Unfortunate title, but it’s a good video and some good thoughts from both Linus and AC.
Interestingly, this video is just 2 years after Linus and Alan Cox had a bit of a blowup that caused AC to resign from the TTY subsystem. And even more interestingly, the blowup was specifically about the very topic they’re discussing: not breaking userspace and keeping a consistent user experience. Linus felt AC had broken userspace unnecessarily, was too proud/stubborn to revert the change and save the user experience. AC felt Linus was trivializing how easy “just fix it” was going to be and threw up his hands and resigned.
I was curious if they were still on good terms after that, and it’s nice to see that they were. For newcomers to Linux, Alan Cox used to be (in the 1990s) the undisputed Riker to Linus’ Picard, the #2 in command, ready to take over all of Linux at a moment’s notice. As we got into the 2000s, that changed, and this video (2011) was from the middle of a chaotic time for him. In 2009 he quit Red Hat, then joined Intel 2 years later, then quit shortly after that and has just a few years ago stopped kernel development permanently.
Should probably also mention that his wife, Telsa Gwynne, was diagnosed with cancer around the time he retired and she sadly passed away in 2015.
deleted by creator
He did nothing. Red Hat did.
expired
This is Tron.
Tron fights for the users.
Be like Tron.
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Lennart has always been a joke. Forced systems on us and wrote the disaster of pulseaudio.
Both pulseaudio and systemd brought significant improvements to the Linux ecosystem.
After being a pile of crap forced on us by a corporate giant for many many years. Make no mistake, they are doing embrace extend extinguish just like Microsoft.
I use Pipewire now but Pulseaudio is (and has been for years) better than both the Windows and Mac audio stack. It may have been bad once (yes, I remember the days of having to start Wine with some pulse env var so the audio doesn’t crackle) but nowadays it doesn’t deserve the level of hate it still gets.
Wasn’t Red hat also responsible for Pipewire and Wayland?
I love to hate them for what they did recently, but those two projects kick major ass.
It would have been fine if it wasn’t forced. “We are the audio stack everyone should use” but when it doesn’t work then it’s an ALSA bug and alsa ppl should take the blame (even when it works fine with full alsa, like my audio card). And it was designed more like a networking stack then an audio stack.
Sure it was necessary at the time (so that hdmi, and later bluetooth, would work transparently), but the “i know best” attitude hurt its execution.
SystemD on the other hand brought nothing of value. Did way more harm then good.
Quit your bullshit, nothing was ever forced on you. This is Linux, free software and all that, if you’re not happy then use a systemd-less distro and stop complaining about meaningless points. SystemD works very well for me (and the vast majority of the Linux community) and is very easy to use and understand
This. If you want to go back to the days without systemd and writing invit scripts manually, knock yourselves out. The rest of us will continue to live in the modern world of systemd, pulse audio (and now pipe wire).
Udev was changed to depend on systemd. No good reason for it. So it practically was forced. You can lie all you want, it won’t change reality. SystemD was hyped up by comparing it with the worst implementation of sysV, at a time when no major distro other then fedora even used sysV. And that is not even the tip of the pile of dishonesty.
Just by saying that it is no better then alternatives of the time will get ignorant people like you to yell. That is how strong the hype was around it. How can you even talk about free software when RH can take a core component and make it hard dependant on whatever they want. Just like bluetooth has a hard dependency on PA. I’m also free to say something sucks, just like you are free to lick their balls.
Use Devuan and quit whining.
It always was about feelings with you fanboys. Pathetic.
PS I wouldn’t mind using systemD, it’s the same as every other. Functionally absolutely the same.
As someone currently actively supporting two commercial products, one using OpenRC and one using systemd to meet different requirements for different projects
Functionally absolutely the same
Makes it blatantly obvious you have no idea what you’re saying
ALSA wasn’t going to take the Linux desktop anywhere
Everything audio needs Alsa including Pipewire.
i dont get why youre being downvoted.i m with you.
Linux community is so inherently meritocratic that one can’t meaninfully force anything upon any large group of them.
Thore particular two creations of Lennart took the world by storm precisely because they were so absurdly good that working on other stuff was a dead-end, obvious for all but such tiny fraction of people that even forming vacuous hate bubbles haven’t rallied enough effort to foster and maintain alternatives.
It became trendy to hate Pulseaudio and call it bloat years after Nokia shipped a rather anemic phone where it already worked flawlessly. I need no further proof that there’s no technical basis beneath the hate.
Linux community is so inherently meritocratic that one can’t meaningfully force anything upon any large group of them.
Even for developers, there is a very substantial cost to any deviation from the herd and little time or money for these projects. Factually a handful of companies run the Linux userspace and a handful of people run those companies.
You can go your own way but existing market share and resources matter more than quality or merit.
As a Red Hat employee who had his all-around sensible Fedora Change to prevent it from falling too far behind RHEL (!) rejected, I think I can confidently claim that your statements smell of conspiracy theories.
Do Linux-involved companies have resources to develop the projects they like the most? Yes. Do companies dominate userspace development? I don’t think so, in fact, they’re all seem quite focused in their interests, and their involvement with a median package on your community distro desktop system isn’t even minimal, it’s none. Do the se companies at least all push for a united agenda? Absolutely not. Can they force a single random community distro like Debian to pick something over something else? No. 99% of the distros? Goes without saying.
It’s not a conspiracy theory to imagine that IBM’s vision for Linux compared to 2000s or 2010s era Linux is opaque, complicated, and enterprisey. It’s who they are.
The grandparent comment
Linux community is so inherently meritocratic that one can’t meaningfully force anything upon any large group of them.
Is pure fantasy. Software projects are dictatorships of those willing to put in the work, not meritocracies. There is nothing immoral or wrong about this but we should be realists. The entire software ecosystem is dominated by oft shitty good enough solutions which people poured enough work into to solve problems well enough.
IBM’s vision
Anybody can have a vision, but it’s the work that matters. I’ll be worried when they become a player.
Software projects are dictatorships of those willing to put in the work, not meritocracies.
Most linux distros are slight variations on the best components available. Yes, one can put in resources, do a great job and now everyone switches to the fruits of their labor. No, it does nothing to stop another player from one-upping them and taking the lead with their next best good enough. In political terms, dictatorships are incompatible with voting with one’s feet.
Anybody can have a vision, but it’s the work that matters. I’ll be worried when they become a player.
Did you entirely miss the part where IBM bought Red Hat
