It's odd how Linux has become the only stable thing in this world. You turn it on and you know that over time it will only become better without any bad intentions.
This is so important to me on this day and age. Most new technology and OS seem to have an agenda. They want to "push" me to do things: buy an iPhone, buy an office subscription , etc. Using Linux is a breath of fresh air in that respect for me. I just want my toaster tu toast bread. I don't want it to tell me what bread should I buy.
I do remember there was some point in the mid/late 90s where I had to do a lot of research before buying [desktop] computers and hardware - would this specific network card be supported? Would this graphics card work with X11? etc. Maybe it was trauma and paranoia from the WinModems of the day, that were never going to work.
But by the early 2000s we seemed to switch to a world where I just assumed Linux would support my new hardware, be it a used Zip-drive, a web-cam, or whatever.
These days I'm the same. I fearlessly buy random motherboards, and hardware toys, and just assume they work. So far I've been lucky, but it is a real testament to the driver-developers. The lone developer who makes one pull-request against the kernel solely to add the magic numbers to recognize yet another kind of SD-card, or similar. Really benefits us all, even if they never do another thing.
Around that same era Windows wasn’t exactly problem free with device drivers either. A fresh install on random hardware would often require hunting down Windows drivers online. Though of course those drivers did always existed because of Windows’ market share.
I spent many years using 10BaseT and then later wired ethernet, which meant I avoided WiFi for the longest time.
Now you reminded me that I bought a wifi dongle around 2012/2013 and ended up having to return it because I couldn't get it to work. But the very next one I bought as a replacement worked first time. So perhaps I'm having rose-tinted memories!
LinModem for me! I got my US Robotics 33.6 (with X2 software upgrade-ability) working and was so amazed. Then my dad's ISP got rid of a bunch of external serial 56k modems and I was in heaven. Those "just worked". Oddly, it was probably 6 months later that DSL started making a splash and I was trying to figure out ways to use my Alcatel USB "stingray" model with Linux. I ended up buying an external "gateway" that required me to set the MTU to 1492 instead of 1500. It screwed up my Redhat 7.2 downloads so badly. The checksum would never match so the install would always fail.
Somehow I still refer to these as "the good old days".
"The lone developer who makes one pull-request against the kernel solely to add the magic numbers to recognize yet another kind of SD-card, or similar. Really benefits us all, even if they never do another thing."
Oh, the dreaded WinModems! And other Linux-incompatible hardware. To help with this research of which hardware would work there were several dedicates sites that attempted to collect info from Linux users on which drivers to use, etc. It's all so much easier now.
I've had multiple Nvidia cards across multiple installs of Linux, never had an issue once. Just install the Nvidia driver and it works. IMO the supposed problems of using Nvidia on Linux are wildly overblown.
I used NVIDIA on sway/hyprland on Wayland on NixOS with a variety of driver versions last year and still had awful flickering that made it basically unusable. After much consternation, I fixed it by buying an AMD card, and it's worked smoothly since.
The author of nouveau is working for NVIDIA now. And redhat is writing their nova driver to the mainstream. I really wish this would mean using NVIDIA is going to be a breeze in the near future.
The kernel is only a small part of the overall Linux ecosystem.
These days even GNU is a small part.
systemd, Wayland, Xorg, PulseAudio, CUPS, KDE, Gnome, etc are all maintained outside of Linus and GNUs governance.
What FOSS operating systems (and not even Linux specifically) offers is freedom to choose. But the effort of using some alternatives can be significant.
So I wouldn’t say Linux is immune to having its “well poisoned” because if Linus.
> What FOSS operating systems (and not even Linux specifically) offers is freedom to choose. But the effort of using some alternatives can be significant.
True. On the other hand, Linux (the kernel) does provide the foundation. You can replace most of components above it and you will still have hardware support for a wide range of hardware. Even if you were to develop an entirely new kernel, the Linux kernel can serve as a proxy for documentation for undocumented or poorly documented hardware.
I realize that places a disproportionate amount of emphasis on the device drivers when the kernel offers so much more and an incredible amount of effort goes into the ecosystem outside of the kernel, but the reality is that most alternative operating systems grow beyond the academic toy phase. Part of the reason is the difficulty in attracting potential users, including developers, if those users have to use said operating system in a virtual machine.
