“Because I personally don’t think they have anything left worth taking after I’ve applied the general Unix principles. I really do think Linux is the better system by now, in all the ways that matter.” Read more here
“Because I personally don’t think they have anything left worth taking after I’ve applied the general Unix principles. I really do think Linux is the better system by now, in all the ways that matter.” Read more here
…this behavior really doesn’t benefit Linux in the long run. Fortunately, there are lots of open source alternatives!
What I love with Linus, it is his modesty…
Thank you for not using a sensational, out-of-context headline for this topic. CNET’s headline made it sound as though Linus had dismissed all of Solaris as a joke.
According to the interview, Linus only dismissed Solaris/X86 as a joke, and even then made it clear that he dismissed Solaris/X86 due to lack of driver support.
Thank you for providing an example of how small media news sites can provide higher quality content than big media news sites, despite what any big media FUD folks might claim.
He definitely has a good perspective on what it takes to make good software great software, Kudos to Linus…
He should really try to use NFS and autfs on linux, put serious load on it, lets try 100 users, all compiling the linux kernel at the same time, and then repeat this using solaris as NFS server, and then say that there is nothing left.
I am a RHCE and work with linux and unix all day, and linux nfs is not as good as hp unix and solaris, it is a fact.
This is arrogant, awful and pathetic. Linus attitude simply is awful and his philosophy and the philosophy behind Linux is a lot worse than the horrible attitude Sun has in their “PR”.
This is not like 2 heros fighting, more like 2 ogrees. Awful and I wonder how Linux will get passed that 2% desktop usage barrier when people hear this guy open his mouth.
Bill Gates at least is humble…
“To invent something totally new and different just because you want to do something new and different is in my opinion, the height of stupidity and hubris.”
If everybody followed this would we still have nothing but a CL interface? Yes doing something totally new and different can be a waste of time but it can also produce good things.
Bill Gates at least is humble…
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640kb ought to be enough for everybody
The Internet?. we dont care about it
Linux is a hobbyist operating system. I dont think it will have any impact on the commercial industry
Linux is cancer
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You call that humble?
His opinions are based on hearsay–he says it himself. Solaris x86 is the same codebase as Solaris SPARC. Yeah, what a joke.
What exactly is the big problem? Solaris/X86 was a joke the last time I tried it too and not at all user friendly.
Linux used to be a hobbyist operating system originally, so what’s the point? And comparing it to cancer is correct from my standpoint as well….
Regarding the 640kb was not about being humble or not, it was about being naive.
Comment about Internet was probably true at the moment he said it?? When did he say it btw?
What I get out of the article, is basically:
1. Solaris x86 has really bad hardware support. (So very very true.)
2. He is not planning on going over the source code looking for things that Solaris does better.
3. He is confident that other people will do that and let him know what ideas they think Linux could benefit from. (A good, scalable leader knows how to delegate.)
4. He believes that on the whole Linux is a better fit for x86 than Solaris x86. (Solaris x86 and Solaris Sparc are two different animals. Sun is in foreign territory here.)
He just wants to spread that Linux is good. Even if one doesn’t make money from a product they create, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to win. I really want to see OpenSolaris. Whether I can use it or not doesn’t matter. It is always better to have more open code.
Did we expect Linus to hype Solaris or Linux? Reality check please! Expecting Linus to hype, even mildly, Solaris is about like expecting Sun to hype up Linux. The hole premise here is about like asking the fox to evaluate the security of your henhouse and give his report any credibility.
Geesh.
Solaris has it’s pros and cons. If you don’t like it , don’t use it.
Linux has it’s pros and cons. If you don’t like it, don’t use it.
I want only the best OS for a particular application, not a religious war amongst a bunch of kiddies that haven’t grown up yet. No ONE OS is going to fit the bill all of the time.
The best lesson you can learn for the real world of IT:
Open source, closed sourse, whatever source, really doesn’t matter to me nor my customers. They want vendor support and for it “to just work.”
Merry Christmas to all. (oops, not being very PC there ;-))
JT
Before you shoot back with the “he has the right”, yeah he has the right to say whatever he wants. I have the right to give it very little credibility.
“(Solaris x86 and Solaris Sparc are two different animals.”
What about Solaris x86 and Solaris SPARC being the same codebase don’t people understand?
With all the complaining about drivers, you’d think people would learn to look at the Solaris x86 HCL before buying hardware?!? Hello, it’s no different than buying a computer for Linux, folks!
JT, that’s the best damn comment I read in a looong time. Cheers mate and Merry Christmas to you too! 😉
What don’t you understand about “x86 and Sparc are too very different processor architectures”?
As t hardware support, it is not at all like buying a computer for Linux. The HCL is far shorter, and if your hardware is not on the list, don’t even bother trying with Solaris. With Linux, if it is not “officially” supportted, there is a pretty good chance that it will work. At least it will not prevent you from installing the OS.
I have tried many times over the years to install verious versions of Solaris onto various machines. I have never, at any time, gotten Solaris to install. Not once. It always fails early in the installation. Solaris 10 included. I’m sure that it was just a problem with my hardware configuration on all the different machines that I tried it on. These same machines all happily have run Linux and the occasional *BSD.
Solaris has serious, serious, hardware compatibility problems in the x86 world.
And say I did go out and buy a machine that would run it. I would be making my hardware decisions based solely on the requirements of the OS. I’d pay whatever I had to pay, and I would live with the fact that it was not really the hardware that I would have wanted based on other criteria.
What about Solaris x86 and Solaris SPARC being the same codebase don’t people understand?
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You forget the key difference. drivers and inability of Sun to make up its mind. it has cancelled and renewed its interest in x86 atleast *three* times
news.com starts the story by saying that Linus called Solaris is a joke, when in fact he called esoteric hardware driver support a joke.
Thankfully Linus seems to be a reasonable person (he can flame though, read the kernel mailinglist), and that probably contributed to much of the success of linux. Just think of RMS would’ve been top dog in linux kernel development. You probably would’ve had about 3 developers left by now or major incompatible forks.
I also liked how Linus mildly dismissed the significance of GNU. Hehe.
Solaris/x86 is a joke, last I heard. (It has) very little support for any kind of strange hardware. If you thought Linux had issues with driver availability for some things, let’s see you try Solaris/x86.
This attitude is perfectly fine for any Solaris release prior to 10. However, Sun has made massive strides both in performance and hardware support, especially on the AMD64 platform.
