201–210 of 273 posts
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It's a good thing that you warned them off, or they might've accidentally gone and done something interesting or enjoyable.
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That's the wrong framing for Hurd. Hurd isn't a "product" that's trying to "win" by beating competitors. It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it. You might as well ask "How can my local pick-up basketball team find a niche to make money, like NBA players do? Can we all wear more colorful jerseys so TV stations cover us?" No, that's silly, the point of the pick-up basketball team isn't t…
I mean, if the goal is "install a niche kernel for the sake of it", sure that's... a reason, but all the modern non-mainstream kernels (aka not Darwin or NT) at least have a purpose as to why you'd pick them. * Linux is the de facto kernel used on most servers, has great support and is the third pick after the mainstream kernels for a good reason. It's also usually someone's first introduction to Unix-based systems t…
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That's the wrong framing for Hurd. Hurd isn't a "product" that's trying to "win" by beating competitors. It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it. You might as well ask "How can my local pick-up basketball team find a niche to make money, like NBA players do? Can we all wear more colorful jerseys so TV stations cover us?" No, that's silly, the point of the pick-up basketball team isn't t…
> It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it. Okay, then tell us why we should care about it when more popular operating systems fit our needs better anyways.
Man, y'all are gonna be so mad when you find out some people work on OSS projects for fun or ideological reasons.
Again, a sentiment that needs repeating far too often here, not everything is about, or for, you.
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Yep, it found a "niche": people could actually hack on it and get it to do stuff, rather than waiting around for the other thing, which wasn't even really a thing yet anyway. Linux has a large, large established user base at this point. If you want to attract people to a different platform, you need a compelling reason. For people just looking to look/experiment/learn/play, 'something new' that's more easily understo…
Going off base, as this is about Hurd vs GNU/Linux. On the IoT space it seems like not everyone is keen in having to deal with GPL and Linux, hence the myriad of FOSS MIT/Apache licensed OSSes that now exist. Zephyr, NuttX, Mbed, Amazon RTOS, Redox, Tock... And then there still the commercial alternatives.
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I mean, if the goal is "install a niche kernel for the sake of it", sure that's... a reason, but all the modern non-mainstream kernels (aka not Darwin or NT) at least have a purpose as to why you'd pick them. * Linux is the de facto kernel used on most servers, has great support and is the third pick after the mainstream kernels for a good reason. It's also usually someone's first introduction to Unix-based systems t…
Software development definitely needs more ideology, principles, and ethics. When talented hackers get behind a project united on these matters great and interesting features occur spontaneously
A lot of Hurds continued development is just predicated on "we don't want to admit Linux became a success" rather than any serious principles or ethics. Again, just look at the whole start-stop nature of its development.
I don't disagree that a lot of tech professionals could spare at least some basic regards for the ethics surrounding the software they create, but you're not gonna find that at the GNU project.
https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/1*HuH... The GNU/Hurd default terminal can display a JPEG inside the terminal?
Same with Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_framebuffer XTerm can as well, if built with Sixel support: https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel
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It's a good thing that you warned them off, or they might've accidentally gone and done something interesting or enjoyable.
I frankly don't understand why he doesn't realize that the borrow checker is just the thing to prevent all the bugs you can have with a file system implementation.
Many of the worst bugs (data loss and corruption)? Probably.
Having something like the Rust borrow checker around to make sure you don't make dumb mistakes is handy, to be sure. But, let's not oversell it as some kind of panacea. I bet I could write a FS in Rust with all kinds of bugs, and the borrow checker wouldn't be able to stop me.
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The machines are different. Multicore 64-bit chips are now standard for consumer PCs. RAM and persistent storage are faster and much more abundant. The architecture of the modern x86-64 is much more sophisticated than that of the 386 for which the earliest Linux was written. Vectorization, predictive branching, and asynchronous code are all front and center in the modern programmer's ecosystem. In short, hardware is…
Being a microkernel doesn't automatically make you more robust. If you look at their docs, Hurd has only one feature that's different to Linux and that's a sort of souped up FUSE. But as they realized later, allowing arbitrary unprivileged programs to extend the filesystem like that doesn't mesh well with the UNIX security model. You can write a "translator" that redirects one part of the filesystem tree to another,…
No, of course, it doesn't automatically do so. But it makes it a whole hell of a lot easier to write a reliable service, if you don't have to deal with all the crap that a monolithic kernel does. In a very real sense, lines of code are a liability: fewer LoC generally translates into fewer bugs in the software.
I think you'd find Plan 9 interesting. It deals with many of the issues you're talking about in a rather head on way. In fact, it takes things even further than Hurd might, and allows processes to migrate to different processors, which may be contained on completely different machines.
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I don’t know enough about Hurd to say, but as an example MINUX found its niche as the control software for Intel’s management system. As a result MINUX is/was more widely deployed than Linux for a few years. Still might be.
Just for clarification, you mean MINIX. Fun fact, even Andrew Tanenbaum only learned about this through news coverage: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
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> It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it. Okay, then tell us why we should care about it when more popular operating systems fit our needs better anyways.
They really should just rename the site CapitalistNews or AntiHackerNews or MiddleManagementNews or PMTechNews. Man, y'all are gonna be so mad when you find out some people work on OSS projects for fun or ideological reasons. Again, a sentiment that needs repeating far too often here, not everything is about, or for, you .
Not everyone here is a joyless sack of shit yet.