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.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, N3OWJ/4X1GM
Making your enemy reliant on software you support is the best revenge.
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