Furthermore, he completely dodged the questions about containers, DTrace, and ZFS. While these are all fancy names for things which are also available in Linux, the truth of the matter is the Linux counterparts cannot hold a candle to any of these features in Solaris. Here’s a quick run down:
Containers: Solaris’s new virtualization mechanism. Containers have a special kernel image which is able to communicate with the main system kernel entirely in kernel space. This is somewhat similar to the approach taken by the Xen virtual machine, except that Xen does it at a much lower level. Solaris containers may be thought of as somewhere between a Linux kernel instance running in Xen on top of another Linux kernel and BSD jails. It certainly is nothing like UML, where the UML kernel is running in process context and thus performs rather pathetically.
ZFS: This integrates all the features of a high end filesystem and high end volume manager into a single package. Unfortunately, this will only be available a few months after Solaris 10 General Availability, but once it hits expect tools like VxFS and the Veritas Volume Manager to be rendered thoroughly obsolete on the Solaris side. Linux certainly has many interesting filesystems with cool whiz-bang features, many of which aren’t implemented in ZFS, but on the flip side ZFS has many features tuned towards the enterprise market which are seen in very few Linux filesystems, most notably XFS.
DTrace: While a bit obtuse for the time being, a simple demonstration of its power must be seen [filibeto.org]. The main advantage DTrace has over Linux alternatives such as KProbes [ibm.com], besides being massively more powerful, is that there is no performance impact on the system when they are not in use. DTrace probes are inserted into the kernel when needed and removed when not, whereas KProbes require they statically be built into the kernel.
Conclusion: There is a considerable amount of feature parity between Linux and Solaris 10, but the Solaris features all have an edge over the Linux ones. Linus should not let his hubris cloud his judgement… I expect Solaris 10 to be a major competator to Linux in the low end SMP server market.
Right now running Linux (or FreeBSD) on AMD64 has you flying by the seat of your pants a bit… it’s certainly not polished and there are a number of caveats and gotchas to watch out for. Contrarily Solaris 10/AMD64, especially on Sun’s own hardware, runs like a dream. I expect Solaris 10 to thoroughly decimate Linux in the Opteron server market.
There are still a number of areas where Linux is still playing catch up to Solaris as well, most notably in the realm of schedulers. While Linux 2.6 now sports a constant time scheduler like Solaris has had for a half decade, Solaris still supports modular schedulers which can be swapped in and out, can be active simultaneously, and processes can be moved between them. One of the most notable ones for which there is not yet a Linux counterpart that I am aware of is the Fair Share Scheduler, which allows processes to be bound to a fixed number of shares of certain system resources.
The Fair Share Scheduler integrates with other Solaris 10 features such as containers. For example, if you had a four processor system, you could dedicate, say, 75% of two of the processors to a given Solaris container instance. In the realm of Linux virtualization, there simply is no counterpart… there is no virtualization mechanism that allows you to partition resources in this manner. Xen won’t even let you run it on two processors…
Try nfs serving milions of files, homedirs for example, using RedHat Enterprise Linux with more then 300 concurrent mixed clients (Linuxes,BSD’s,Solaris,Irix).. then I’ll get to know the meaning of trouble ( read the bugzilla reports yourself ) unless you are using something like FreeBSD/Solaris. That’s my personal view based on years of handson experience using commercial unix and open-source flavors.
Same goes for populair filesystems like XFS. Testemonials all over but try to get a bug solved, heck it’s still open after 2 years. Nightmare kernel messages like:
xfs_force_shutdown(sd(8,48),0x8) called from line 4049 of file xfs_bmap.c. Return address = 0xc0223ad8
these won’t interrupt my sleep anymore since we have gone back to using the old and dusty UFS’es and commercial VXFS.
No? How about Gates and Balmer dressing up like Neo and Morphius and pretending that Linux is the Matrix? Okay, maybe not arrogant,but how about idiotic? Moronic? Childish? Lack of imagination?
http://www.i4u.com/article848.html
If only a couple of features like this is the advantage of solaris then its not much beyond what Linux has. Linux has several other unique features beyond solaris. Its not x vs y. its more of what you need and what developers and users percieve as important
Linus admits being ignorant of recent developments in solaris if you read the interview carefully. ignore the stupid titles. he offers an explanation that whatever is important people will tell him anyway and he isnt the only guy in charge of the development so other people will look into it too.
I suspect things have been quoted out of the context here
Solaris 10 still has alot to prove. Especially in the areas of performance. I am looking foward to seeing independent benchmarks comparing the latest vanilla kernel’s(not nessicarily Redhat’s) vs Solaris 10.
If the only thing Solaris 10 has in its arsenel are containers, zfs, and dtrace it still has still has alot more to prove. As Linux has had innovative technologies for awhile with v-servers, and the development of reiser4. And ucLinux for embedded platforms.
Right now running Linux (or FreeBSD) on AMD64 has you flying by the seat of your pants a bit… it’s certainly not polished and there are a number of caveats and gotchas to watch out for.
GNU/Linux distributions are considerably more advanced than FreeBSD on 64 bit systems. See this article.
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/12/14/1518217
Linus has every right to think Solaris on x86 is a joke, he has still yet to be proven wrong.
Linux also supports pluggable CPU schedulers.(though it is not in mainline yet, because it is very new, also ppl objected that this feature is not necessary) I believe that Con Kolivas is currently maintaining the patchset though I may be wrong.
Solaris 10 still has alot to prove. Especially in the areas of performance.
I suggest you give Solaris Express a try. We’ve noticed 50% – 100% transaction processing performance improvements in Solaris 10/AMD64 vs. Linux/AMD64, but of course YMMV.
In general, Solaris has nothing to prove in regards to performance… it’s still the paragon.
GNU/Linux distributions are considerably more advanced than FreeBSD on 64 bit systems. See this article.
That article is horrible! I have a FreeBSD/AMD64 dual Opteron colo server, and while I have had trouble with FreeBSD 5.3 on it I’ve resolved my problems and many of the comments they make are blatently wrong.
Linux also supports pluggable CPU schedulers.(though it is not in mainline yet, because it is very new, also ppl objected that this feature is not necessary)
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Linux has supported pluggable CPU schedulers for quite sometime in mainline now. Linux 2.6.10rc adds pluggable IO schedulers too. however the above post also mentions process transistions from one schedulers to another which he claims is supported by solaris
Linux also supports pluggable CPU schedulers.(though it is not in mainline yet, because it is very new, also ppl objected that this feature is not necessary)
Much like kprobes this is another half finished, untested feature which isn’t in the kernel mainline.
Let me know when Linux has a Fair Share Scheduler which you can reliably run simultaneously with the time share scheduler and you can migrate processes between the two with a single command.
In general, Solaris has nothing to prove in regards to performance… it’s still the paragon.
