Linux 3.0

[guy keren]

why do you think you are not both right?

each of you had different uses for Linux, different needs, and different
experiences.

the same can be said for other operating systems too.

personally, i have been using Linux as my home desktop OS since October
1993. were there problems? yes, there were problems. at one point i
bought a CDROM - and found that it had no Linux driver - one was
released only 1-2 years later, and worked badly for a long while. there
were upgrades that worked well , and upgrades that required a full day
of fixes to make the system function properly again. there was a fiasco
when i upgrades to Ubuntu 8.04, where pulse-audio wreaked havoc on my
system, making lots of sound parts not work, and flash causing firefox
to crash every now and then - and it took me days to work around these
problems.

The thing is, windows did not lack problems either - they were simply
different problems - with its common crashes, and installation problems
(the fun i had with windows 98 on a PC i bought in mid 1999 - linux
would work on it for a week or two with no crashes. windows 98? it
crashed every day or two - sometimes several times a day). and the fact
that for each new version - you'd do a fresh install - because the
upgrade rarely worked properly. when i wanted to switch to a new PC at
2002 - with linux i just placed the old disk in the new machine, and
just had to configure some peripheral drivers. with windows - a
re-install was required - and it took several hours until i figured out
the proper order in which i had to install the various drivers for the
board, the screen controller and the network card - installing in a
different order lead to a blank black screen after windows started.

as for bsd - i never tried to use it at home - only had access to one
such system in the Technion (with the "original" Berkeley BSD 4.3).

there were times when i stumbled upon various Fiascos with Linux - such
as the memory management problems of early 2.4 kernels. and yet even
them - i have seen people that were bit by it, and people that didn't
even know there were problems. two companies i had a pleasure to work
with used it for their new appliance products. for one - a 2.4.0.testX
kernel ran on a small appliance without a flow. For the other - their
memory-hungry application had struggled on their appliance all the time
until version 2.4.18 - where they had to work directly with the memory
management developer of the day to get a solution). i imagine each of
them would have given a completely different account of how stable Linux
is.

Yes - Linus tends to break things around every now and then. no - it
does not mean this is a toy.

did Sun not ditch SunOS in order to force its buggy Solaris OS upon its
users, and making the users go all over a few years of debug cycles,
when its users were screaming for SunOS all this time?

did IBM not release AIX to its users with trivial bugs, such as "ps" not
showing the correct output occasionally, and had the users work as "beta
testers" for their system on RS/6000 machines for several years, until
it finally started to work properly?

did Microsoft not do the same, dropping every working system in favor of
something worse at every release of windows - with the huge amount of
resources each release required, not to mention their years of blue
screens and desktop machines that crash several times a day - and people
simply took it for granted that you had to press the reset button
occasionally? with windows XP dropping support for a lot of older
hardware that windows 98 supported, causing users to have to drop that
hardware (i have seen a good scanner being thrown away, because it had
no driver for windows XP).

the world of computing is full of systems that, due to the broad ways in
which they are used, leave a completely different impression on
different people.

so the bottom line is: which system gives you the best choice - is
different for different people. all of them have problems, all of them
have strong points and weak points.

