Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnyman | Hacker News Reader

Surely the Linux-kernel must by now be the worlds most advanced and most bloated kernel? Then again, the kernel is not the thousands of high quality modules (which I guess could be called drivers) which allow you access to the hardware.

Anybody know how the central kernel (the parts that are on all hardware) has evolved speed/size-wise?

Also, is the drivers in linux of higher quality than the ones for example windows? I have gotten the impression that it is so.

View on HN

As far as quality goes, it varies largely depending on the hardware. Some stuff is easy to figure out (or has specs published) and results in good quality stuff being available. Other things don't tend to fair so well, like the graphics drivers, and I believe many broadcom wifi adapters. However if you have something headless with a wired network you're generally not going to be able to ever be unhappy.

You get best bang for your buck by purchasing hardware that is made by companies that support Linux with open source drivers.

Example:

Purchasing random laptop off the internet that runs other OS because it is cool and then trying to install Linux on it is not going yield good results unless you are willing to spend a lot of time researching and making sure you bought something that will work well, as well as spend some time fiddling around with drivers a bit and filing a couple bug reports. This would be because your using hardware that no Linux developer has direct access too. Essentially you are the primary means of support for that particular OS/Hardware combination.

Or you can purchase laptop from a company that provides support for your particular Linux/hardware configuration (ie: they sell Linux pre-installed) and then you will likely get close to a 'Apple-like' experience with it 'just working' out of the box.

Yes but thanks to all these people who fiddle around with the bug reports I would say that after a while (a few months, half a year?) your laptop will work fine with Linux.

Just check a site like http://www.linux-on-laptops.com before buying and I believe you can actually get better bang for the buck by buying a cheap laptop will full linux support (even if the manufacturer does not officially support it).

Yes. Especially ThinkPads seem to be very well supported (typing this on a X220), with everything working out of the box, amazing battery life (up to 12 hours on mine) and a very stable system in general.

I'm using the X220 as well and love it. There are minor quirks on Ubuntu 12.04; are you on 12.10?

Also, did you buy direct or get from a company that does the Linux install? I did the latter and was very disappointed with Emperor Linux; I've gotten basically zero support.

I'm on a Google internal ubuntu 10.04 version, which works very well.

As for the support - I have to support the other users ^^

If you are a power linux user why pay for someone to install linux? What is emperor linux?

At the time I needed a new laptop, but didn't want to spend the many hours previously necessary to get all the devices working properly, and I didn't want to take the risk of device incompatibility. So my theory was that I was paying them to do all the fucking around. Or, alternately, to have the same sort of out-of-the-box experience I would with, say, a Mac or the same laptop running Windows. Except with my OS of choice.

Emperor Linux is one of the companies that offers pre-installed Linux laptops and guarantees compatibility and offers support. The box was indeed compatible (even the touch-screen), but their support was poor.

I used to think this, but my W520 has had more than its fair share of graphics problems (especially when I naïvely started with the Canonical-recommended 32-bit install; I've since gone 64-bit). It still won't link to an external display (at least not without rebooting, which I haven't tried but is a complete non-starter for me). Other than that, it's pretty solid.

Someone pointed out zareason [1] in another thread; I may give that a shot next time.

[1]: http://zareason.com/shop/Verix-2.5.html

Sadly this is untrue.

After working extensively with linux USB drivers by large corps like Philips, I cannot but assume they put their worst teams on the Linux drivers.

And as a proud owner of (what is widely considered the most supported linux laptop) lenovo laptop, I can say that many things just dont work. E.g. Suspend.

>And as a proud owner of (what is widely considered the most supported linux laptop) lenovo laptop, I can say that many things just dont work. E.g. Suspend.

Suspend worked out of the box for me on my X220t. I am running Arch Linux.

Same, in fact it bugs me out a little when Suspend works flawlessly with KVM VMs running!

> Also, is the drivers in linux of higher quality than the ones for example windows?

It really depends on the driver, but, at least, you can look into the code to see if it looks high quality. Or pay someone to do it.

> most bloated kernel?

I wonder how you arrived to such conclusion.

I was just thinking about how many new releases there have been and how little new things have actually affected me or the servers I administer in any way. Of course, most of the added stuff are not part of the core kernel and I will probably never run the code but still?

The thing that got me on this track was thinking about all the systems that still run the 2.6.X kernels (and maybe even 2.4.X), how much, if any improvements would they get from upgrading to 3.5?

I wouldn't say it's "bloated", more featureful! In fact, I believe the kernel developers routinely cull old and crufty code.

The features that are in the Linux kernel are used by all sorts of folks. And there is a constant review of developers refactoring and debating how to merge features. And they never seem to merge features unless it is being done right from a technical viewpoint!

For example econet and token ring were purged from 3.5. So in some ways this is the most unbloated linux kernel in some time.

> how much, if any improvements would they get from upgrading to 3.5?

It depends on hardware and workload. A newer kernel will be able to use hardware an older one wouldn't be able to. It'll also do some newer tricks (I gather the work on TCP is yielding big performance improvements). I also like BtrFS, but won't deploy it to production just yet.

A new stable kernel is released on a regular schedule about every 2-3 months. Unlike many projects, these aren't based on major changes, but rather incremental improvements. In an ideal world, you should not notice any change other than module X is now supported (or occasionally you might see a performance boost)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com