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Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

parsimo2010

Imagine Linus trying to get a job. “So we like that you created one of the most popular operating systems ever, and your version control system is also very nice. But do you only have two projects in your portfolio?”

“Those two take up most of my time, but I also have this scuba diving app.”

“This is great, it shows that you can ship a full product. You should have led with this.”

The moral of the story is that this is like seeing a finger painting made by Leonardo da Vinci. It’s cool, but I expected something different. Like, it’s just too normal compared to the other things Linus’ name is attached to.

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I strongly suspect that most work was spent on hardware support for the different dive computers and maintaining the drivers. It would surprise me if Linus did not have a bunch of scripts that automatically filled in most of the log fields, which then explains why so relative little efforts has been put into the UI.

I would imagine that the pain of maintaining the hardware support for dive computers is similar to supporting the computer inside cars. Multiple manufactures, multiple models, basically no standard and everyone wanting to lock the users into their own ecosystem with their own cloud sharing social network, and likely filled with ads for products of their own stuff and paying partners. A open source project would basically have to choose a very small subset which happen to be similar enough to reverse engineer the protocol, a handful specific devices which are so extremely popular that there will be a developer dedicated to each of them, plus that one company which is open source/free software friendly.

The dive computer support lives in libdivecomputer

Yes, through they forked it for a number of reasons.

A bit more of the story can be heard in their talks, and I found a interview written down at https://divelog.blue/linus_torvalds.html

If I recall right from one of the talks, subsurface has received/bought a lot of computers in order to make them work properly with subsurface so the relation between the different hardware, subsurface and libdivecomputer is as far as I understand it quite intermingled.

From the interview I get a mixed feeling where most effort was spent. A lot of the article focus on GUI and getting cross-platform working, but in the end linus remarks that "The biggest problem spot is probably hardware and particularly Bluetooth". For me this reflect my own views of subsurface and getting bluetooth to work with my own dive computer took a while.

If you knew how shitty other dive plan software is you wouldn't say that.

I feel like I have a bit of an idea considering this is what Linus decided to work on as soon as he got a break from kernel development. But there are lots of industries/hobbies with crap software, and Linus chose scuba.

If he had been in college at the time he would have definitely decided to write an alternative to BlackBoard or Canvas.

I would say subsurface is to dive plan apps what calibre is to ebook management software. An all in one solution that works and imports from a variety of dive computers through libdc (a subsurface fork of libdivecomputer).

Alright, not git or linux, but not having to deal with crap spyware from the companies behind dive computers puts it on the same level of not having to install printer/scan drivers on linux. It kind of "just works", in the quirky way of some things that just work on the FLOSS world.

Moodle is the project you're looking for. It's actually really good, my university uses it

As far as I can tell, Linux is the most popular operating system if you take into account everything that runs Linux, including Android phones.

Tanenbaum claims (or did, a few years ago) that the most popular operating system is Minix.

Obviously it's impossible to prove one way or the other...

It is, since it's baked into every Intel processor.

It's very likely the most popular OS shipping today on desktops, laptops and servers. All Intel chipsets post-2015 are running MINIX 3 internally in the Intel Management Engine.

It's not the most popular overall because the largest number of CPU chips in the world are ARM (phones and other devices) which don't have embedded MINIX.

You could argue that the most popular shipping OS is the BIOS, or hard drive microcode.

It depends on your accounting, so I like to leave the door open for debate. The Linux kernel does have a good case if your metric is total installs. If you go by market share, Windows might have had the highest proportion ever in the 1990s (not sure, but it was dominant).

If you count by "dollars went to OS vendor for the OS explicitly" then yes. Otherwise Android phones alone is like Apple+Ms combined in terms of installs.

That's exactly my issue with going by market share. By installations, desktop Linux is massively successful compared to where it was in the 90s even though its share is low.

Sounds like Linus started it, worked on it for a year or so, and it has been maintained by someone else for ~7 years.

I didn’t mean to imply that conversation would have happened in real life or that Linus claims to have sole ownership of the project.

His name is featured on the website, and he did write the foundational code, so it’s probably fair to at least mention in a fictional job interview.

Looks on github like he's still committing regularly.

I'm pretty sure he'd still be asked an algo question.

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