> I'm a tad more humble. Mentioned more than a dozen times in the kernel git log.
Exceptionally humble, indeed.
> You've never said how much time you've wasted fixing Linux or making software work.
This comes up often and I'm always fascinated by the implied assumption that time isn't wasted fixing Windows or MacOS computers and making software work on those systems. The age-old "No, I will not fix your computer!" is not a Linux meme - in 99% of cases it refers to a Windows machine.
We can trade anecdata until the heat death of the universe, and in fact you've nicely listed many of the pro/con points in your articles. However having read both versions (current/technical and final), I must agree with parent. This is just a rant from someone who likes Windows more.
I also want to call out your "solving linux" section (in the technical article). You've listed basically the entire Ubuntu playbook (which is, btw, a UK company, not an African company). Mark "poached" debian developers (DDs), poured millions of his own money into it, spearheaded many of the desktop-specific innovations (now supplanted by other software, but Ubuntu provided the initial push), created an app store, did an enormous amount of work popularizing Linux specifically for the desktop, was the first to start "officially checked and approved" hardware list, etc.
And the results show even if we don't attribute them to Ubuntu today, and even if we're using alternatives: Linux desktop today is a much smoother experience than 20 years ago.
So, while I can sympathize with many of the points in your technical article (https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...) even if I do not agree with them, the linked one really seems like distillation to a "I like Windows more" rant.
Could you be specific about what constitutes "a rant"?
And no I've spent far less time "fixing" Windows. In fact I don't remember doing that ever. I've had multiple cases when Windows stopped booting and in absolute most of them I just had to reinstall the system from scratch. That's all "I've wasted".
Linux on the other hand?
"It works for you everything is made up in the article".
Never mind how once I had to fix a glaring issue in the Linux kernel which rendered tens of thousands of systems unbootable and which took me over 24 hours of hard work to unravel.
Yeah, indeed I've never had anything like that in Windows in 30+ years that I've been using it. Never once a Windows update rendered the system completely dead. And I'm not talking about my system, I talking about hundreds.
Lastly I'm just a poor Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer who actually overlooks a lot of stuff and sees a staggering number of fixes in every stable Linux release.
I follow way too many bug trackers and LKML as well. It's all good, please disperse.
> And no I've spent far less time "fixing" Windows. [...] I just had to reinstall the system from scratch.
That's one way of dealing with it.
> Never mind how once I had to fix a glaring issue in the Linux kernel which rendered tens of thousands of systems unbootable.
You didn't have to fix it, you could've booted the old kernel. You chose to debug the issue and help. That's commendable, but do you think people (who work on Windows or hardware, or in IT departments in any organization) don't do that for Windows as well?
> And I'm not talking about my system, I talking about hundreds.
Is it tens of thousands, or hundreds?
> Lastly I'm just a poor Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer who actually overlooks a lot of stuff and sees a staggering number of fixes in every stable Linux release. I follow way too many bug trackers and LKML as well.
Well if you're Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer, it's natural that you see many more Linux bugs than Windows or MacOS bugs. Again, commendable that you choose to participate, help, and make it better! You choose to live on the bleeding edge, and so you bleed. But that's far from typical Linux desktop user experience.
> Could you be specific about what constitutes "a rant"?
You're obviously very passionate about, and involved with, Linux. But you also seem to hate it so I'm confused why do it? Buy a Mac, be happy, live and let live, etc.
Windows can be reinstalled, Linux bugs never go away by themselves.
> You chose to debug the issue and help.
No, people don't do that in Windows because Microsoft has much better QA/QC. Not a single Windows update since 1998 has rendered my system unbootable. Microsoft is certainly not perfect and Windows sometimes has regression but those normally affect very few people.
> Is it tens of thousands, or hundreds?
Windows installation user base: 2 billion. Linux: 40 million. Have fun with mental gymnastics.
> You choose to live on the bleeding edge, and so you bleed.
There's a huge number of bugs affecting "stable" Linux distros that use "stable" software including the kernel. Linux bugs are not specific to the bleeding edge but they are more prominent.
This is not a counter argument and I will not waste any more of my time with you. Try using the dictionary argument with your children, "You are a retard, my boy! Why? Look it up in the Merriam Webster dictionary, that's why".
You literally have to reinstall windows because of how broken it got, and that's somehow okay?
The amount of BSOD I've seen and unfixable issues after spending hours googling and browsing windows shitty support sites are just the tip of the iceberg.