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Solaris 10 might have improved in performance but I havent seen it being compared to Linux 2.6..
Also the term “still the paragon” implies that it was always faster which is not true
Too true 🙂
Much like kprobes this is another half finished, untested feature which isn’t in the kernel mainline.
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both of these features are in mainline for quite sometime. perhaps you need to know better what you are talking about…
“Let me know when Linux has a Fair Share Scheduler which you can reliably run simultaneously with the time share scheduler and you can migrate processes between the two with a single command.”
you think this is something thats is overweighing all other things in Linux like supporting the maximum number of hardware devices and plaforms out of the box?
Sounds like they caught Linus before he got his cup of java… Arrogant, self-centered and egotistical? Indeed, and grumpy to boot. Dismissiveness shouldn’t diminish the importance of the DTrace, ZFS and Container concept contributions of Sol 10.
Sheesh, the new 3 Amigos – Gates, Ellison and Linus, certainly three of a kind egos…
That article is horrible! I have a FreeBSD/AMD64 dual Opteron colo server, and while I have had trouble with FreeBSD 5.3
FreeBSD 5.3 is FreeBSD’s flagship product. I would not put it on a production server, unless if I didn’t want stability or performance on par with modern UNIX like and Windows NT like systems.
I suggest you give Solaris Express a try. We’ve noticed 50% – 100% transaction processing performance improvements in Solaris 10/AMD64 vs. Linux/AMD64, but of course YMMV
I doubt it, though I will give Solaris 10 a try when it is released officially.
Agreed. My point was, the best thing about linux is, if there is a demand for a specific feature then someone will work on it. The pluggable CPU scheduler thing is done because, ppl thought that there can’t be a “DA SCHEDULER”, that is, one scheduler good for all cases.
So, if someone needs a Fair Share Scheduler, someone will probably code one.(maybe you?:))
Hey, it’s my good friend The Worst Troll In The World, and he’s calling me ignorant…
So please educate me!
Solaris 10 might have improved in performance but I havent seen it being compared to Linux 2.6..
Also the term “still the paragon” implies that it was always faster which is not true
Sooo… if you claim Solaris may only be regaining its performance crown with 10, at what point did it lose it and to who?
both of these features are in mainline for quite sometime. perhaps you need to know better what you are talking about…
Hey look, you’re half right!
http://www-124.ibm.com/linux/projects/kprobes/
November 2, 2004 Kprobes is now included in the main line kernel. No need to apply kprobes base patches. Download Linux version 2.6.9-rc2 and above.
So I’m terribly sorry for saying that kprobes aren’t in the mainline kernel when they are indeed in the absolute latest 2.6 release. But I guess your idea of “quite some time” is a month and a half in the latest kernel version.
Guess what, Solaris has had modular schedulers since 2.6…
However, I see no record of the pluggable CPU schedulers being merged into the kernel mainline. Here’s a kerneltrap article dated November 1st, 2004 talking about an experimental patch posted to LKML:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/4111?PHPSESSID=47b07765bc3f429cc38455f9e…
“I also liked how Linus mildly dismissed the significance of GNU. Hehe.”
Quick – you need to check this link out: Flame resistant overalls
http://www.speedace.info/racing_overalls.htm
FreeBSD 5.3 is FreeBSD’s flagship product. I would not put it on a production server, unless if I didn’t want stability or performance on par with modern UNIX like and Windows NT like systems.
Well, I’m using it quite happily and reliably on a dual Opteron production server, even under extreme process/network/database loads. No “ugly hack” is needed to enable 32-bit Linux compatibility like the article claims, simply add COMPAT_LINUX32 and COMPAT_43 to your kernel configuration and rebuild.
I’ll certainly admit that there were issues with RELENG_5_3 but *all* issues I experienced have been now been remedied in RELENG_5. I guess you won’t cut the FreeBSD people some slack for their first production release of their new branch, but you’re willing to tolerate all the botched releases in the Linux world? Remember Linux 2.6.8.1? Sounds like someone’s a bit of a hypocrite…
Sooo… if you claim Solaris may only be regaining its performance crown with 10, at what point did it lose it and to who?
Linux has been faster than Solaris for awhile, even while Solaris ran on Sun’s own SPARC achitecture. It would be unfair to Linux to assume Solaris 10 is faster, without independent benchmarks.
http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1148/sam0107a/0107a.htm
Linux has been faster than Solaris for awhile, even while Solaris ran on Sun’s own SPARC achitecture. It would be unfair to Linux to assume Solaris 10 is faster, without independent benchmarks.
Okay, and your “independent benchmark” to prove that Linux is faster than Solaris/SPARC is…
As a real-world test, we measured how quickly email could be sent using our MailEngine software. MailEngine is an email delivery server, ships on all the tested platforms (plus on Solaris for Sparc), and uses an asynchronous architecture (with non-blocking TCP/IP using the poll () system call). So that email was not actually delivered to our 200,000-member test list, we ran MailEngine in test mode.
This is your proof Linux outperforms Solaris/SPARC? Try again please…
You’re oversimplifying things a bit. To a large class of computer users, Solaris/x86 is not the paragon of performance. It’s performance on single and dual CPU servers has never been that great — it really shines when you throw more hardware at the problem. Historically, Linux has outperformed Solaris x86 on these sorts of configurations. Solaris/x86 10 might be a different matter entirely, but that is not yet released, is it?
The entire article is flame-bait. It takes the “Solaris/x86 is a joke” thing completely out of context. Linus qualified that statement with “last I heard”, and referred mainly to hardware support. I think the “joke” thing mainly comes from the fact that Solaris/x86 has not, until now, been a serious product at Sun — it was something of a side event. The interview itself reflects not so much Linus’s ego, but his pragmatism. Marketing talk doesn’t excite Linus at all, and beyond that, I doubt he follows Solaris development very closely at all. It makes sense, then, that he would not be excited about Solaris 10 until people actually using it told him about which features were useful in the real world. That is precisely what he said in the interview!
Hey, it’s my good friend The Worst Troll In The World, and he’s calling me ignorant…
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I didnt call you ignorant and I would excuse those cheap name calling you are indulging in instead of technical discussions
“Sooo… if you claim Solaris may only be regaining its performance crown with 10, at what point did it lose it and to who? ”
I havent claimed that solaris is regaining any crowns. You claimed that and I contradicted you by saying that its performance against Linux (esp 2.6) has traditionally been poor and its yet to proven otherwise
”
So I’m terribly sorry for saying that kprobes aren’t in the mainline kernel when they are indeed in the absolute latest 2.6 release. But I guess your idea of “quite some time” is a month and a half in the latest kernel version.
