this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by Tekkip20@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I've tried using my incredible (british) brain using Google to see if these open source titans ever engaged in a battle of "friendly conversation" with one another.

I was always interested what Stallman thought of the angry but smart finnish man who gave us the robust penguin kernel that breathes life into older machines and powers supercomputers for the weather.

The same with Torvalds thoughts on Stallmans GNU involvement and him as a person.

This is because you sometimes had different organisations in the FOSS and OSS community that take on different meanings so I wanted a better idea if these chaps ever spoke in an interview together.

TLDR : Does finnish man like bearded GNU jesus man and the same vice versa

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[–] myrrh@ttrpg.network 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

...i'm absolutely ignorant of its current state, but every time i've checked in on progress of GNU/hurd over the past three decades, it still hasn't matured into a stable production-ready platform: i'm not sure if that's an artifact of technical viability or developer interest...

[–] Octorine@midwest.social 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Both, I think.

It's built in top of Mach, which has some architectural issues that aren't fixable without a huge amount of work.

And no one's interested in doing that work because we already have Linux and Linux is fine.

There have been a couple of pretty good post mortems over the years. I think one of them is on gnu.org somewhere.

[–] myrrh@ttrpg.network 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

...NeXTstep was built on mach and, although i'm unsure if any antecedents remain in macOS, it was certainly production-ready in its day; i remember a couple of decades ago there were stopgap versions of the HURD built on top of mach instead of their own microkernel but i thought that was only ever intended as a temporary workaround...

...i presume on that basis that sustained developer interest was its greatest hurdle, no pun intended...

edit: ...is this the post-mortem you mentioned?..

[–] Octorine@midwest.social 3 points 4 months ago

I haven't seen that paper before. The ones I remember were blogposts or web pages. In fact, this may be what I was remembering: https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq.html Particularly the part about what happened with the port to different microkernels.

IIRC NeXT and OSX use Mach, but they don't use it as intended. I think they're mostly a BSD kernel with Mach functioning as an interface to userspace.

Hurd actually used Mach as a microkernel, and moved most functionality to userspace daemons. This meant that Mach's performance issues,, at least the ones related to IPC, affected the Hurd a lot more than OSX or NeXT.

And yeah, I think developer interest was the biggest thing that held it back.

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