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by btilly 2521 days ago
Please note that Linus wrote an operating system that in practice showed greater reliability than competing commercial microkernels. I do not believe that the principles that he came to believe in that process should be dismissed as straw man arguments.
3 comments
sorbits 2520 days ago
> […] showed greater reliability than competing commercial microkernels

What is your basis for this claim?

I am only aware of QNX as a commercial microkernel (and real-time OS) and that is widely used in cars, medical devices, etc. with a strong reputation for reliability.

But for many tasks, Linux is good enough and free, which is hard to beat. But that does not mean that Linus is automatically correct in his statements.

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btilly 2519 days ago
According to the public advertising at the time, Windows NT, GNU Hurd, and Mach were all designed as microkernels. Mach of course is the basis for OS X.

At the same time that Windows NT was being claimed as a microkernel, Linux was outperforming and had a reputation as being more reliable. Ditto with Mach. And GNU Hurd famously was hard to get running at all.

QNX is highly reliable, but is also a specialized use case.

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SomeOldThrow 2520 days ago
Source? Speed I can imagine, but not reliability.
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jayd16 2521 days ago
Tell that to my (lack of) graphics drivers. You can say its political but as it stands its no where near apples to apples in terms of what Windows supports vs what Linux supports.
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jandrese 2521 days ago
Which video card do you have that lacks drivers for Linux? Or do you need fully open source drivers that fully support 3D acceleration and computation?
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btilly 2520 days ago
And yet somehow Linux manages to run on a greater variety of hardware than Windows does.

I am of course including supercomputers, embedded hardware, and hand-held phones. Admittedly Windows has greater support for is running consumer hardware for desktops. But that has to do with how small the Linux marketshare is. And is hardly an indictment of Linus' work.

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jayd16 2520 days ago
It's not an indictment at all. I'm just pointing out that there is no apples to apples comparison and it's misleading to imply there is.
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