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Getting smart young people to contribute to Linux Distros (and BSD for that matter) to me is a tough job. Linux kicked off in the 90s because young people at t

by jmclnx 2y ago

Getting smart young people to contribute to Linux Distros (and BSD for that matter) to me is a tough job. Linux kicked off in the 90s because young people at that time wanted a real OS, so Linux came out and people flocked to improve it. Today, almost all kids use Cell Phones, which are all locked down. I think only a few young kids rely on PCs, thus the issue. I hope it can be solved at some point and good contributors can be found. Otherwise we will be left with just IBM Red Hat.

shakow 2y ago
> Getting smart young people to contribute to Linux Distros (and BSD for that matter) to me is a tough job. I mean, they came with enthusiasm and a lot of hard work, brought a new language with many advantages (as said by the BDFL humself), dusted off the whole GPU stack, tried to formalize a bit the FS systems, then got shunned out by the greybeards because “muh youngsters and their religion”.
- arp242 2y ago
  That's not really a fair representation of the argument, and the stereotyping of everyone who disagrees or expresses some caution as an old stubborn greybeard who refuses to learn anything new is exactly the thing people (rightfully) complain about.
  - shakow 2y ago
    Please feel free to develop what you perceive as being a fair representation of the situation. > or expresses some caution Bellowing about religions while monopolizing a talk Q&A is not “expressing some caution”.
    - arp242 2y ago
      I'm not going to spend half an hour (or more) doing a full detailed write-up in response to a lazy assertion, especially since your attitude does not resemble that of a person with genuine interest in understanding other people's viewpoints. Stereotyping an entire viewpoint as you did in your previous comment is pretty much always wrong. I might be a bit more forgiving if it has included some context or details, but it doesn't. Your post is little more than an insult. I will add that people having been choking each other over all sorts of technical stuff for as long as this "free software" thing has existed, because there are usually 20 ways to do anything and typically between 2 and 10 ways are reasonable. This is really nothing new and discussions surrounding Rust are really not that special.
    - NobodyNada 2y ago
      The full quote: > You're trying to convince everyone to switch over to the religion as promulgated by Rust, and the reality is that ain't gonna happen because we have 50+ filesystems in Linux. They will not all be instantaneously converted over to Rust. Before that happens, we will continue to refactor C code because we want to make the C code better. If it breaks the Rust bindings, at least for the foreseeable future, the Rust bindings are a second class citizen, and those filesystem that depend on the Rust bindings will break, and that is the Rust bindings problem, not the filesystem community at large problem, and that's going to be true for a long long time. And I think we just simply need to accept that, because the answer "you are not allowed to refactor the C code because it would break 5 critical filesystem that distros depend upon" is not a starter. So we'll see; I suspect the best thing to do is for you to continue maintaining your Rust bindings. Over time, there will be continued C code refactoring -- maybe we will start using kfree RCU. If that breaks Rust, we will find out whether this concepts of encoding huge amount of semantics into the type system is a good thing or a bad thing, and instead of trying to convince us to what is actually correct, let's see what happens in a year or two. And it will either work or it won't, and we will see, more likely, where does the pain get allocated. Because with most of these sort of engineering things it's almost always a pain allocation question. > [...] > You're not going to force all of us to learn Rust -- if I make a change, I will fix all of the C code, because that's my responsibility. Because I don't know Rust, I'm not going to fix the Rust bindings. Some of his language is more emotionally charged than was productive, sure, but I think his underlying concern is reasonable: most kernel maintainers don't know Rust, and so when they make changes to C code, they won't be able to fix Rust clients of that C code. The Rust maintainers accept this, and agree to take responsibility for updating Rust code to match changes in C (which is contrary to the usual development workflow of the kernel, hence the concern over what happens if major distros start depending on Rust code). Note also that Ts'o isn't objecting to including Rust in the kernel! His recommendation is to ship the Rust bindings and see "where the pain gets allocated" as the C code continues to evolve. (The idea being that either Rust's type system and borrow checker will make it easy to identify semantic breakages early, thus making Rust code lower-maintenance than C, or the Rust bindings will turn out to be fragile and high-maintenance, and that the best way to tell is by waiting to see). I'm not a part of the Linux kernel community at all, and I certainly don't know all the context that led to Almeida leaving the project -- I imagine Ts'o's comments were a "straw that broke the camel's back" kind of thing. But the Linux kernel is a complex project and critical infrastructure, so surely concerns about organization and maintainability need to be hashed out before Rust can make it to production. Also, Ts'o's comments struck me as some of the most reasonable out of that talk, at least from a technical perspective -- the next commenter after Ts'o objects to Rust in the kernel on the basis that its function call syntax reminds him of Java.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Rust on Linux will happen. One way or another. At the worst, one funeral at a time. I wouldn’t sweat it. I remember a HN comment that I really liked and can’t find now that went something like: You know what stopped me from programming? It wasn’t that I didn’t have a good computer. It wasn’t that I started later than all the other kids. It wasn’t that I had to work. Nothing. Nothing stopped me from programming. There’ll always be folks like that. And I hope I’ll be like that for some thing too!
