Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LINUX is obsolete (1992)

groups.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 76 posts

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#61

Post by sophacles »

wobbleblob wrote: post #44
jacquesm wrote: post #23

The problem with this whole debate is that Linus was 'more wrong' than Tanenbaum and Tanenbaum made plenty of mistakes with Minix which also make it more of a macrokernel than a true microkernel. A true microkernel does one thing and one thing only: pass messages. Now that's an ideal and in the real world you don't get to have your ideals realized so rather than to be able to realize this spherical cow you're going t…

> Tanenbaums biggest mistake was to try to monetize Minix through Prentice-Hall, You make it sound like his capitalist motives worked against him. Writing and publishing educational material was part of his job. Prentice hall had been publishing his books since the 1970's. I'm sure it seemed like the obvious way to publish his educational material - especially since minix wasn't a standalone thing, but it came with a…

In 1997 in the suburbs of Chicago, a book with a CD was the only reasonable way for me to get linux... By that time I "had the internet" but it was 33.6Kbps dial up, beginner resource pages were lacking (so a book to teach me was nice), and downloading a full linux distro was going take to way too long (so CD was the way to go). Particularly as a 17 year old without a credit card to order CDs online from one of the early, untrusted, online merchants.

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#62

Post by krick »

amirmc wrote: post #7

I find it interesting that this post can be taken two ways. 1. It's clear that Linux 'won' in the marketplace so we can all laugh at how wrong this guy was and the curiosity of these 'microkernel' things and that portability stuff. Lols all around. 2. We've reached a point where ideas are gaining ground about immutable infrastructure, people are talking more about things with similarities to microkernels called unike…

> Linux 'won' in the marketplace so we can all laugh at how wrong this guy was

Oh, it has been a long time since 1992 and these posts by Tannenbaum are pretty famous (actually, I'm surprised it still appears on HN). So we did laugh already. Later we suddenly stopped laughing and it was more like your "second approach". But that also was quite a while ago. Next wave of philosophical though in techno society was reflecting on all these "worse in better" stuff, "MIT vs Berkley", "Lisp is older that C", "ML is 40 years old". Because, really, it's all about the same idea. And posts about "Cathedral and bazaar" and how dot com bubble destroyed the notion of sound architecture is pretty much about the same thing.

So for me it isn't anymore about any new "lessons" to learn from that. Just a painful reminder on "sooner or later we'll have to throw all these tremendous work away and start anew… shall we?".

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#65

Post by jacquesm »

digi_owl wrote: post #48
icebraining wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cost was the only problem, why didn't Hurd take off? Did Minix not suffer from the same problems?

Hurd was a research project as much as a working kernel. I Think the project restarted 3 times in 10 years... Linux may have been crude etc, but it was here, it was working, and it was free (in both senses of the word). Frankly i see the lack of Linux on the desktop less about the quality of Linux, and more about MS abusing its market position and a massive failure to regulate.

Linux has been my desktop OS of choice for over a decade now and it works just fine in that role.

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#66

Post by hristov »

amirmc wrote: post #7

I find it interesting that this post can be taken two ways. 1. It's clear that Linux 'won' in the marketplace so we can all laugh at how wrong this guy was and the curiosity of these 'microkernel' things and that portability stuff. Lols all around. 2. We've reached a point where ideas are gaining ground about immutable infrastructure, people are talking more about things with similarities to microkernels called unike…

I would very much like to laugh at Andy Tanenbaum and we all should. He deserves to be ridiculed because he was being an a-hole. He was putting down another programmer based on a theoretical mumbo jumbo when he could have proven his theories by actual programming.

I think it is obvious that any scientist that can prove his theories in a practical way must do that and should not flame and criticize another. In areas where theories are harder to prove like astrophysics, social science, economics, etc. I guess people can debate and flame. We are all used to economist flame wars by now.

But in areas where theories are practically provable, such criticisms are useless and idiotic. If Tanenbaum thought microkernels were so great he should have made a usable microkernel OS.

This also shows a very negative practice in the software industry which should be discouraged. And this is the criticism of the thing that is working now in favor of some new shiny project that is still in development but it will be all so great when it comes out. It is a very easy pitfall to get into, because the thing working now usually has some problems and disadvantages while the shiny new thing that does not exist yet is usually perfect in every way. But in practical matters, one usually does better going with the thing working now. But worst of all, this practice of worshiping the nonexistent solution is usually used to strike down newcomers and disruptors.