”
relative thing. only the obsolutely latest yet to be final release of solaris has dtrace too.
“Guess what, Solaris has had modular schedulers since 2.6… ”
artificially inflated product number doesnt increase the number of revisions. I dont care at what point of history who catched up with whom. Windows is gaining several “new and innovative” features that have been in Unix like systems for decades and I still prefer to appreciate that
“However, I see no record of the pluggable CPU schedulers being merged into the kernel mainline”
I am not sure which revision included it but the current fedora development series has this thing. its probably being tested here because ingo monglar was worried about the effect of its inclusion as discussed in the kerneltrap article. I just looked into Linus’ bk tree and this one has the patches but the revisions arent clear from the search results(its as bad as bugzilla search)
Remember Linux 2.6.8.1? Sounds like someone’s a bit of a hypocrite…
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released hours after 2.6.8 because of a typo in the original release… hypocrite? sure
released hours after 2.6.8 because of a typo in the original release… hypocrite? sure
Dunno anyone who drops everything to install a new kernel release on a production server, or anyone who would install Solaris 10 because it has new features like containers, that Linux has had for awhile.
And because Solaris is now known as Solaris 10 definately does not mean it will perform well, given their past history of poor performance.
Dunno anyone who drops everything to install a new kernel release on a production server, or anyone who would install Solaris 10 because it has new features like containers, that Linux has had for awhile.
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Precisely. Regardless of whether you consider me as a valid source or not, solaris has historically less performance than Linux on the x86 architecture. its a known thing all over the industry. Linux also has the world’s best support for the largest number of devices and platforms out of the box.
If solaris 10 outperforms it I will accept that when its released. plain and simple. There is always a cost vs benefits equation.
if you think a bunch of features is going to make everyone switch you are dead wrong. Just because a feature is in product x doesnt mean that product y requires the same thing.
Sometimes removing features increases the popularity of a product too!
witness mozilla suite vs firefox
In the commercial/proprietary world, the more features your PR/Marketing department can spew out per second, the more competitive your product is, irrespective of how redundant and needless these features are.
Linus says it best:
“To invent something totally new and different just because you want to do something new and different is in my opinion, the height of stupidity and hubris.”
Linus makes an off-the-cuff remark about Solaris x86 driver support being a joke (a very truthful remark), and all the Solaris fans get their briefs in a bunch, and start flaming Linus and Linux, to which Linux fans respond with their own flames. Then the thread goes into being a debate about Solaris vs Linux technical merits. It’s all pretty funny.
Let’s face it. Both Solaris and Linux are great operating systems, and have their own merits.
Solaris kicks total booty as a big iron server OS.
Linux kicks total booty as an OS for practicaly everything else, and is even pretty good for big iron.
People should not get all excited about what Linus Torvalds says. And frankly, he did not come off as all that arrogant. So he doesn’t like Solaris’ lack of driver support? Big deal. Plus, most of the interview he talks about Linux, and being concerned about making Linux the best that it can be, as well as the open source development process. There is nothing wrong with any of that, and I see nothing arrogant in Linus’ statements.
“But more importantly, if I’m wrong, that’s OK.”
Sounds pretty modest to me.
Anyone else notice these debates are starting to be more and more like Ford vs. Chevy debates. Seriously, I think in a few years, what OS, what internet server, what application server, web browser, whatever is all going to be irrelevant. The internet has become to computers what roads have become for cars and it is becoming more and more irrelevant what kind of computer you are using as long as you can get around the internet. One day, people are going to be making decisions on what operating system they have purely on economical decisions, personal preferences, and what kind of expertise they possess.
One day, people are going to be making decisions on what operating system they have purely on economical decisions, personal preferences, and what kind of expertise they possess.
um.. I thought thats what people already do…
Grumpy, egotistical, arrogant, blunt?
Sounds like a true programmer to me.
I beleive Linus when he says he’s glad that he doesn’t deal with customers directly, instead letting RedHat, Novell, and others do that. I know very few programmers who would speak in the marketing or philisophical format people seem to want to hear during an interview.
Sounds like nothing but honest answers from a fellow coder to me.
When you buy Solaris, you are putting money on the current product, plus the promise of future support. Solaris for x86 processors has lacked support in the past in two ways:
1) It was clear that Sun’s heart was not in a version for Intel and AMD processors.
2) Support for software applications to run under Solaris x86 was lacking.
If I were to purchase Opteron servers, it’s the support issues that would loom large. I still get the impression that Sun is “embracing” Opteron only because it’s being forced to. Like its Linux offerings, Sun may be getting dragged into Solaris x86 kicking and screaming.
Beyond any of the benefits of Solaris, it’s the support issues that Sun needs to address.
Yes, but the fact is; “American Cars” are often crap (especially Ford). Volvo was the best, until Ford bought it; and Japanese companies do make more parts in the US than GM, Ford, or Chrysler.
So.
Ford sucks, Windows sucks, but people use them anyway.
Ok, I really don’t know about most of that, so you’re actually right in what you said about it all being a silly debate most of the time. However, I really think that’s about as far as the similarities go. And honestly, I’ve never heard a Ford man show that Ford’s are better A-B cars (just better muscle cars or towin’ trucks). However, I see a lot of ’89 Civics, and almost never see an ’89 Taurus.
“One day, people are going to be making decisions on what operating system they have purely on economical decisions, personal preferences, and what kind of expertise they possess.
um.. I thought thats what people already do…”
Obviously, then you have not worked in the real world enough. People right now do not choose what software they should run, that choice is made for them. Only recently, with the advent of alternative open-source applications and information exchange through standards (XML and html), people can finally starting thinking about alternative operating systems and application suites. But before this, people had no choice but to run Windows on the client side. And you didn’t have much choice but to run Windows Servers to support these clients.
But this is all changing now. With Gnome, OpenOffice, Mozilla, ThunderBird, GAIM, CUPS, and thousands of other application, people are finally getting the freedom to choose. They will get to choose what OS they want and this choice is not going to be based on capability or scalability (now that Microsoft is losing its monopoly, their products are becoming extremely capable and scalable). People are going to take it for granted that a system is secure, scalable, and can run xyz application. Instead, decisions are going to be made on personal preference and economical decisions. Someone might even make their decision to run FreeBSD because of the cute little devil.
Solaris has a reputation for not being the best choice on x86 I have tried to install various versions of it over the years and Linux have always been a better experience for the x86 platform.
Now enter Solaris 10. Sure Sun may have fixed things, they may even provide drivers for every single hardware item out there. It will take a long time before they can wipe off their bad reputation on x86. The fact that Sun doesn’t seam to decide what leg to stand on in the Solaris x86 doesn’t make things better.