- mustache_kimono 2y ago
  It's a shit take, but I like it. Upvote this guy.
dangitman 2y ago
[dead]
cesarb 2y ago
> Linux kicked off in the 90s because young people at that time wanted a real OS It's easy to underestimate how inferior MS-DOS was, unless you lived through it. Windows (3.x and later 9x) was slightly better, but still had severe issues. Modern Windows is, from what I've heard, a lot better, so the incentive to migrate is not as strong. > Today, almost all kids use Cell Phones, which are all locked down. Not just cell phones; with Secure Boot and BitLocker, computers are more locked down too. In particular, BitLocker means that it's harder to share disk space between Windows and an alternative operating system; back in the MS-DOS (and Windows 9x) days, it was not unusual to install Linux in a directory (or a disk image file) on the same partition used by the other operating system.
- arp242 2y ago
  > Not just cell phones; with Secure Boot and BitLocker, computers are more locked down too. You can just disable secure boot, no? I just got a brand new laptop today, and I could just disable it. I know you can get Linux to work with it, but I can't be arsed to mess about with it and the practical security benefits for me are basically zero. Also, don't underestimate the friction that existed in the 90s or early 00s. Nothing worked on Linux or BSD. My government sent me .doc files. Tons of stuff was Windows-only desktop software.[1] Mucking about with xfree86 -configure and /etc/X11/.... was far from easy or straight-forward. Internet access was far more rare and "just Google it" wasn't really a thing, etc. etc. etc. If I look at the amount of effort I spent to "just get Linux running" back in 2000 or so when I first tried it vs. today, then I'm fairly sure the overall experience is a lot better today. Sure, you need to deal with some stupid nonsense, but that was always the case. [1]: For all the hate the "modern web" gets from some people here: it does replace tons of crappy desktop stuff with an abstracted isolated VM which, among other benefits, makes running "alternative" systems like Linux or BSD far more viable.
  - Filligree 2y ago
    > You can just disable secure boot, no? I just got a brand new laptop today, and I could just disable it. I know you can get Linux to work with it, but I can't be arsed to mess about with it and the practical security benefits for me are basically zero. An imagined conversation: “Mom, I want to disable secure boot so I can try a free operating system.” “Oh no you don’t. Security is important.” This won’t happen to anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about, but it’s having a real impact on the pipeline for getting there. The conversation isn’t as imagined as all that.
augusto-moura 2y ago
There are still a bunch of young ones on PCs because of gaming, unfortunately the gaming scene is chiefly on Windows. Proton and Steam Deck were improvements, but the market share is still heavily leaning towards Microsoft. Maybe if things get better we could see a steadily increase in Linux users, as we are already seeing
lolinder 2y ago
I suspect the same number of people want a real OS as before, the difference is that everyone now has an OS of a weaker kind that gives them access to the same web that we're all on. So it's a similar problem that we have on the web as a whole—it's not that there's less good content (there's actually dramatically more), it's that it's hard to find it in the deluge of bad content. The trick that we have now is that young people with potential to be highly technical won't just come to us automatically like they did when we were 60% of the web. Instead we have to make a more conscious effort to do outreach and give people a taste of the power of real computing.
- skinner927 2y ago
  I agree with your assumption that there’s the same number of people who want a real OS as there ever was. However, I believe there are more active distros and related highly-technical projects today than ever. So everyone has to share fewer contributors, except of course whatever the few hot/popular projects are (the latter is nothing new). I do worry though. Major academic institutions are having to put freshmen in remedial computer classes to teach them what files, folders, and devices are. The average persons is getting farther and farther away from an actual PC and deeper into the “app” world. Everything is moving to “the cloud”. Even software development is being pushed to virtual desktops/thin clients (look at GitHub workspaces [or whatever it’s called] as an example). The extremely large majority of software development today is web/cloud based. There are more and more of the non-technical buying “computers” that are really just glorified tablets. At some point, likely not/hopefully not in our lifetimes, it could become unprofitable for manufacturers to build PCs or only a few remain and the costs become prohibitively expensive to anyone but for-profit companies/corps. Hopefully that’s a pessimistic outlook.
cedws 2y ago
I’m ~young (23) and care about Linux. But I’m not going to volunteer to work on it for free. I have bills to pay. I’m here to get paid. Something that I hope dies off in the next decade is corporations leeching off of passionate volunteers doing free work.

