-back. The end result was that they went back to the drawing board, and designed something better. AIUI, the reason that the AMD and nVidia proprietary graphics drivers are a terrifying mass of hacks on top of hacks is trying to say yes to everything. Years later, the vendors can only move forward by setting fire to the whole lot.
lisivka 10y ago
Android is Linux.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  No. Android is a Java based OS that happens to use Linux as a kernel. The majority of APIs are not exposed to NDK users, only to OEMs. Google could release lets say Android 8 with another POSIX compliant kernel and the only apps that would notice are the ones using non official APIs.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - lisivka 10y ago
    Some Linux distros are already using non-linux kernels, e.g. GNU Debian/kFreeBSD, so Debian Linux is not Linux then. Currently, Android is released using Linux kernel, ELF executable format, POSIX API's, and so on. There is no Android/kFreeBSD, nor Android/NT. Android games can be launched on Linux using android libraries (not all, but some works pretty well, see: http://www.shashlik.io/showcases/ http://www.shashlik.io/showcases/ ). Linux tools can be launched on Android systems (including X based tools, if X server is running). For most of practical purposes, Android is Linux.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Nice try playing word games. Debian user space isn't the same thing as a kernel. Android kernel doesn't expose the same syscalls as a standard Linux. I am really keen in having Google replacing Linux with Magenta, then we can carry on this discussion about what Android is supposed to be.
      - lisivka 10y ago
        Currently, Android can be ran at vanilla kernel: http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-7-2013/general/android-running-vanilla-4-5-kernel-t3351816 http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-7-2013/general/android...
mVChr 10y ago
And not being able to play A-grade games is barely a rounding error in the pros and cons of why most people use Linux, especially in the workplace.
- xorxornop 10y ago
  And it is also why it will continue to be marginalised, and have generally shit, inconsistent UI.
  - foepys 10y ago
    I feel that any KDE distribution has a more consistent UI than the monstrosity that is windows 10 with their Metro/Ribbon/Windows 7 UIs.
    - andromeduck 10y ago
      consistently bloated, yeah
      - scythe 10y ago
        Lol KDE has many flaws but bloat isn't one of them, I get the feeling sometimes that the presence of several ultra-ultra-light "desktop environments" on Linux causes people to think the major ones are "bloated" when in fact they're much smaller than the DEs on Windows/OS X. FWIW "slow under certain circumstances" does not necessarily imply bloat b/c a single badly implemented feature can cause slowness but that's not the same as bloat; try enabling compositing in some old versions of Xfce (basically right after it was added, maybe Xfce 4.2?) and you'll see what I mean real quick.
  - krylon 10y ago
    It is a matter of taste, of course, but compared to Windows 8 and Windows 10, common Linux/Unix desktop environments like MATE or Xfce are very pleasant to use.
- OskarS 10y ago
scythe 10y ago
Reliable wifi and streaming video appeal to a significantly larger market than GPU-heavy video games. Having a good, easy-to-use image editor (competes with paint.NET and old versions of photoshop) and music player (competes with foobar2k et al/the surprisingly good performance of iTunes on os x) doesn't hurt. ("Do users do X often?" isn't the question; "do they get annoyed when they can't?" is the question, and hardcore gamers tend to have one computer for gaming and oftentimes other computers for other stuff; if they were even using Linux on those it'd be a paradigm shift)

pjmlp 10y ago

Other than the desktop. And before anyone mentions Android and ChromeOS, Google can replace the kernel and only OEMs writing drivers, most of them closed, would notice.

pavanky 10y ago
Sure it is the OS problem that Linux doesn't dominate the desktop. Nothing to do with Windows and OSX being bundled with the hardware /s
- EpicEng 10y ago
  GPU drivers that work half as well as the competition don't help.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    They do, if that's what it takes to keep the qualities that make Linux different. If it turns itself into a shitty Windows clone, then one might as well use the original.
    - EpicEng 10y ago
      No, on the desktop, they absolutely do not. It may please a tiny subset of people who understand what the kernel is and read patch notes, but no one else.
      - yoasif_ 10y ago
        It works fine for members of my family and extended family that have Ubuntu installs on Intel GPUs. Light gaming and more importantly, hardware accelerated YouTube works just fine. I'd be willing to bet that most people really only want windows to appear quickly, scrolling in web pages to work well, and to watch videos online. Lots of casual gaming has moved to mobile, and never left the consoles. Hardcore gaming -- not most people.