By the way, unikernels have absolutely nothing to do with microkernels. So, no the day of the microkernel has not arrived and there is no indication that it will come any time soon. Maybe there will be a practical working microkernel based os some day. I have no idea what will happen in a thousand years or ten thousand years. But if that happens it will be more of coincidence than evidence that Andy Tanenbaum is some kind of genius living in the future. If you have long enough time frame a lot of predictions about the future will eventually happen in one way or another.

Regardless, Linus never disputed the fact that microkernels are theoretically better. He just knew how impractical they were because he actually buckled down and did the work to make a useful OS instead of bloviating on theory.

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#67

Post by hristov »

asuffield wrote: post #46
amirmc wrote: post #7

I find it interesting that this post can be taken two ways. 1. It's clear that Linux 'won' in the marketplace so we can all laugh at how wrong this guy was and the curiosity of these 'microkernel' things and that portability stuff. Lols all around. 2. We've reached a point where ideas are gaining ground about immutable infrastructure, people are talking more about things with similarities to microkernels called unike…

So we now live in a world where both monolithic and "microkernel" (hybrid) systems are commonplace - there's a bit shy of a billion devices running linux (android) and no shortage of windows and osx hosts around. What can we learn from this? Well, it doesn't really seem to matter whether you use a monolithic or microkernel design. They both work well enough. Driver development is hard for reasons that have got nothin…

Neither Windows nor OSX are microkernels.

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#68

Post by hristov »

jheriko wrote: post #41
amirmc wrote: post #7

I find it interesting that this post can be taken two ways. 1. It's clear that Linux 'won' in the marketplace so we can all laugh at how wrong this guy was and the curiosity of these 'microkernel' things and that portability stuff. Lols all around. 2. We've reached a point where ideas are gaining ground about immutable infrastructure, people are talking more about things with similarities to microkernels called unike…

> It's clear that Linux 'won' in the marketplace it depends a lot on what you mean by won and which marketplace you are talking about. as a desktop os linux is essentially non existent with an ever shrinking 1.5% of the market share or so as more and more regular joe consumers get machines with windows or os x preinstalled at a much faster rate than expert-level geeks are installing linux. as a software developer tar…

Chromebooks (which use linux) accounted for over 5% of laptop shipments in Q3 of last year. They also grew at an astounding rate of 67% quarter over quarter. I have not seen data for Q4 of last year yet, but considering the chromebooks' growth rates it will probably be even higher.

So, no desktop linux market share is not non-existent and it is definitely not shrinking.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/chromebook-shipments-leap-by-67...

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#69

Post by TsukasaUjiie »

hristov wrote: post #67
asuffield wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we now live in a world where both monolithic and "microkernel" (hybrid) systems are commonplace - there's a bit shy of a billion devices running linux (android) and no shortage of windows and osx hosts around. What can we learn from this? Well, it doesn't really seem to matter whether you use a monolithic or microkernel design. They both work well enough. Driver development is hard for reasons that have got nothin…

Neither Windows nor OSX are microkernels.

Depends on how you look at it. Darwin is based on Mach with some monolithic BSD stuff linked in, I remember reading that Windows was fairly microkernelish but they've been pushing more things to kernel space.

Re: LINUX is obsolete (1992)

#70

Post by TsukasaUjiie »

digi_owl wrote: post #48
icebraining wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cost was the only problem, why didn't Hurd take off? Did Minix not suffer from the same problems?

Hurd was a research project as much as a working kernel. I Think the project restarted 3 times in 10 years... Linux may have been crude etc, but it was here, it was working, and it was free (in both senses of the word). Frankly i see the lack of Linux on the desktop less about the quality of Linux, and more about MS abusing its market position and a massive failure to regulate.

"and more about MS abusing its market position and a massive failure to regulate." thats a pretty vague statement.

IMO its simply the fact that Windows/OSX have set a high bar of out-of-the-box usability and shine that GNU/Linux simply hasn't reached. Not that this is a bad thing, it just might be worth accepting that we can't compete on desktop.

Post reply on HN