Windows is utter trash and the only reason it won is because of the monopoly it established, forcing everyone to use it, hardware manufacturers to support it and once the dominance was established, you can't escape it.
MacOS is literally only used with hardware lock-in. People don't choose it. It's forced onto whoever chooses to overpay for an Apple computer.
The only reason Linux won't win the desktop is because it doesn't have a monopoly to support it.
These discussions that pretend any of this is due to merits of one OS over the other are moot. It doesn't matter at all when it comes to who or how many people use it. These are all determined by external factors.
> You literally have to reinstall windows because of how broken it got, and that's somehow okay?
Last time I did it was in the Windows XP SP0 days.
> The amount of BSOD I've seen and unfixable issues after spending hours googling and browsing windows shitty support sites are just the tip of the iceberg.
When was the last time you got BSOD? I've not seen them after Vista.
> The only reason Linux won't win the desktop is because it doesn't have a monopoly to support it.
"Win"? Start with software compatibility. There's no one Linux, there's a billion of incompatible distros that make it impossible to run old software.
> These discussions that pretend any of this is due to merits of one OS over the other are moot.
API and ABI compatibility are swear words to you, I get it.
I'm sorry if you don't care about those, the world will shrug you off. No other OS has this madness.
> by external factors.
Yeah, for Linux fans it's always someone or something else. The fact that Linux is a bug-ridden mess of software with no compatibility and no stability isn't an issue of course. It's because Microsoft/Oracle/NVIDIA actively interfere with Linux. Or aliens? Must be aliens.
I've been running Linux exclusively since RedHat 5.0 (no, that's not RHEL, that's more than a decade earlier).
This entire article is 1000% true. Every word of it. You can "opine" and "disagree" with it as much as you want. It's become too damn popular in the western world lately to opine about anything.
Feel free to opine about gravity, just don't fall off the top of a 10-storey building.
BTW this is why the entire world is running "ad-ridden"/"privacy-invading" Windows.
People run it because
1. Windows doesn't get in the way and allows them to run their software.
2. Windows is rock stable and doesn't break randomly after every upgrade (sans occasional conflicts with third-party software here and there affecting ~0.05% of people).
3. Windows is simple.
Linux has no implied compatibility, it's full of regressions, it's complicated as hell and it still has poor HW support. Yes.
People run Windows because it comes installed in their machines.
> Windows is rock stable and doesn't break randomly after every upgrade (sans occasional conflicts with third-party software here and there affecting ~0.05% of people).
What? I've lost count of the amount of times that I've had to restore botched Windows updates. It has gotten better lately, but it still happened more times than I've had to deal with update issues on my Linux installation. And I run my Linux near the bleeding edge where, in theory, everything should break all the time, right? Well, it doesn't.
My point stands. People don't choose their OS. It's chosen by the hardware manufacturer, their employers or their requirements.
I'm gonna repeat this because it's extremely important: people don't spend a single second choosing their OS.
If you want to game, you have to use Windows (yes I know about Proton and love it, but mainstream online games require Windows).
If you want to use your computer for work, you need Office. Even with Google Docs, people in my country simply default to the Office suite. Again, not because they choose it, but because it was already chosen for them by the monopoly that is already in place.
Aside from Office, you have all of the other specialized tools like the Adobe suite and many others that force you to use Windows again.
Windows doesn't have anyone competing with them. Their monopoly guarantees they can get away with anything. It's not a competition.
Windows 11 is a great example of this. Nobody asked for it. It's garbage with more ads in it. It wasn't built to improve the system for users, it was built to sell ads and force people to buy new computers. Being the only option allows them to do all of this. Windows simply doesn't need to add, change or remove features because of competitors since there aren't any.
Of course in the unicorn land of Linux cultists it "works" too, but then you open any Linux related forum and multiple threads about something not working anymore are posted daily.
I invite you to r/Fedora for example.
> My point stands. People don't choose their OS.
There's no point.
There's an actual OS, Windows.
And then there's a software compilation X version N that comes with no warranties whatsoever, it's called Linux Distro X version N.
People choose to run an actual OS with the ability to create and run third-party software for at least a decade, in the case of Windows for up to three decades.
Linux offers NONE of that.
No stability, no quality, no QA/AC and no implied or enforced backward or forward compatibility.
Continue to OVERLOOK all of that and believe "But mom, Windows is preinstalled!"
