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.
I think I heard the NetBSD toaster is out of support :(
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.
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!
Somehow I still refer to these as "the good old days".
But by and large, thing did still just work.
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.
Very much so -- many drops form a torrent.
Until that I'll buy AMD.
Much like the post world war civil society, economic and diplomatic development was an exception in Human history.
Assuming the reality we have will remain forever without protection or constant maintenance effort is dangerous.
It's rather the opposite, combined with moral stance of Linus and it's core committee itself that has managed to kept Linux on this track so far.
The main issue i see is that we aren't really "cultivating" the next Linuses
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.
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.
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.
For example like how OpenIndina was forked from OpenSolaris (CDDL) when Oracle dropped OpenSolaris development and support.
APSL has been approved by the FSF which other “Source Available” type licenses aren’t.
Personally though, I’d still rather people supported (for example) FreeBSD rather than Darwin/XNU.
100% agreed on BSD, though I'd opt for OpenBSD myself. Either way works!
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.
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.
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.
(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.)