6 ms·

I don't know where to begin. 0) Linux is just a kernel, so if taken literally, it never will be an OS. But I will roll with your terminology for now. 1) Linux

by myztic 11y ago

I don't know where to begin. 0) Linux is just a kernel, so if taken literally, it never will be an OS. But I will roll with your terminology for now. 1) Linux was a Unix-like OS for tinkerers, programmers and soon for servers. A "real OS" is not defined by its availability on the Desktop. And indeed I very much used it exactly because of this, because I am a tinkerer who rather runs a Server OS on his private machines, that also allows him to do most Desktop-tasks with ease. 2) The voice of the Desktop camp inside of Linux is not ignored, if anything, the influence is too big. Think about systemd for example. This was not a move in order to run better on Servers, this was primarily Notebook and Server focused. The year of the Linux Desktop is not something we won't see because of evil big corporations, rather because it simply is not Linux's DNA to be that. (And side note: Because of systemd I see more and more people using *BSDs)

krisdol 11y ago
GP was pretty obviously tongue-in-cheek.
tokenizerrr 11y ago
> this was primarily Notebook and Server focused Do you perhaps mean something else here? Notebook and Desktop focused maybe?
notalaser 11y ago
To be fair, notebooks and desktops ran fine without systemd for a long time. To this day, I'm convinced systemd got there just to give Red Hat a big enough foot in the door. Systemd is useful on servers, especially for the DevOps people. On a desktop, it solves no problem that cannot be -- and that has not been for years -- solved without it. I don't use it enough to question its technical merits. The fact that it was packaged in Debian and the world hasn't fallen over implies that people may be unhappy with it, but can still do their jobs, which would mean it's not that bad. But the necessity of its existence on notebooks and desktops is questionable at best. Edit: I know this is going to incite a lot of posts about how the times have changed and now storage devices aren't statical anymore and we NEED systemd. From a lot of people who are too young (or too recent Linux users) to remember the days when udev was still news. Guys, we've been easily hotplugging devices on Linux, on USB, SATA and PCI for about half a decade before systemd's first release (and not as easily but reliably, nonetheless, for at least seven or eight). We've been reliably booting and using Linux off a combination of USB and NFS filesystems for even more than that. All that yadda yadda about devices coming and going at boottime is not without its technical merits, but unless you boot your computer with its case open while frantically plugging and unplugging SATA drives, trust me, it's of absolutely no consequence. Devices appearing and disappearing dynamically used to be a problem. In 2.4. Do you remember the 2.4 kernel? That was (boy, does time pass...) more than ten years ago. Do you honestly think the smart people writing Linux sat on their thumbs for ten years while the arcane world of tape drives and 10 MB hard drives around them was giving way to this new world of magic SSDs and USB?
- lmm 11y ago
  The evil part is that it's making it harder and harder to use a lot of OSS projects on non-Linux OSes. As a FreeBSD user I'm worried, and when it comes to Debian/kFreeBSD the world really has ended as far as I can tell ( and just when it was starting to look like a first-class architecture :'( ). The conspiracy theory would be that it's a deliberate RedHat effort to cripple competitors like Solaris. Unfortunately \*BSD and freedom will be caught in the crossfire.
  - toyg 11y ago
    A RedHat ploy may be, but certainly not to fight Solaris of all systems. Not even Oracle believes in Solaris (they are pushing Linux everywhere, and their own devs always target Linux first), and its community is basically as big as AmigaOS. Systemd is just the end result of RedHat employing a dominant share of infrastructure-critical Linux developers and making too much money compared to other players.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      Well Oracle now have their own Linux distro, forked from RHEL6 (iirc). This fork seems to have put RH on a war path, as their subsequent releases no longer separated out kernel patches from the main kernel source etc. And now CentOS is part of the RH flock, where before it was an independent repack of RHEL. And while Solaris itself may be "dead", there are still various tech that came out of its development that is of interest in the -nix world. Just look at the continued lamentations that you can't get ZFS support in Linux because of incompatible licenses.
      - throwaway7767 11y ago
        Was it really a fork? I was under the impression that they were just directly rebuilding the RH packages, and maybe adding a couple of new ones. Like CentOS, but it's another company doing it and profiting by free-riding on RedHat's work. I can understand RedHat being pissed about that.

by myztic 11y ago

krisdol 11y ago

GP was pretty obviously tongue-in-cheek.

tokenizerrr 11y ago

> this was primarily Notebook and Server focused Do you perhaps mean something else here? Notebook and Desktop focused maybe?

notalaser 11y ago

To be fair, notebooks and desktops ran fine without systemd for a long time. To this day, I'm convinced systemd got there just to give Red Hat a big enough foot in the door. Systemd is useful on servers, especially for the DevOps people. On a desktop, it solves no problem that cannot be -- and that has not been for years -- solved without it. I don't use it enough to question its technical merits. The fact that it was packaged in Debian and the world hasn't fallen over implies that people may be unhappy with it, but can still do their jobs, which would mean it's not that bad. But the necessity of its existence on notebooks and desktops is questionable at best. Edit: I know this is going to incite a lot of posts about how the times have changed and now storage devices aren't statical anymore and we NEED systemd. From a lot of people who are too young (or too recent Linux users) to remember the days when udev was still news. Guys, we've been easily hotplugging devices on Linux, on USB, SATA and PCI for about half a decade before systemd's first release (and not as easily but reliably, nonetheless, for at least seven or eight). We've been reliably booting and using Linux off a combination of USB and NFS filesystems for even more than that. All that yadda yadda about devices coming and going at boottime is not without its technical merits, but unless you boot your computer with its case open while frantically plugging and unplugging SATA drives, trust me, it's of absolutely no consequence. Devices appearing and disappearing dynamically used to be a problem. In 2.4. Do you remember the 2.4 kernel? That was (boy, does time pass...) more than ten years ago. Do you honestly think the smart people writing Linux sat on their thumbs for ten years while the arcane world of tape drives and 10 MB hard drives around them was giving way to this new world of magic SSDs and USB?

lmm 11y ago
The evil part is that it's making it harder and harder to use a lot of OSS projects on non-Linux OSes. As a FreeBSD user I'm worried, and when it comes to Debian/kFreeBSD the world really has ended as far as I can tell ( and just when it was starting to look like a first-class architecture :'( ). The conspiracy theory would be that it's a deliberate RedHat effort to cripple competitors like Solaris. Unfortunately \*BSD and freedom will be caught in the crossfire.
- toyg 11y ago
  A RedHat ploy may be, but certainly not to fight Solaris of all systems. Not even Oracle believes in Solaris (they are pushing Linux everywhere, and their own devs always target Linux first), and its community is basically as big as AmigaOS. Systemd is just the end result of RedHat employing a dominant share of infrastructure-critical Linux developers and making too much money compared to other players.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    Well Oracle now have their own Linux distro, forked from RHEL6 (iirc). This fork seems to have put RH on a war path, as their subsequent releases no longer separated out kernel patches from the main kernel source etc. And now CentOS is part of the RH flock, where before it was an independent repack of RHEL. And while Solaris itself may be "dead", there are still various tech that came out of its development that is of interest in the -nix world. Just look at the continued lamentations that you can't get ZFS support in Linux because of incompatible licenses.
    - throwaway7767 11y ago
      Was it really a fork? I was under the impression that they were just directly rebuilding the RH packages, and maybe adding a couple of new ones. Like CentOS, but it's another company doing it and profiting by free-riding on RedHat's work. I can understand RedHat being pissed about that.