Solaris on x86 just not only need to get better for people to change their oppinion, they need to be much better. Linux development is not exactly standing still either. I would say that Sun is too late to the party.
To be a player in FOSS you need to build a community, that will take time. This is time Sun doesn’t have. The battle for the free desktop is starting now, and on the serverside it has been going on for a while, and Solaris isn’t winning.
On the serverside the price of Solaris have hardly stopped anyone its not worse than some enterprice linux distros. So making Solaris free is probably not doing it much good.
The serverside users will remember Suns treatment of Solaris x86 and will not trust Sun to support it, so they are not likely to deploy it until there is a large community support.
On the free desktop, the thing needed for it to happen is software, and not only free software. Look how long it has taken to get just a firms to port their stuff to Linux. If they wont port to Linux that have a few percents of the desktop market at best, they will not consider Solaris x86 that have even less. Here Solaris will have the same problem Linux have with respect to Windows.
This means that even if Solaris 10 turns out to be as good as some people say. I guess it will have little impact on the free software market for several years. And by then most people will have decided wheter thay will run Linux or Longhorn leaving very little space for Solaris no matter what technical merits it may have by then.
Even thought Solaris have some interesting features, so have Linux especially in the security area. True, we have Trusted Solaris, but how much of that will enter into the free version remains to be seen.
So I would say that Linus is doing the right thing in focusing on his own system so far. If and when Solaris becomes a player I’m sure somebody will let him know.
I also liked how Linus mildly dismissed the significance of GNU.
Yeah…except he didn’t. He said that GNU or something similar might have happened without RMS, just like Linux or something similar might have happened without himself.
He also reaffirmed his trust that the GPL was pretty much the only license he found acceptable for Linux.
Way to pick the most easy to misinterpret quotes and strip them of context. As someone else pointed out, he bashes Solaris/X86 *only*, says ‘last I heard’ which indicates he doesn’t look at it much, and specifically singles out the issue of driver support. As for the quote where he says he doesn’t think there’s anything in Solaris worth taking, there’s an immediate following paragraph which basically says “…but more importantly, I don’t know much about Solaris, and if I’m wrong, it makes much more sense for people who know about Solaris to tell me what things I should pick up than for me to go and find it all out on my own”. Which is a perfectly sensible attitude.
@aaron: He said that inventing something totally new *for the sake of inventing something totally new* is the height of hubris – i.e., if there’s a perfectly good way to do something already then it’s ridiculous to reinvent the wheel. He did *not* say that it’s the height of hubris *to invent something new*. The GUI was invented as a useful new interface paradigm for computers, it wasn’t a reimplementation of an existing concept created purely because someone didn’t want to use an existing system. Which is the kind of thing Linus was criticising.
However, Sun has made massive strides both in performance and hardware support, especially on the AMD64 platform.
You’ll notice that the criticism is directed towards Solaris/x86, not Solaris/AMD64…
I’d love to know how he dismissed the significance of the GPL, given that he said his two requirements for a license were that it made the code available and ensured that any derviatives would be available. Which is, after all…the entire point of the GPL.
These comments made by Linus that sound like pure FUD tell me just one thing — Linus is insecure and scared of Solaris. Solaris is a serious contender packing much more punch per pound than Linux and the fact Solaris being open-source has a pretty good potential to steal thunder from Linux makes Linus worried, hense the bitterness. Overall I’m pretty disappointed in Linus, he used to be my role model not so long ago, but these petty insecure remarks about Solaris are just revolting. Linus has become an embodyment of a typical arrogant Linux fanboy that makes the rest of Unix community sick to the stomach. If anything I was exptecting Linus to welcome Sun as being the first commercial company in the history to make this sort of a bold move by open-sourcing one of the brightest Unix implementations in history, but I guess the personal insecurity overtook Linus — what a pity.
did you actually read the article, or just the sensationalised out-of-context quotes?
Please give example of “petty insecure remarks” Linus made int the article.
On the contrary, I found him very candid and honest, as usual. I think you mistook his playful tongue-in-cheek jabs as arrogance, but the fact of the matter is that he sounded very confident and calm (as he should, Sun not having a tenth of the momentum that the Linux movement has).
Damn it – that’s twice we post similar responses almost at the same time! People are going to think we’re the same person posting under two different nicks/IPs…
Stop thinking like me! 😉
> On the contrary, I found him very candid and honest, as usual. I think you mistook his playful tongue-in-cheek jabs as arrogance
Linus is playful and candid only when he talks about anything but Sun and/or Solaris. Throwing a comment like “Solaris is a joke” in public is not exactly the most flattering or playful thing he could have done. Plus this is not the first time Linus makes this sort of move as he is systemically trying to derail any optimism about Solaris. What is the most amazing thing about Linus’ comments about Solaris is that he poo-poos Solaris admitting his own complete ignorance on the subject — “I haven’t tried it, I have no plans to try it” — how much more arrogant and ignorant can you get?
Solaris is not too late for the party. It already is in the party. And arguing Sun’s commitment to x86 is pure FUD. The market has chosen x86 and any serious OS today that wants to stay relevant in the mass market has to be committed to it. Sun isn’t going to abandon this market anytime soon. On the other hand, I find it difficult to see how the new features in Solaris are going to kill Linux. I don’t see how Solaris going open source is going to get people to abandon Linux and flock to Solaris. Some of the new features in Solaris are cool, but that’s about it. I can get by without them. I already have been. Grow up people and get used to your neighbors. MacOS X, BSD, Linux, Windows, and Solaris are here to stay. They are all very solid systems and competitively priced. They aren’t going anywhere, anytime soon.
Throwing a comment like “Solaris is a joke” in public is not exactly the most flattering or playful thing he could have done
—-
taken out of context. he specifically mention solaris/86 regarding driver support
“I haven’t tried it, I have no plans to try it”
again/ he just meant that he wouldnt probably poke into it himself and that people would bring to his attention the important features anyway. he also pointed out that he wasnt controlling the project.
and you’re forgetting asynchronous I/O which sucks on linux and is very much needed if they want to make a good desktop OS out of linux.
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/event_completion.html
All the people saying that the x86 and SPARC versions are the same code base need to think a little. I can write code with 100000 ifdefs and it’s the same code base – it doesn’t mean it’s the same code. Then consider the necessary differences in drivers, the vastly larger array of hardware on the x86 platform (and the corresponding increase in the number of drivers). They’re not the same.
Rich.