by jmclnx 2y ago

shakow 2y ago

> Getting smart young people to contribute to Linux Distros (and BSD for that matter) to me is a tough job. I mean, they came with enthusiasm and a lot of hard work, brought a new language with many advantages (as said by the BDFL humself), dusted off the whole GPU stack, tried to formalize a bit the FS systems, then got shunned out by the greybeards because “muh youngsters and their religion”.

arp242 2y ago
That's not really a fair representation of the argument, and the stereotyping of everyone who disagrees or expresses some caution as an old stubborn greybeard who refuses to learn anything new is exactly the thing people (rightfully) complain about.
- shakow 2y ago
  Please feel free to develop what you perceive as being a fair representation of the situation. > or expresses some caution Bellowing about religions while monopolizing a talk Q&A is not “expressing some caution”.
  - arp242 2y ago
    I'm not going to spend half an hour (or more) doing a full detailed write-up in response to a lazy assertion, especially since your attitude does not resemble that of a person with genuine interest in understanding other people's viewpoints. Stereotyping an entire viewpoint as you did in your previous comment is pretty much always wrong. I might be a bit more forgiving if it has included some context or details, but it doesn't. Your post is little more than an insult. I will add that people having been choking each other over all sorts of technical stuff for as long as this "free software" thing has existed, because there are usually 20 ways to do anything and typically between 2 and 10 ways are reasonable. This is really nothing new and discussions surrounding Rust are really not that special.
  - NobodyNada 2y ago
    The full quote: > You're trying to convince everyone to switch over to the religion as promulgated by Rust, and the reality is that ain't gonna happen because we have 50+ filesystems in Linux. They will not all be instantaneously converted over to Rust. Before that happens, we will continue to refactor C code because we want to make the C code better. If it breaks the Rust bindings, at least for the foreseeable future, the Rust bindings are a second class citizen, and those filesystem that depend on the Rust bindings will break, and that is the Rust bindings problem, not the filesystem community at large problem, and that's going to be true for a long long time. And I think we just simply need to accept that, because the answer "you are not allowed to refactor the C code because it would break 5 critical filesystem that distros depend upon" is not a starter. So we'll see; I suspect the best thing to do is for you to continue maintaining your Rust bindings. Over time, there will be continued C code refactoring -- maybe we will start using kfree RCU. If that breaks Rust, we will find out whether this concepts of encoding huge amount of semantics into the type system is a good thing or a bad thing, and instead of trying to convince us to what is actually correct, let's see what happens in a year or two. And it will either work or it won't, and we will see, more likely, where does the pain get allocated. Because with most of these sort of engineering things it's almost always a pain allocation question. > [...] > You're not going to force all of us to learn Rust -- if I make a change, I will fix all of the C code, because that's my responsibility. Because I don't know Rust, I'm not going to fix the Rust bindings. Some of his language is more emotionally charged than was productive, sure, but I think his underlying concern is reasonable: most kernel maintainers don't know Rust, and so when they make changes to C code, they won't be able to fix Rust clients of that C code. The Rust maintainers accept this, and agree to take responsibility for updating Rust code to match changes in C (which is contrary to the usual development workflow of the kernel, hence the concern over what happens if major distros start depending on Rust code). Note also that Ts'o isn't objecting to including Rust in the kernel! His recommendation is to ship the Rust bindings and see "where the pain gets allocated" as the C code continues to evolve. (The idea being that either Rust's type system and borrow checker will make it easy to identify semantic breakages early, thus making Rust code lower-maintenance than C, or the Rust bindings will turn out to be fragile and high-maintenance, and that the best way to tell is by waiting to see). I'm not a part of the Linux kernel community at all, and I certainly don't know all the context that led to Almeida leaving the project -- I imagine Ts'o's comments were a "straw that broke the camel's back" kind of thing. But the Linux kernel is a complex project and critical infrastructure, so surely concerns about organization and maintainability need to be hashed out before Rust can make it to production. Also, Ts'o's comments struck me as some of the most reasonable out of that talk, at least from a technical perspective -- the next commenter after Ts'o objects to Rust in the kernel on the basis that its function call syntax reminds him of Java.
renewiltord 2y ago
Rust on Linux will happen. One way or another. At the worst, one funeral at a time. I wouldn’t sweat it. I remember a HN comment that I really liked and can’t find now that went something like: You know what stopped me from programming? It wasn’t that I didn’t have a good computer. It wasn’t that I started later than all the other kids. It wasn’t that I had to work. Nothing. Nothing stopped me from programming. There’ll always be folks like that. And I hope I’ll be like that for some thing too!
mustache_kimono 2y ago
It's a shit take, but I like it. Upvote this guy.

