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Yes, they really don't care unless it results in a site going down. An industrial giant is happy to throw infinite machines at a problem until it is resolved. T

Yes, they really don't care unless it results in a site going down. An industrial giant is happy to throw infinite machines at a problem until it is resolved. The issue isn't in their behavior, it's in Linux's implementation being so poor that they have to. But what are the alternatives? Should Google/Facebook/Amazon throw infinite developer time resolving kernel issues? Should they walk away from Linux?

mhoad 5y ago
I mean one of them at least went ahead and wrote (technically is in the process of writing) an entire operating system from scratch in response. I say this as someone who uses and has used linux as a daily driver for years now but honestly I don’t feel good about the future of the platform in the medium term at all. If anyone has some time to throw at understanding why this is probably the single most sober and rational set of arguments I’ve found of the topic yet https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WtJ9T_IJOPE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WtJ9T_IJOPE
- samhw 5y ago
  Sorry if this is a bit blunt, but I'm mystified by the description of that video as "sober and rational". I'm not a Linux fanboy at all -- I happily use my Mac and don't even own a Linux computer besides my Raspberry Pi -- and in fact I was looking forward to digging into that talk, but it's just a guy rambling extraordinarily slowly about a bunch of half-points for an hour. The parts that I managed to endure were these: "Some Linux figures are being cancelled, like Richard Stallman." Silence the pianos and with muffled drum... oh wait, actually, systemd will probably keep running and crons will keep firing. "Linux companies undergoing changes." Where's Heraclitus when you need him? "Linux complexity increasing rapidly." He counts 2m lines of code added this year. But it's mostly drivers, and anyway this number has been trending downwards for a decade from what I can see (https://www.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/linux-kernel.0021.jpg https://www.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/linux-ker...). "All Linux events are cancelled." Hmm, far be it from me to say, but I faintly recall that there was something besides Linux which might account for that. "Google building Linux replacement." Google not building Linux replacement, Google building operating system. "No operating system stays dominant forever." Linux is indeed not Ozymandias, sitting alone at the top of all creation, outside of space and time ... but I'm not sure how that means it sucks. I wanted to like this, I honestly did, but the arguments are so dreadful that it feels like a deleted scene from one of Plato's dialogues. And Lord almighty he could have got to the point - such as it was - in much less than an hour.
  - effie 5y ago
    It is easy and correct to critize that Lunduke's video. But the main point behind is that Linux project is becoming more corporatey, more windowsey and less user friendly and less small business friendly. New Linux drivers can't run perfectly fine 10 year old hardware (RAID cards, GPU cards) and users are forced to stay on old versions, or keep buying new hardware they don't need. That is not user or community friendly. But it is how Microsoft operates.
    - samhw 5y ago
      I'm not sure what 'corporatey' or 'windowsey' means in the context of an operating system? Also, surely it's part of the nature of drivers that they are hardware-specific. Hardware changes a hell of a lot over 10 years. These complaints seem to describe issues with the way computers are architected and developed, more than anything in Linux itself.
      - effie 5y ago
        Re. corporatey, windowsey, see my answer above. The problem with old HW support is that the hardware is fine, the drivers are available and fine, but the kernel people decided to throw them out and replace by newer drivers which can run only newer HW products. Developers/vendors could be more user-friendly and keep support for the older hardware since the older compatible drivers exist, but they often don't.
        marcan_42 5y ago
        What are these drivers you're talking about? Linux very rarely drops support for older hardware. Things I remember off the top of my head in recent years: floppy boot support being removed, pre-ATAPI Matsushita CD-ROM support being removed, stuff like that. Turns out... you aren't going to be running modern Linux on systems that ancient anyway, because the minimum system requirements for just the kernel alone are already higher than machines of that era. So the number of people impacted by those cleanups should be ~0. Are you seeing drivers actively being used by people on modern kernel versions being removed? You mentioned GPUs, but Nouveau supposedly supports Nvidia GPUs all the way back to the Riva TNT2 from 1998, and the Radeon driver should go all the way back to the original Radeon R100 from 2000. What are these unsupported GPUs you speak of? Same with RAID cards; I see the driver for the Promise PDC20277 is still in mainline, and that's a PATA card from 2001 or thereabouts. You can't endlessly upgrade software on ancient hardware; at some point the software outgrows it. Linux has historically been extremely good at keeping compatibility for old hardware, 20 years down the line. No other OS does that. But at some point things do have to go. I don't remember any time Linux broke something within a timeline similar to other OSes' support period.
- somerando7 5y ago
  Who is in the process of writing an entire OS from scratch if I may ask? I want to go join that company...
  - pram 5y ago
    Google. Good luck!