Incorrect quotation. Not “Solaris is a joke”. “Solaris/x86 is a joke, last I heard.” You could only semi-legitimately quote that as “Solaris/x86 is a joke…”, and you’re still stripping it of context. Changing a comma to a period and dropping part of a word entirely is not a legitimate quotation.
“I can write code with 100000 ifdefs and it’s the same code base – it doesn’t mean it’s the same code.”
A stronger statement would be that Solaris is modular and is greater than 90% platform-independent (from the book Solaris Internals). 100000 ifdefs is not platform independence.
Up until now, Solaris/x86 has lacked hardware support, software support (why do you think they are implementing Linux emulation in versoin 10?), and Sun was very flip-floppy on it’s future. That doesn’t sound like a serious product to me. Maybe Solaris 10 is different — at least, that’s what Sun says. That doesn’t mean that until now, as a commercial product, Solaris x86 hasn’t been pretty comical. Now, that is not to slight Solaris/SPARC at all. After all, Windows/x86 was always a serious operating system, but Windows/PPC or Windows/MIPS was never a serious contender!
It is debatable whether asynchronus I/O really is that critical a feature. Linux has always focused on having very cheap processes and extremely fast context switch times. As a result, a multi-threaded blocking model on Linux can perform very well.
I think as Linus said, the best attitude here is wait and see. First and foremost, the key thing is going to be the license that Solaris is released under. The way I see it, it’s a lose-lose proposition for Sun. If the license is not compatible with the GPL (which I can pretty much guarantee) then it will be a “one-way” license- things will be able to be put into Solaris, but nothing good can come out and go into competing efforts like Linux or BSD. It will be very hard to create a community effort when its all taking and no giving- a loss for Sun.
OTOH, if Solaris by some miracle is GPL compatible, then as Linus said, folks who are curious and interested in what Solaris has to offer will harvest the good stuff and bring it into Linux. Then Solaris will have no technical benefit over Linux. Again a loss for Sun.
Besides, the other thing people forget is that companies such as IBM, HP and SGI will never support Solaris over their own version of UNIX on their own hardware. When Solaris supports as many hardware platforms as NetBSD or even Debian then Sun can talk.
[S]olaris has historically less performance than Linux on the x86 architecture. its a known thing all over the industry.
Historical precedent is of limited value when looking at a new release of a product. I’m sure that there were plenty of “industry” preconceptions about Linux that were true 3-5 years ago that aren’t true now.
Linux also has the world’s best support for the largest number of devices and platforms out of the box.
It supports more devices out of the box than Windows? And whose box are you talking about anyway? I do recall you lecturing me about the difference between Linux and RedHat, so what precisely are you talking about and where are you getting your basis for comparison?
There is always a cost vs benefits equation.
if you think a bunch of features is going to make everyone switch you are dead wrong.
A sundry assortment of unimportant features are certainly not a compelling reason to change any kind of software. However, if a new version of software contains features that allow you to save money in your business operations, they tend to be a more attractive reason to switch. As you said, there’s a cost vs. benefits equation. If Solaris is the same cost as Linux, yet has benefits which allow you to better utilize your systems and your developers’ time, then I would argue that this comparison favors Solaris precisely because of features.
Solaris is not too late for the party. It already is in the party. And arguing Sun’s commitment to x86 is pure FUD. The market has chosen x86 and any serious OS today that wants to stay relevant in the mass market has to be committed to it. Sun isn’t going to abandon this market anytime soon.
Sun never was into that mass market. They mainly did sell high end systems using SPARC. That was the party they were invited to. Not, the now more interesting x86 party held by street kids like Dell and HP. Now they are dragged to that party screeming and kicking by their customers.
Just compare the availability of software for Solaris x86 and Solaris sparc. You will find that I’m not alone in viewing Suns intentions for Solaris with respect to the x86 platform with some suspicion.
To make it worse, there seams to be just as many views on the direction of Sun as there are excecutives and weeks in the year. The sense that there is no direction creates uncertanty, and in the business world uncertainty usually means no business.
It’s a sad day when saying Merry Christmas is considered inappropriate. Sad sad sad…
Merry Christmas, everyone!
huh?
Like adamW already pointed out, you all really need to actually “read” and then try and “comprehend” it before you make comments.
This is like listening to my 1yr old niece repeating what she heard from the rest of the family, it only comes out half ass. I can understand why a 1yr old would do this, what about the rest of you?
/me puts on his flame resistant trunks and dives in……
Merry Christmas!
A sundry assortment of unimportant features are certainly not a compelling reason to change any kind of software. However, if a new version of software contains features that allow you to save money in your business operations, they tend to be a more attractive reason to switch.
You also have to consider things like the cost of support.
So far I guess there are fewer people that are aware of Solaris internals than there are people who know the Linux kernel in and out, at least if they are not employed by Sun.
This means that, at least initially, you would have only one realistic supplier of support and that is Sun Microsystems. This means that you probably will be forced to pay a higher price for Solaris support as there is less competing companies offering it, and there are less people availabe to hire by those companies.
Naturally the situation may not stay like this forever, and I wouldn’t mind replacing the Linux kernel with Solaris provided it worked just as well and had the same security that SELinux offers. I’m just saying that it will be a uphill battle for Sun to get there.
Solaris is not too late for the party. It already is in the party. And arguing Sun’s commitment to x86 is pure FUD. The market has chosen x86 and any serious OS today that wants to stay relevant in the mass market has to be committed to it. Sun isn’t going to abandon this market anytime soon.
I agree with much of what Slash has said, but Sun’s “party” has not been the x86 party. Sun made (or had made for them) the hardware, and produced the software to run on it. If I understand correctly, Sun does a terrific job on on servers with 8 CPUs and up. Sun also does well with servers of 4 and less, but not better than x86.
Sun commanded high profit margins during the “dot com” heyday, but companies looking for cheaper servers that do the job are going with vanilla, mass market hardware, and either Linux or Windows.
In addition, some of Sun’s big iron is being eclipsed by Linux’s ability to run clusters.
In short, Sun is being pushed more and more into a niche market, and they have seen this coming and done little. I don’t blame them, really. Why would they want to give up the big margins that come with selling their own integrated solutions. They have been loath to abandon that model. Thus, they reject Linux, then embrace it, then marginalize it. Thus they produce and abandon Solaris x86 several times.
Can Sun produce x86 servers with Solaris that are price competitive with Dell, HP, IBM and all the rest. I doubt it, but I won’t go so far as Robert Cringely did at the end of one of his columns: “Losers in the [IBM PC division sale to Lenovo] deal are HP, Intel, and Sun. Especially Sun. Those guys are in trouble.” (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041209.html)
This means that, at least initially, you would have only one realistic supplier of support and that is Sun Microsystems. This means that you probably will be forced to pay a higher price for Solaris support as there is less competing companies offering it, and there are less people availabe to hire by those companies.