--guy

On Sun, 2011-05-29 at 22:16 +0300, geoffrey mendelson wrote:
> On May 29, 2011, at 9:23 PM, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> >
> > I know you said this as a joke, but to rain on your parade, BSD is  
> > not GNU-
> > free. As far as I know *BSD distributions typically use quite a  
> > number of GNU
> > packages, such as gcc, groff, bc, and probably a bunch of others.  
> > They also
> > include, I believe, a bunch of other GPL (though not GNU) software.
> 
> Some do, some don't they are not needed. As for C compilers, there is  
> more than GCC.
> 
> >
> > Linus's intention is to change the kernel numbering scheme, and  
> > nothing
> > else - the move to 3.0 (or 2.8) will not (apparently) be used as an
> > oportunity for massive depracation of old features, cleaup of defunct
> > drivers, or major restructing of the code. These things have been  
> > happening
> > slowly in every version, and nobody is waiting for a specific  
> > version number
> > (like the big three-oh) to do them.
> >
> 
> Good, there was among other things the major I/O driver change from  
> 2.4 to 2.6 leaving many devices with 2.4 drivers not working in 2.6,  
> and 2.4 without drivers for many new devices until the fact that 2.6  
> was not being universally accepted and 2.6 drivers were backported.
> 
> Then there was the alsa/oss disaster, when lots of things stopped  
> working because there was no alsa support in the applications that  
> used them, oss support for them in the kernel was dropped, and no oss  
> emulation under alsa. This covered probably 90% of the TV capture  
> cards and many sound cards in use.
> 
> I had to give up on MythTV because I could no longer get a packaged  
> system that would work with my capture card.
> 
> I recently installed the latest Ubuntu (11.04) on a system with the  
> card and it does not work. There was a work around using /dev/dsp? but  
> it just disappeared in this release.
> >> Will audio ever work right?
> >
> > Audio has been working "right" for me for at least 10 years (before  
> > that,
> > I had a lot of problems with proprietary and half-working  
> > drivers)... What
> > kind of problems are you having?
> >
> 
> 
> See above. Also the various sound daemons that have come and gone and  
> never worked right, ESD, and something new I don't remember (it's in  
> 11.04) and so on.
> 
> 
> >> Will Linus, etc ever "get it" that it's not a toy and people actually
> >> expect it to work and stay working?
> >
> > Linux worked, and stayed working, for me for the last 18 years, ever  
> > since
> > I dumped AT&T's commercial System Vr4 which I had been using on my  
> > 386sx,
> > because Linux was, frankly, better than the commercial alternative.
> > Over these 18 years, I slowly dumped also the rest of the commercial
> > alternatives I had been using - DOS, Windows, OS/2, Solaris (nee  
> > SunOS),
> > Ultrix, OSF/1, Irix, HP-UX, DG/UX, and probably a few others, and  
> > today work
> > (almost) exclusively on Linux. My current PDA is still using Apple's
> > prorietary OS, but the next one will most likely be using Linux (via
> > Android). And I have several other devices at home running Linux  
> > (streamer,
> > router, and more).
> >
> > So I don't think it should be called a toy. I think it has been  
> > working,
> > and will continue to work for another decade, better than all the  
> > "commercial"
> > alternatives.
> 
> 
> You're lucky. The system that has worked for me over time has been  
> Windows. Linux has worked well for servers this century, but it never  
> quite seems able to do the things I want when it comes to applications  
> or hardware support. Once Windows 95 came out with TCP/IP built in,  
> and SAMBA was available for UNIX, it has been a much better  
> workstation with far less surprises and "gotchas" than Linux.
> 
> IMHO it's still Linus' toy, and he makes artbtirary decisions based  
> upon what he wants to see people use, and not what they want.
> 
> Of course at this point it's the big choice for servers because the  
> others are BSD (which is fragmented and not as well supported), MacOS  
> (being dropped in server form), Windows Server (a different can of  
> worms) and well that's it. Solaris is just about dead except in new  
> large shops as Oracle intends to make a profit from it. No one I know  
> can afford zOS or A/IX :-)
> 
> As for your using Linux for 18 years, that would put you starting in  
> 1993. That surprises me because I have been using Linux since mid 1995  
> and in those days it was not much more than a curiosity, and not  
> something that you would want to replace UNIX with.  In fact, in those  
> days I was buying CD ROMS with several versions of Linux and BSD on  
> them, and BSD was far richer and more reliable than Linux. I remember  
> the disasterous Linux over DOS filesystem which if you were not  
> careful deleted your boot blocks. I don't even want to remember how  
> many times I had to rebuild them  on various computers.
> 
> When I made aliyah in 1996, I brought with me one of those disks, and  
> left it on the ceiling of the HUJI CS department's system group. At  
> that time they had a site license to to a BSD version and were using  
> that for X86 UNIX, although the first year students had a farm of  
> Windows/NT computers.
> 
> When I left in 1998 to go work at one of the early (and by that time  
> well established Linux based startups in Israel), they were just  
> experimenting with Linux. By that time Red Had been out for a while  
> and it was stable enough to be used for a work environment.
> 
> Ironically while I was there I helped beta test what became Red Hat  
> Linux release 6, with the brand new and seriously broken kernel based  
> NFS server. By the time it was released it had been fixed. I recently  
> went back to the user NFS server, dropping the kernel one because it  
> causes data loss and kernel panics if you share a USB disk.
> 
> The user NFS server does not support all of the functions of the  
> kernel one but I have not had an I/O error or kernel panic since I  
> started to use it, while before I was getting it several times a day  
> on different computers running different Linux kernels (and distros)  
> and disk drives.
> 
> Geoff.
>