dangitman 2y ago

[dead]

cesarb 2y ago

> Linux kicked off in the 90s because young people at that time wanted a real OS It's easy to underestimate how inferior MS-DOS was, unless you lived through it. Windows (3.x and later 9x) was slightly better, but still had severe issues. Modern Windows is, from what I've heard, a lot better, so the incentive to migrate is not as strong. > Today, almost all kids use Cell Phones, which are all locked down. Not just cell phones; with Secure Boot and BitLocker, computers are more locked down too. In particular, BitLocker means that it's harder to share disk space between Windows and an alternative operating system; back in the MS-DOS (and Windows 9x) days, it was not unusual to install Linux in a directory (or a disk image file) on the same partition used by the other operating system.

arp242 2y ago
> Not just cell phones; with Secure Boot and BitLocker, computers are more locked down too. You can just disable secure boot, no? I just got a brand new laptop today, and I could just disable it. I know you can get Linux to work with it, but I can't be arsed to mess about with it and the practical security benefits for me are basically zero. Also, don't underestimate the friction that existed in the 90s or early 00s. Nothing worked on Linux or BSD. My government sent me .doc files. Tons of stuff was Windows-only desktop software.[1] Mucking about with xfree86 -configure and /etc/X11/.... was far from easy or straight-forward. Internet access was far more rare and "just Google it" wasn't really a thing, etc. etc. etc. If I look at the amount of effort I spent to "just get Linux running" back in 2000 or so when I first tried it vs. today, then I'm fairly sure the overall experience is a lot better today. Sure, you need to deal with some stupid nonsense, but that was always the case. [1]: For all the hate the "modern web" gets from some people here: it does replace tons of crappy desktop stuff with an abstracted isolated VM which, among other benefits, makes running "alternative" systems like Linux or BSD far more viable.
- Filligree 2y ago
  > You can just disable secure boot, no? I just got a brand new laptop today, and I could just disable it. I know you can get Linux to work with it, but I can't be arsed to mess about with it and the practical security benefits for me are basically zero. An imagined conversation: “Mom, I want to disable secure boot so I can try a free operating system.” “Oh no you don’t. Security is important.” This won’t happen to anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about, but it’s having a real impact on the pipeline for getting there. The conversation isn’t as imagined as all that.

augusto-moura 2y ago

There are still a bunch of young ones on PCs because of gaming, unfortunately the gaming scene is chiefly on Windows. Proton and Steam Deck were improvements, but the market share is still heavily leaning towards Microsoft. Maybe if things get better we could see a steadily increase in Linux users, as we are already seeing

lolinder 2y ago

I suspect the same number of people want a real OS as before, the difference is that everyone now has an OS of a weaker kind that gives them access to the same web that we're all on. So it's a similar problem that we have on the web as a whole—it's not that there's less good content (there's actually dramatically more), it's that it's hard to find it in the deluge of bad content. The trick that we have now is that young people with potential to be highly technical won't just come to us automatically like they did when we were 60% of the web. Instead we have to make a more conscious effort to do outreach and give people a taste of the power of real computing.

skinner927 2y ago
I agree with your assumption that there’s the same number of people who want a real OS as there ever was. However, I believe there are more active distros and related highly-technical projects today than ever. So everyone has to share fewer contributors, except of course whatever the few hot/popular projects are (the latter is nothing new). I do worry though. Major academic institutions are having to put freshmen in remedial computer classes to teach them what files, folders, and devices are. The average persons is getting farther and farther away from an actual PC and deeper into the “app” world. Everything is moving to “the cloud”. Even software development is being pushed to virtual desktops/thin clients (look at GitHub workspaces [or whatever it’s called] as an example). The extremely large majority of software development today is web/cloud based. There are more and more of the non-technical buying “computers” that are really just glorified tablets. At some point, likely not/hopefully not in our lifetimes, it could become unprofitable for manufacturers to build PCs or only a few remain and the costs become prohibitively expensive to anyone but for-profit companies/corps. Hopefully that’s a pessimistic outlook.

cedws 2y ago

I’m ~young (23) and care about Linux. But I’m not going to volunteer to work on it for free. I have bills to pay. I’m here to get paid. Something that I hope dies off in the next decade is corporations leeching off of passionate volunteers doing free work.