This really isn’t true. You don’t need to be familiar with the internals of the Solaris kernel to administer it effectively. There are plenty of people who have administered these systems and can do so quite well. That said, support costs are a valid concern, and I agree that they have to be competitive. With this in mind, though, I believe Sun is much more competitive than other support vendors. I challenge you to get a quote from IBM Global Services about administering a Solaris shop, or about maintaining one of Sun’s boxes. They’re willing to do it, but it’s a order of magnitude more expensive.
Fundamentally, though, there’s nothing that forces you to buy the hardware or the support from Sun. You could just as easily buy the server and support from Fujitsu and you’ll still be able to run Solaris on it.
solaris 10 x86 has good hw support actually
and solaris 10 is surprisingly fast — in fact much faster at boot up for the same amount of services run than any linux distro. everyone in the linux world always recommend turning off services you don’t need as a way to improve boot time and conserve system resources.
.. well, you don’t need to do that for solaris 10 now! out of the box, there’s a whole lot of services launched–but it still boots fast, much faster than say.. suse 9.x especially if you do an apples-to-apples comparison and use the exact amount and type of services (since the new smf framework keeps tracks of dependencies, it launches any services it can concurrently). and i’ve run it on a pentium III 500 mhz, 384 mb of ram, scsi drive connected to an adaptec 2940uw (that’s 40 mb/s max btw) and is just as responsive as freebsd 5.2.1.
now getting back to the article. linus mentions about standing on the shoulder of giants, yet from his very dismissive attitude, he seems to have forgotten on whos shoulder he’s been standing on for some time.
in fact, down in the kernel vm, afaik, jeff bonwick’s (of sun microsystems) slab allocator concept and design is still used. and if they ever want to get nfs and autofs right, they need to turn to sun some more.
Why are you C&P from a Slashdot post?
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=133523&cid=11150418
> Can Sun produce x86 servers with Solaris that are price competitive with Dell, HP, IBM and all the rest. I doubt it
Sun x86 gear is already cheaper than Dell’s, just check the prices — Network World magazine was recently making price comparisons of x86 gear from Dell, HP, IBM and Sun — guess what Sun gear is the cheapest. And in the future Sun will always be able to undercut the likes of Dell and HP as Sun owns the OS and therefore doesn’t have to pay royalties to RedHat/Micro$oft/etc. Out of all major server vendors Sun is best suited to deliver the lowest priced and most full-featured product bundles because Sun owns the entire system stack from hardware to OS to middleware to desktop, even IBM can’t quite do it this way because IBM still depends on RedHat/SuSE and M$.
“It supports more devices out of the box than Windows?”
Yes, far more. Windows’ own driver support is fairly limited, most peripherals come with third-party drivers.
I rather like the Americanism ‘happy holidays’, actually. Sounds nice and sincere, doesn’t leave anyone out. And most societies have had a winter solstice festival of some sort for much longer than the Christian faith’s been around, so it recognises that too. So…happy holidays, one and all! Even Lumbergh.
Maybe he’s talking about Solaris 9 x86. Because prior vesions of Solaris for the x86 were not that great–sun execs even said so! It set the stage for Solaris 10 x86. It has really improved and the AMD64 version allowed them to turn a bunch of stuff on to make it outperform Linux.
Linus should stay out of politics. Solaris is a much better designed OS. Linux was created as a hobby OS to be something better than MINIX. It has never been architecturally surprior than the legacy unix alternatives. It runs, it’s supported, it’s popular, it’s free thats why people use it. It has evolved from a hobby fun OS to a better OS due to investments of MILLIONS of dollars (so you don’t think im all against the GPL) I personally think GNU/Hurd is a better OS.
Linus, i believe you should go order Solaris 10 from sun.com’s store and then compare. Comparing operating systems due to driver support is sometimes not the way to go, especially if you are comparing them on desktop drives. Then again, isn’t it obvious that windows and linux will have more drivers anyway?
Solution: Contribute to OpenSolaris when its released and make it not “suck as much as linux” As you now, there is no reason to b!tch about a better designed, stable and scalable (solaris PROVEN to be much more scalable–their FS’s are also better–go research that)OS that dosen’t have as many drivers. It’s more reasonable to go contribute to an OSS project to improve it or just use and contibute to an alternative… or perhaps your own project.
Why ‘O why must we have so much politics in open source? why can’t it all be free and personal license opinions respected?
i should have thaought linus would be less arrogant
What is the most amazing thing about Linus’ comments about Solaris is that he poo-poos Solaris admitting his own complete ignorance on the subject — “I haven’t tried it, I have no plans to try it” — how much more arrogant and ignorant can you get?
There are several problems with your analysis of what Linus said. First, he didn’t poo-poo Solaris, he was specifically talking about Solaris/x86. Nor does he admit “complete ignorance on the subject” – in fact, you used quote marks, but I looked for what you quoted in the article and couldn’t find it. Misquoting is really bad form, you should avoid it. He does say that he will “probably not” take a peek at the Solaris code for lack of time and interest, but that’s quite different from what you’re saying.
As for arrogance, I disagree. In the next few lines he says that he’s not the best one qualified to take a peek anyway, that if there’s anything worthwhile in there someone will surely bring it up.
In any case, he really didn’t come out as arrogant to me, though I can see how his words could annoy Solaris/x86 enthusiasts. Both of them. (See, that is arrogance! 😉
Linus should stay out of politics.
He has the right to his own opinion and a tendency to speak his mind. If you don’t like what he says, don’t listen to him.
Solaris is a much better designed OS.
Well, he is not talking about Solaris in general, but Solaris/x86.
Linux was created as a hobby OS to be something better than MINIX.
Actually, Linux is just the kernel. The OS is GNU/Linux. I wouldn’t normally mention it, but you did use the term “GNU/Hurd” a few lines later, so I think it’s fair game. 😉
It has never been architecturally surprior than the legacy unix alternatives.
That’s debatable. After all, Unixware is a legacy Unix alternative!
Of course, not having access to the source code of those Unix alternatives, it’s kind of hard to appraise their architectural superiority over Linux. But I’ll take your totally unbiased word for it…
Solaris is a much better designed OS.
I have never seen the source code to Solaris, so I could not comment on design. Though with its traditionally poor performance, I would say it is not better designed.
GNU/Hurd is obviously not a better operating system, as now it is only getting support for partitions larger than 2GBs.