mhoad 5y ago

I mean one of them at least went ahead and wrote (technically is in the process of writing) an entire operating system from scratch in response. I say this as someone who uses and has used linux as a daily driver for years now but honestly I don’t feel good about the future of the platform in the medium term at all. If anyone has some time to throw at understanding why this is probably the single most sober and rational set of arguments I’ve found of the topic yet https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WtJ9T_IJOPE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WtJ9T_IJOPE

samhw 5y ago
Sorry if this is a bit blunt, but I'm mystified by the description of that video as "sober and rational". I'm not a Linux fanboy at all -- I happily use my Mac and don't even own a Linux computer besides my Raspberry Pi -- and in fact I was looking forward to digging into that talk, but it's just a guy rambling extraordinarily slowly about a bunch of half-points for an hour. The parts that I managed to endure were these: "Some Linux figures are being cancelled, like Richard Stallman." Silence the pianos and with muffled drum... oh wait, actually, systemd will probably keep running and crons will keep firing. "Linux companies undergoing changes." Where's Heraclitus when you need him? "Linux complexity increasing rapidly." He counts 2m lines of code added this year. But it's mostly drivers, and anyway this number has been trending downwards for a decade from what I can see (https://www.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/linux-kernel.0021.jpg https://www.pingdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/linux-ker...). "All Linux events are cancelled." Hmm, far be it from me to say, but I faintly recall that there was something besides Linux which might account for that. "Google building Linux replacement." Google not building Linux replacement, Google building operating system. "No operating system stays dominant forever." Linux is indeed not Ozymandias, sitting alone at the top of all creation, outside of space and time ... but I'm not sure how that means it sucks. I wanted to like this, I honestly did, but the arguments are so dreadful that it feels like a deleted scene from one of Plato's dialogues. And Lord almighty he could have got to the point - such as it was - in much less than an hour.
- effie 5y ago
  It is easy and correct to critize that Lunduke's video. But the main point behind is that Linux project is becoming more corporatey, more windowsey and less user friendly and less small business friendly. New Linux drivers can't run perfectly fine 10 year old hardware (RAID cards, GPU cards) and users are forced to stay on old versions, or keep buying new hardware they don't need. That is not user or community friendly. But it is how Microsoft operates.
  - samhw 5y ago
    I'm not sure what 'corporatey' or 'windowsey' means in the context of an operating system? Also, surely it's part of the nature of drivers that they are hardware-specific. Hardware changes a hell of a lot over 10 years. These complaints seem to describe issues with the way computers are architected and developed, more than anything in Linux itself.
    - effie 5y ago
      Re. corporatey, windowsey, see my answer above. The problem with old HW support is that the hardware is fine, the drivers are available and fine, but the kernel people decided to throw them out and replace by newer drivers which can run only newer HW products. Developers/vendors could be more user-friendly and keep support for the older hardware since the older compatible drivers exist, but they often don't.
      - marcan_42 5y ago
        What are these drivers you're talking about? Linux very rarely drops support for older hardware. Things I remember off the top of my head in recent years: floppy boot support being removed, pre-ATAPI Matsushita CD-ROM support being removed, stuff like that. Turns out... you aren't going to be running modern Linux on systems that ancient anyway, because the minimum system requirements for just the kernel alone are already higher than machines of that era. So the number of people impacted by those cleanups should be ~0. Are you seeing drivers actively being used by people on modern kernel versions being removed? You mentioned GPUs, but Nouveau supposedly supports Nvidia GPUs all the way back to the Riva TNT2 from 1998, and the Radeon driver should go all the way back to the original Radeon R100 from 2000. What are these unsupported GPUs you speak of? Same with RAID cards; I see the driver for the Promise PDC20277 is still in mainline, and that's a PATA card from 2001 or thereabouts. You can't endlessly upgrade software on ancient hardware; at some point the software outgrows it. Linux has historically been extremely good at keeping compatibility for old hardware, 20 years down the line. No other OS does that. But at some point things do have to go. I don't remember any time Linux broke something within a timeline similar to other OSes' support period.
somerando7 5y ago
Who is in the process of writing an entire OS from scratch if I may ask? I want to go join that company...
- pram 5y ago
  Google. Good luck!