Or, if you have enough funding to write a new kernel, what would you do differently?
Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
1–10 of 173 posts
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#2If you were starting a project like that today, it'd probably be a capability-based microkernel written in Rust.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#3I dont think Linux did wrong, but, were we to fund new kernels, distributed capabilities (likely via object capabilities) would be great. Thats a huge subject, with many avenues, but a kernel as an isolated thing seems like a less ambitious core than what we could be doing.
Controversial, but I'd probably take QUIC or http3 & try to build distributed capabilities on that. Having fast QUIC in kernel, & available to userspace would be very much "heading towards where the puck is going".
It's notable how bad Linux async i/o & others had been. Uring (its much more than io_uring these days) has totslly rewritten the rules, has been a giant leap into modernity. But it's so new! Leaning into uring style completeable syscalls would be essential.
eBPF has shown that programmability of the kernel space opens hella doors. Trying amplify this winning wpuld be great.
The past 10 years have really seen Linux grow all kinds of fast excellent capabilities, griw into itself. The above uring & ebpf examples are high examples of this. DMA-BUF has gone from up-and-comer to become the core win for much of the kernel, for how desktops & media processing are fast & good & flexible. It'll be interesting to see, but I have a hard time imagining more big boom events that push us way forward again continuing.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#4Not Linux, but Systemd[0] makes many people angry. Entire distros have purposefully not included it. Look at Devuan[1]
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#5The concept of device drivers being within the kernel is a terrible idea. It should instead offer a stable ABI for drivers to be external and (within reason) be independent of the kernel version.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#6I think one of the problems was to provide only the kernel and leave implementing the userland to people building different distributions. This has led to an incredible amount of replication of work, inconsistencies and incompatibilities and IMHO was one of the reasons Linux on the desktop never caught on.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#7If you were starting a project like that today, it'd probably be a capability-based microkernel written in Rust.
You probably already know this, but "a capability-based microkernel written in Rust" describes RedoxOS.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#8whenever I try to install software on linux I inevitably end up googling errors to find out what dependencies I'm missing. Install failed because i'm missing "python.h" header for some C dependency, let me make sure python-dev is there, okay how about libffi-dev, apt install gcc-arm* fixed it for this rando on stackoverflow? okay now the installation fails in a different way, wait a minute does this python library expect rust is already installed? wtf?
people complain about NPM but at least the dependency resolution works
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#9Tooling for webcams is very lackluster.
Re: Ask HN: What did Linux not do right?
#10whenever I try to install software on linux I inevitably end up googling errors to find out what dependencies I'm missing. Install failed because i'm missing "python.h" header for some C dependency, let me make sure python-dev is there, okay how about libffi-dev, apt install gcc-arm* fixed it for this rando on stackoverflow? okay now the installation fails in a different way, wait a minute does this python library ex…
There used to be something like apt-build which downloaded sources of whatever you need using your distros source repositories. I don't know if i remember the name right. I don't think this is related with Linux only, but more cpp oss dev problem.