Remember way back (chuckles) when I mentioned that it looks like Linux is in trouble? Well here are two threads on /. – aside from the recent stupidity with BitKeeper – to show you what I mean. Even the zealots see the problem.
- Slashdot – Kernel Changes Draw Concern
- Slashdot – Why Aren’t More Distros Becoming LSB Certified-
- Linux Can’t Kill Windows – InfoWorld – Column – 2005-04-13 – By Tom Yager
Some quotes…
“Instead we have a bunch of fragmented containers (KDE, Gnome, lots of lesser known desktop environments) that are incomplete and immature. Heck, its a pain in the ass sometimes to get simple brain-dead stuff such as printing and mounting a drive working. So you have projects like OpenOffice having to write their own container!!! And Miguel (bless his heart) making a version of Microsoft’s .NET container (Mono) for Linux that is still incomplete and sits with an incomplete container — Gnome, which is sitting on top of an incomplete desktop container — Linux.
I know this is a rant, but my shop recently switched back to Windows from Linux desktops (about 40 people), why? Because the new CEO (and me too), were sick and tired of people trying to get things to work together properly. We were sick of not having an Exchange replacement (don’t get me started on the open source ones now “available”). And new hires and our clients were just plain used to using the dominant containers out there (windows/mac). ” – quote in context
“I’ll say it: the 2.6 kernel is unstable on x86_64 platforms with USB 2.0 mass storeage devices. There are bug reports everywhere. The response? “It’s fixed.” The reality? The system locks up like Fort Knox whenever it’s booted with a USB 2.0 mass storeage device attached.” – quote in context
“They’re doing active development on 2.6 and they don’t want to fork 2.7 because apparently they’re making good progress working as they are. They expect the distros to do regression testing — something they are not equipped to do on a sufficiently large scale. Examples of major bugs allowed through are a memory leak when burning CDs (I think that was 2.6.5) and in 2.6.8 I can’t have SATA and ATA devices connected to my motherboard (which supports both, and works under other versions of the Linux kernel and FreeBSD) at the same time. Those are the major ones that have affected me but there’s always something.
Since each new kernel contains new bugs, upgrading isn’t very useful because it just replaces bugs you know about and have worked around with ones you don’t know about.” – quote in context