I know a TON of people who have left Linux after a few years of struggling with it at every turn. They are all now running Windows or MacOS.
Reading your answers you seem unhinged. Calm down mate.
> Of course in the unicorn land of Linux cultists it "works" too, but then you open any Linux related forum and multiple threads about something not working anymore are posted daily.
As opposed to Windows where nothing ever breaks? That doesn't make any sense.
It's a known fact that Linux users report way more problems than Windows users because they are simply more technical, more in line with the open source spirit and dig deeper.
When I had issues on my Windows, it was extremely hard to find any solution online. Nobody goes to r/Windows for their troubles. From the few answers I've found, pretty much all of them ended up being "re-install Windows" or "re-install parts of Windows".
> People choose to run an actual OS with the ability to create and run third-party software for at least a decade, in the case of Windows for up to three decades.
Sorry but, that's simply not true for the average person. I'm not talking about the typical HN user here. The absolute vast majority of users *do not choose an OS*. Surely you can't argue with that, right?
> Continue to OVERLOOK all of that
No. I'm well aware that there are many things to improve on Linux (especially desktop linux), but my whole point is that it's utterly irrelevant until people actually get to choose an OS. Linux could have zero issues and work flawlessly everywhere and it would still have almost nobody using it outside of our tech savvy bubble.
If Linux as a whole was as bad as you say, it wouldn't be used in the majority of computers in the world. It's only desktop Linux that suffers from your complaints, and it's simply because it doesn't have companies with infinite money and monopolies behind it making it more seamless for the average user while forcing vendors to support it.
DC was built on lands ceded from the states of Maryland and Virginia for the explicit purpose of creating a national capital that was neutral ground between the various states. The residents of the District are free to vote for retrocession back to Maryland if they want representation.
It combines the convenience of SQLite (nothing to install) with the convenience of just throwing stuff in a dict. Perfect for quick prototypes/mockups.
Like shelve, but with json instead of pickle, and sqlite instead of dbm; and you have a set of dicts instead of k/v store , with helpers to search by any dict field; and also pydantic support.
And Linux kernel, curl, SQLite and many other open source software are worth infinitely more than the purchase price.
Also, you cut off the "from the benchmark" part; this doesn't expect it to solve any random Github issue, just the ones from the (presumably manually vetted and cleaned up) bench dataset.
Linux kernel, curl, and SQLite don't require significant compute cost to develop that put it out of reach of hobbyists, and only in the reach of organizations expecting a positive ROI.
Also, the prize doesn't require you to train a new foundational model, just that whatever you use is open weights or open source.
Theoretically, might be get away with a Llama3.3 (or any other model which you think makes sense) with a cleverly designed agentic system and a fresh codebase-understanding approach, with minimal compute cost.
(ok, probably not that easy, but just saying there's much more to AI coding that the underlying model)
I followed your link, but it doesn't seem to bear out upur assertion. The two numbers mentioned in the article are
176 mil and 612 mil. Mind you those weren't an estimate of cost, but rather an estimate to replace. Article is dated 2004, with an update in 2011.
Using the lines-of-code estimation it crossed a billion in 2010 - again to replace. That has no relation to what it did actually cost.
Getting from there to "tens of billions" seems a stretch. Assuming a bottom value in your estimate of 20 billion, and assuming a developer costs a million a year, that's 20 000 man-years of effort. Which implies something like 2000 people (very well paid people) working continuously for the last decade.
> The two numbers mentioned in the article are 176 mil and 612 mil.
Those two numbers are from the intro. The postscript and the updates at the end mention $1.4b and $3b respectively.
The real cost is probably impossible to calculate, but that order of magnitude is a reasonable estimate IMHO, and absolutely comparable, or even larger, than compute costs for SOTA LLMs
There are around 5000 active kernel devs, they are generally highly skilled and therefore highly paid, and they've been working for a lot longer than 10 years.
So doesn't seem that unlikely based on your estimates.
Linux kernel has been in development since the nineties, not just for the last ten years. Also 5000 contributors is a lot more than 2000 from gp's comment.
Let's ignore the years before dotcom boom since the dev community was probably much smaller, and assume an average of 3500 contributors since.
That's 25 years * 3500 contributors on average * 200k salary (total employee cost, not take home) = $17.5b
The original is, well, OG, but I prefer the Orbital version, esp. when listening on something that won't butcher the bass (ie
not a phone, laptop, or cheap headphones).
