[Annatar]

Thanks for the clarification.

In the context, most other posts here contain no technical detail whatsoever either and are nothing more than unsubstantiated opinions (same as mine); they just really dislike that there is someone out there who doesn’t think that Linux is phenomenal. In the days of Microsoft dominance, we called that monoculture.

Volumes have been written and videos filmed on all the inadequacies of the GNU/Linux kernel, far more than I could cram into one “Hacker News” post. I for example get a painful reminder of just how unfit the Linux kernel is as firmware every time I turn on my television set which runs it (ARM V7 Linux for the curious). After that, I don’t want any more. That is not an isolated scenario.

Apropos petty, my hate of GNU/Linux is epic.

[nickik]

Can you actually link to these resources?

Because people have been doing it since the 90s. Google use this on their Chromebook. Some of the people working on Coreboot, Heads, NERF have been doing it for a long time and they all seem to agree with each other.

Also, please tell me why the Linux kernel is so bad, but the BSDs are not? They are not that different and its hard to argue that they are much saver in terms of bugs (just look at the BSD talk at 34C3).

You actually clarified nothing in your post.

[Annatar]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6XQUciI-Sc - watch it to the end.

How long "people have been doing it" has nothing to do with the quality, it's a fallacy. They can't code if they can't even get the basics like polling or startup / shutdown correctly.

[diegocerdan]

People ask for sources about your harsh claims and you share various multiple hour podcasts that "you have to watch it to the end".

Some people may not be able to code but others are not even able to argue.

[Annatar]

While both might be true, it does not change the fact that Linux is not a good choice for firmware because the product is simply bad. And asking for links (I did originally write videos and I meant those exact ones) and then complaining about having to watch through them is exactly what’s wrong with our industry. That kind of mentality spills over into code quality or lack thereof. It is high time to start owning up to it and change course.

[pferde]

You also mentioned volumes that have been written. And those would be greatly preferable to podcast or videos, which are some of the worst forms of information sharing, with low density, inability to process it at one's own pace and several other reasons.

Unless you want to discuss something visual where showing things on camera helps greatly with delivering the subject matter, you're much better off writing an article or two. But if the video is mostly about looking at people's faces as they talk and flashy intro animations, then you're just wasting people's time and attention. Again, why not just write an article and include photos of people involved?

[atlas_hugged]

Have you ever wondered why you’re always so angry? I looked at your comment history and your bio... sheesh man, please seek out a mental health professional. It’s not normal. I’m gonna take a wild guess that you have had lower back pain for years too. Not trying to be a prick, just a wake up.

[Annatar]

Had you had grown up on something so cool and elegant as a Commodore Amiga or an sgi Origin 3800 and IRIX and now you find yourself stuck on a PC bucket server forced by someone else to run Linux, by knowitalls who’ve never known anything else, you’d be pissed off too. People tend to become resentful when they have to regress to something worse and it was not their choice.

[gkya]

So Linux (there is no GNU/Linux kernel, but a GNU/Linux OS) is more popular than how much you'd like it to be, and is that the problem? I for one am glad GPL-licenced free software is running on as much platforms as possible. In those cases Linux is basically a library they pick for their work. You can well say the same thing for glibc, gcc, apache, nginx etc. But in the end-user space nobody is forcing you to use Linux, and that's what monoculture is, not the choices regarding firmware with which the end user is not meant to ever interact.

[Annatar]

So Linux (there is no GNU/Linux kernel, but a GNU/Linux OS) is more popular than how much you'd like it to be, and is that the problem?

That's a huge problem for me, because I get stuck dealing with problems solved in traditional UNIX operating systems anywhere from 30 to 20 years ago. It's extremely depressing to have to regress. If the future is Linux, then I want no part of such future.

But in the end-user space nobody is forcing you to use Linux

No? Then why do most companies today force me to work on Linux by insisting on running it? Why am I told in interviews "nah, they don't want to try ZFS or SmartOS... they're Linux people".

[O_H_E]

I seriously would be interested to learn more about that, can you point me to some resources

[Annatar]

Why certainly! This is as good of a place to start as any:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTVfAMRj-7E

[Fnoord]

A 4h40m interview on YouTube is considered a source these days. How about written text? Makes it much easier to read and quote.

[Annatar]

The delivery medium is irrelevant. And yes, this particular video is a good source, since the person in the video is an authority on kernel engineering; his teams have managed to deliver a fully functional storage appliance, a volume manager/filesystem from the future, infinitely extensible kernel and userspace debuggers, a dynamic tracing framework, a very high performance operating system which for more than two decades was the textbook on large scale symmetric multiprocessing, and a large scale cloud solution which mops the competition in efficiency and design of use. Oh, and a parallel startup/shutdown mechanism as part of a larger self-healing framework. I have a sneaking suspicion that this person might know what he’s talking about after having written and debugged a good portion of that code. I’m not putting in Linux as firmware because I already have it in the products and infrastructure I use and not only is it piss poor slow and inefficient and crashes all of the time, but greenhorns who think they know best keep introducing compatibility-breaking changes. Out of the question, no more. And polishing a piss poor solution is no solution either. Start with a solid foundation, which excludes Linux immediately from the consideration.

[Fnoord]

Oh, the delivery medium and medium are relevant. Not to you, that much is clear. But we've already established your viewpoint is an outlier. The person you're referring to is Bryan Cantrill [1]. For each expert like him, there are also Linux kernel experts, so I am not buying that one [2], sorry. He's been able to rant successfully in text, as you can read on the Wikipedia page. No idea why we'd have to see extremely long videos of him. I'm sure a shorter, to the point argument can be made by him. So if Cantrill (& friends) could sum it up in 10 min read in a 2018 sauce, that'd be great.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Cantrill

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

[Annatar]

For each expert like him, there are also Linux kernel experts,

That's an unsubstantiated opinion not backed up by any kind of qualitative evidence.