I have not seen proof to indicate Solaris is much more scalable than Linux. I do know Linux scales to the most powerful super clusters, http://www.top500.com. The fastest super computer is the IBM Blue Gene/L and it runs Linux, not Slowlaris.
I have no clue why people call Linus Torvalds “arrogant”, Linus Torvalds did create his own operating system kernel that is used and has bested many commercial products (Slowlaris, so his input should be respected.
There is nothing like taking a quote out of context and using that as a headline. This is pure marketing from OSNews and it’s sickening. I can tell just from the number of comments that most posters did not actually read the article or else they would see that Linus’ comment is pretty benign. He did state that if there were features that people wanted that Solaris had, then they would be implemented, not because Solaris did it but because it’s what people wanted. Now I think that’s a much better situation than you have with companies like Microsoft who will leave you high and dry because they know you are locked in and really don’t have the option of switching platforms.
> The fastest super computer is the IBM Blue Gene/L and it runs Linux, not Slowlaris.
Calling Solaris “Slowlaris” is immature and plain idiotic — speaking of Linux fanboy arrogance — Solaris 10 is already kicking Linux’s ass pretty much across the board on the benchmarks . As for Blue Gene and other Linux based supercomputers, they are basically loosely coupled clusters targetted at highly parallel workloads and comparing them to high end systems from Sun is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Solaris on the other hand shows stellar scalability in the single image, something Linux can’t really brag about. According Linus’s own words Linux kernel won’t scale beyond 16 CPU in the single image. Solaris kernel is very fine grained and fully multithreaded allowing for better scalability across multiple CPU’s, you can’t say the same about Linux kernel.
According Linus’s own words Linux kernel won’t scale beyond 16 CPU in the single image
The days of the mainframes are over.Nobody needs yet another single point of failure.Clusters are hot and have a greater redundancy.Linux is cheap,has everything a server would,could need.BTW so does FreeBSD.An ueber admin doesn’t need a support contract for it’s operating system, maybe for the apps tailormade,or some hardware.I would rather have three machines with 8 processors each than one with 24.It’s only important what gets the job done in the least amount of time and has the longest verifyable *real* uptime,and has a healthy TCO.
Hurd has better design. Maybe you should research operating system designs and them give me an opinion. I have worked with OS engineers and I can give a pretty good explanation of why Hurd is much better designed OS. Let me also say that due to the linux popularity people have not focused much on it so its only in linux’s shadow. Lack of driver support and OS design are totally different thing. Please go research what ‘design’ and ‘architecture’ mean.
“Though with its traditionally poor performance, I would say it is not better designed. ”
This is unrealistic. Solaris x86 has been poor, but not Solaris on SPARC. Sys V and BSD have never had poor performance, they are big iron OS’s. I suggest you download Solaris 10 for x86-64, x86, and SPARC and compare it to Solaris 9.
I figured I would get replies from people whom have not done their homework and use tactics used in political campaigns to support their unproven, idiotic side.
Also, Linus really does not do the bulk of Linux’s work anymore. I really doubt he has done most of the work in the linux kernel. He started it and shapes it and holds the linux community together. I respect him for that and I think he’s intelligent. I think he should watch more clearly what he says and not to get in the middle of an “OS War” or whatever you call it. I respect him that he does not out right does it but he should watch how he responds to questions because he’s so influential. Open Source is about collaboration and it has tarditionally rivaled against commercial competition. It shouldn’t rival against itself but disagree with design, community structures and so forth.
Please reap up on your topics Mr. Adam.
Man, considering the whining about hardware support, wasn’t linux like this just a few years ago?
Maybe the community should embrace it and build upon it like it has with linux and the bsd’s. From Linus’ pretentious tone it sounds like he’s afraid that it’ll take free developers away from working on linux and onto something else new.
I haven’t seen this many flamers in a long time. Reading the article it seems to me that the interviewer was trying to make Linus say some things about Sun, Solaris, and GNU in a way that Linus didn’t intentionally say them. The interviewer was baiting the questions for a flamefest. So what if Linus is a little over-confident or cocky many successful people are. Plus Linus seemed slightly annoyed with the interviewer in my opinion.
And here’s a question why do people get into flamefests about OS. If an OS is useful to you then use it if not don’t use it. If you are asked why you don’t use tell them why you don’t use it. If you discover during the conversation that the OS or software may now meet your uses try it again.
I personally use only Windows currently, although my computer is set up to dual boot with Mandrake Community 10.1. The installation stopped working during finals and now I can’t get it fixed. I plan to install Mandrake Official 10.1 when I return to school and the T3 connection:-). After I play with that for a couple of days I’m going to reinstall Windows over it and reclaim my hard drive space because I am running out. From then on I plan to burn every new release of Knoppix (and Knoppix Games) so I can continue to use Linux. I would use just Linux but I love my video games. I plan to buy a laptop when I go to grad school in two years and probably about a year after Windows Longhorn is released I will begin building my own computer to replace my current desktop as a gaming machine and then I will install Linux on my current desktop and use it for various hacks.
> And comparing it to cancer is correct from my standpoint as well….
but it’s *not* humble, dood
@Anonymous 61.95.184.—
“however the above post also mentions process transistions from one schedulers to another which he claims is supported by solaris”
Has been supported for years. priocntl(1). Scheduler
functions are implemented in an object-oriented style.
“artificially inflated product number doesnt increase the number of revisions”. What do you mean by this? the OP
was stating that support has been in place since Solaris
2.6 (1998).
@ Richard Moore
Comments regarding code base. Specifically: “They’re not the same.”
OK, I work with the Solaris kernel source code everyday.
They are the same. Stop spreading FUD. The differences are
in the HAT layer and platform specific code. The kernel
is platform agnostic.
@Adam
“I have never seen the source code to Solaris, so I could not comment on design. Though with its traditionally poor performance, I would say it is not better designed.”
Hmm. A poorly concealed straw man. Having said that
you have not seen the Solaris source and could not
comment on it’s design you then proceed to do so.
The primary design principles for Solaris have been
robustness, scalability and security. You cannot say
Solaris is poorly designed because it, apparently,
does not perform well. It now does these things and
performs well. I see all the comments regarding Zones,
Dtrace etc. There are many, many, incremental improvements
to existing features. You should also not forgot about
Fireengine, the redesigned tcp-ip stack.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/networkperf/
I actually found it the opposite of arrogant. He basically says: “I’m busy with this, i heard Solaris/x86 isn’t very good on driver aspect, but i’m busy with this. So i don’t know much about it.” How is that ‘arrogant’?
Why it is ‘news’ is a second discussion altogether. I don’t see it as such…