This is a point that the Linux community never seems to grasp when they wonder why Linux has never been able to make significant inroads with everyday consumers.

That's a funny thing to say about the single most popular OS kernel on earth -- including in consumer devices.

 

Yeah. I was gonna say the left always has those crazy eyes.

It's the "left" you can thank for the demise of slavery, the abolition of child labor, seatbelts, food safety laws, school buses, criminalizing the poisoning of local water supplies by factories, unleaded petrol, particulate matter regulations, women getting the vote, so judge a tree by its fruit.

 

That's a funny thing to say about the single most popular OS kernel on earth -- including in consumer devices.

It's true though. Do some research Linux is a mess, not designed, a hodge podge of ideas and techniques, sure free things are always popular doesn't mean they are any good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28621558

 

It's the "left" you can thank for the demise of slavery, the abolition of child labor, seatbelts, food safety laws, school buses, criminalizing the poisoning of local water supplies by factories, unleaded petrol, particulate matter regulations, women getting the vote, so judge a tree by its fruit.

Speaking of "fruit".



You forgot mom's apple pie.



Ha Ha, bet you thought I was going to say something else.

 

Speaking of "fruit".



You forgot mom's apple pie.



Ha Ha, bet you thought I was going to say something else.

I wonder how many Americans here have tasted this:

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/rhubarb-crumble

 

Crazy Eyes posted a rant from the internet, and calls it research.

Funny.

 

Crazy Eyes posted a rant from the internet, and calls it research.

Funny.

Hey, take it or leave it, I don't care, there's a wealth of material out there that describes the many shortcomings of Linux. The points he raises - sorry "rants" about - are all legitimate recognized shortcomings, why didn't you know this?

 

That's a funny thing to say about the single most popular OS kernel on earth -- including in consumer devices.

Which is why it has, what, a 4% or so share of the desktop OS market.

 

Which is why it has, what, a 4% or so share of the desktop OS market.

Consumers don't use desktops anymore.

 

Consumers don't use desktops anymore.

Linux is undisciplined, has poor design, was never actually designed in fact or even specified and has a terrible approach to device drivers and hardware support. Windows relies on a sophisticated model known as WDM and supports "plug n play" in which device drivers are loaded dynamically as hardware is added/removed, often with no need to restart the system.

Read all about how Windows WDM is professionally engineered whereas Linux is just an amateurish hack job. Besides all this why on earth would a so-called engineer want to rely on a poorly cloned hack of a 1960s toy OS rather than a modern OS designed in the 1990s by a renowned team of OS engineers? Oh, because it's "free", that must be why - socialism for computer users!

 

Funny how it answers to Crazy Eyes.

 

Funny how he answers to Crazy Eyes.

Well I know only too well that some people can only really express themselves through epithets, they just don't know any better.

 

Consumers don't use desktops anymore.

Consumers don't use desktops anymore.

And yet we currently sell, just in the U.S., more PCs in a year than there are people in the country -- and about 24 out of every 25 of them do NOT have Linux.

 

And yet we currently sell, just in the U.S., more PCs in a year than there are people in the country -- and about 24 out of every 25 of them do NOT have Linux.

Mobile devices are 2:1 over desktops for consumers (not business).

Android is nearly 3:1 over iOS in the mobile device space (MS does not have a position).

Android is Linux (kernel), with a pretty open source wrapper on top.

Aside from that, Linux has won over almost every appliance that is not a PC, including your car.

Linux runs 500 of the top 500 supercomputers, and a large majority of websites, routers, and servers of every kind.

The competitor survives on the desktop only through inertia and marketing (and -- unfortunately -- gaming).

Your step-mom can run Linux: my close-to-centenarian mom uses it on her desktop and laptop. She now hates Windows, and would never consider going back.

 

Mobile devices are 2:1 over desktops for consumers (not business).

Android is nearly 3:1 over iOS in the mobile device space (MS does not have a position).

Android is Linux (kernel), with a pretty open source wrapper on top.

Aside from that, Linux has won over almost every appliance that is not a PC, including your car.

Linux runs 500 of the top 500 supercomputers, and a large majority of websites, routers, and servers of every kind.

So what?

Pick a random person in this country.

It is overwhelmingly likely that that person is not running a supercomputer, or programming a website, or configuring a router, or setting up a server.

But there is a very high likelihood that that person has and/or uses a PC on a regular basis, either at home or at school, or at work, and that that PC is not running Linux.

It is also highly likely that that person would struggle greatly with a Linux machine and would give up in frustration before becoming sufficiently proficient to use it.

But I have better things to do than to keep going down this rabbit hole, so I'm bowing out and you can have the last word, regardless of whether or not I have any issue with it.

 

...you can have the last word...

Mighty generous of you. Unfortunately, I cannot quickly dig up recent numbers, but in 2015:



This supports my original assertion that:

That's a funny thing to say about the single most popular OS kernel on earth -- including in consumer devices.

 

Mighty generous of you. Unfortunately, I cannot quickly dig up recent numbers, but in 2015:

View attachment 321102

This supports my original assertion that:

Odd how the man who doubts news ends up quoting news.

 

Mobile devices are 2:1 over desktops for consumers (not business).

That kind of makes a mockery of your earlier claim:

Consumers don't use desktops anymore.

So, do they or don't they? because if it were true, then 2*0 = 0.

 

Mobile devices are 2:1 over desktops for consumers (not business).

Android is nearly 3:1 over iOS in the mobile device space (MS does not have a position).

Android is Linux (kernel), with a pretty open source wrapper on top.

Aside from that, Linux has won over almost every appliance that is not a PC, including your car.

Linux runs 500 of the top 500 supercomputers, and a large majority of websites, routers, and servers of every kind.

The competitor survives on the desktop only through inertia and marketing (and -- unfortunately -- gaming).

Your step-mom can run Linux: my close-to-centenarian mom uses it on her desktop and laptop. She now hates Windows, and would never consider going back.

Yes there are all sorts of statistics you can find but none of that counters the facts I gave you earlier about Linux, it is a poor clone hacked together in a free for all mish mash of ideas and concepts. It was never designed and never specified. It is useless as a desktop OS or gaming OS, it is fragile, needing tweak after tweak and update after update to get stability.

The perceived popularity of Linux along with its use in fringe scenarios like supercomputers is not attributable to any technical merits but simply to the fact that nobody cares to invest in a proper modern operating system design. Only one company has truly designed a new operating system in the past thirty five years and that is Microsoft under the leadership of Dave Cutler.

Everything else is a clone or rehash of Unix in one way or another, with the same old tired concepts it trumpets, no engineering prowess involved. That list includes

1. Linux
2. Mach
3. NEXTStep
4. AIX
5. SunOS
6. Solaris,
7. MacOS
8. Android

and on and on the list goes.

I'm not sure either what wonderful original ideas Unix/Linux actually brings to the table, it did not innovate at all from what I have seen, all of these concepts predate Unix:

1. Virtual memory
2. Hierarchical file systems
3. Multitasking
4. Shared memory
5. Interactive command line interface
6. Dynamic linking
7. Multiprocessors
8. Security based design
9. Online documentation

All of this and more had already been designed and used in real operating systems, Unix brought almost nothing more and Linux has brought nothing either, it is the emperor's new clothes - but people LOVE "free" stuff, that is all that matters to some.

Now, here are some remarks from Torvald himself:



and



This stuff is easily found but you must take off your blinkers, if you don't want to find the bad news, don't want to find the problems then you never will find them and it will take others to bring them to your attention. As for "popularity" don't forget that smoking used to be popular.

 

Linux, that totally unreliable and badly designed OS.