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The Linux kernel has a ton of attention dedicated to it. In particular, enterprises that prefer reliability to newness often are a few versions behind, making L
by cynicalkane 15y ago
The Linux kernel has a ton of attention dedicated to it. In particular, enterprises that prefer reliability to newness often are a few versions behind, making Linux for their purposes the most heavily acceptance-tested software there is.
This doesn't mean its design is inherently more reliable. Anything can be made reliable with enough eyeballs. I think a design goal of Minix is to increase the reliability per eyeball ratio, particularly when it comes to extending the kernel. Reliability, modularity, performance, and testing are all trade-offs. It's also pretty easy to find a configuration that one would think "should work", but actually causes Linux to suffer, complain, and crash.
- anamax 15y ago> Anything can be made reliable with enough eyeballs. The relevant measure isn't the number of eyeballs, but whether they're the correct eyeballs. The wrong eyeballs can decrease reliability.
- ketralnis 15y agoSure, but we already have Linux (and FreeBSD and NetBSD and...). So if your argument for something new is reliability, you're arguing inherently-potentially-more-reliable vs in-practise-already-quite-reliable and haven't shown us what we gain by going with you vs them.
- cynicalkane 15y agoThe usual arguments in a language or OS flame war are relevant here. Do you choose the allegedly superior design, or the more popular and practiced one? The answer depends on your use case, love of tinkering, tolerance for productivity risk. But were it not for people trying new designs, we'd all be writing code in assembly language on single-user systems.