Linux isn’t a unicorn here. Sure FreeBSD has pretty good driver support. In fact back in the 00s I had fewer problems with FreeBSD WiFi drivers than Linux.
I don’t know what the driver story is like for all of the other main BSDs but DragonflyBSD is a really interesting platform with some real innovations in the kernel.
Technically XNU, the macOS kernel, is open source too. Though there doesn’t seem to be much community effort behind that.
There’s also OpenIndiana. Which itself has some really novel ideas.
Then you have smaller projects that have compatibility layers, for example Haiku can run some Linux and FreeBSD systems. ReactOS and Windows driver support. But even if you exclude them in favour of larger, more stable projects, there’s still plenty of options out there.
I do also think you’re placing far too much emphasis on the kernel here. For example some platforms don’t guarantee ABI compatibility between releases, instead requiring their standard libraries being used as the kernel entry point (eg Darwin instead of XNU, or libc on some UNIXes). This is why people often talk about GNU/Linux, Darwin or NT as more than just a kernel.
And that’s before we address the massive elephant in the room that is all the abstractions that sit on top of the userland. For example how so many applications these days are basically running inside a virtual machine called a “web browser”. These days a modern browser is almost like an OS in its own right.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking anything away from Linux nor the Linux kernel. But its main strength is its momentum rather than it being unique.
That's true, but I agree, why would anyone make a XNU-based OS? Upstream wouldn't accept your forked changes and if you wanted to implement any of the upstream changes over time, that would get difficult as the fork diverged. I really don't think there's anything special in XNU. What exactly does it do well vs. BSD, Illumos, or NT?
100% agreed on BSD, though I'd opt for OpenBSD myself. Either way works!
All of us aren't going to stay forever on the planet, and whoever replaces Linus and the core committee has their own set of values, and goals for the project, there are zero garantees that everything stays the same no matter what.
I worry that it's a Linus thing - he still has to step in and call for order now and again. I don't know for sure if it will remain on the trajectory of always getting better when he retires.
I think there was a discussion regarding this last year where linus was saying that they are already thinking of who will call shots after him so I think even though right now it's very much a linus thing, I think they are already prepared for the next person to lead it in case we ever need it
It’s the right mix of open source but with so many huge well resourced users that it’s in everyone’s interest to improve it. It’s like in this specific case the tragedy of the commons works backward.
We should study the social and economic dynamics and game theory of this and try to replicate it. Someone should do a whole game theory Ph.D thesis on Linux and how it manifests an un-tragedy of the commons.
Thankfully most of the corporate interests that have already seeped into Linux have been a net positive. If corporations remember the lessons of the 1990's, it will remain that way.
(In the 1990's businesses either had to develop and maintain their own operating system, or license it from someone else. Both routes are expensive. There were also collaborative efforts for larger operating systems, none of which seemed to reach positive conclusions since the businesses who owned the rights to the operating systems were ultimately in direct competition with each other. For whatever reason, the open source collaborative model used by Linux has been successful. In all probability it is because nobody "owns" Linux in the conventional sense.)
Corporate interests are not bad per se, you would have to point to something nefarious that it has led to. Most people seem to think corporate interest in Linux has made it better by raising the level of investment to the extent that we can use it on most commodity hardware.
On the minus side of the equation, large controversial changes, more often outside the kernel but still important nevertheless, do get pushed through by people who are employed at important companies.
If your fulltime job is Linux it does give you an ability to influence what happens that others who are earning their daily bread some other way lack. You can use that ability to ride over some objections.
For some people the goal of Linux is to become the world's OS. I used to think this but I realise now that if it did, then it would become static and conformist. This is because the experience of using it would have to be stable and common so that all the users who don't care about Linux per se wouldn't have to keep relearning how to use it or at least would only need to relearn 1 way. So there would have to be the world linux distro, probably run by some bullying company that would keep app developers, hardware vendors in line.
We'd be complaining about it like we might about MS or Apple. I like Linux for the wrong reason - I like it because there's so much choice. Simplicity is about eliminating choice.
> For some people the goal of Linux is to become the world's OS.
This is extremely worrying. There already is enough linux monoculture in critical network infrastructure due every manufacturer except Juniper seemingly putting their penguin eggs into one basket. I can only hope there will be some common sense brewing for the future before linux experiences major failure and Pluto's Kiss starts to feel a bit too real for comfort.
