Linus Announces the 2.6.25 Linux Kernel 181
LinuxWatch writes "'It's been long promised, but there it is now,' began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25 Linux kernel. He continued, 'special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before. That said, that was just the last particular regression fix I was holding things up for, and it's not like there weren't a lot of other fixes too, they just didn't end up being the final things that triggered my particular worries.' There were numerous changes in this revision of the OS. The origins of some of those fixes is detailed in Heise's brief history of this kernel update."
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:0, Insightful)
It's a kernel, not an OS (Score:5, Insightful)
"numerous changes in this revision of the OS"
Asking people to call it GNU/Linux [gnu.org] is one thing, but it's not much to ask Slashdot not to call a kernel changelog an OS changelog.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
And that has precisely what to do with the kernel? X is in user space. If you want to replace X with any other windowing system you like, just port it or write it. And when you've written something as powerful and stable as the X Window System, come back and tell us about it.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux devs are working their asses off in their parents basements, hacking and testing drivers for hardware that they don't have access to the interface specifications for. If things still look a little shakey, just remember to be glad that they work at all, given the hours of work for $0 return.
When you are done giving thanks, complain to your hardware manufacturer, who does make money from the deal, and does have the full specifications - AND for reasons unknown, have turned down the offer of OSS developers writing the drivers for them, for free [slashdot.org].
*See also: Canon
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:3, Insightful)
What you are asking for would add substantial complexity to the codebase. Right now things are simple because X messages are just that, messages; it doesn't matter if they're carried over TCP/IP or a Unix Domain Socket. That's a feature. As computers get more powerful, message passing becomes more commonplace for convenience's sake. There ARE other GUIs available for Unix, especially on Linux where there's a kernel gui package. Perhaps one of those solutions would better be suited to your needs?
We have that already. It's called GTK+ or Qt or WxWidgets. Why should they be directly in X?
My understanding is that this existed in both GNOME and KDE.
It seems to me like you're repeating a frequent and misguided call for overcomplication of X11, which is already quite complicated enough, thank you.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:3, Insightful)
I also agree with you on the sentiment of xdnd and cut and paste. As a user, I'm not seeing the problem. The only user issue I see is that the middle click paste sometimes confuses people, but I'd hate to see that go away. Nothing about that could be called an issue with the architecture regardless of the opinion.
X gets a lot of power from having abstractions that can be remote agnostic. I think the implementations have done a sufficient job of providing short-path optimizations for the local case without sacrificing the fundamental remote functionality. I think X's task of taking the network architecture and doing it locally fast has produced a smoother experience than the platforms that have had to do the opposite, and try to make their GUI cleanly remotely usable.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:1, Insightful)
You are yelling at him for something that is not true. He is not exactly using a company that is a microsoft shil either, HP.
The 0$ bit is why I am mostly understanding of what is going on. However for now Linux on this laptop is a non starter and will be for at least another 6-12 months. When I will re again evaluate the situation.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, most of us don't work on Linux to make money with it directly. We work on Linux because it's fun and it enables us to do what we want with a machine, rather than being told where to go today.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, for pity's sake. Throw all your engineering discipline out of the window (ha!) and fall back on gut feel. and superstition. The fact is that Linux (with X Windows) performs much better on the same hardware than either Windows or MacOS. Why is this? Until you've shown that X Windows is a significant cost, then you really don't have any argument beyond hand-waving.
I have this to add: I personally have been using the X Window system for eighteen years. I've used it on hardware which had an 8MHz - MHz, not GHz - processor. I've used it on hardware that had 8Mb - Mb, not Gb - of RAM. The X Window system performs perfectly well on that hardware spec. It's always outperformed every other windowing system on the same hardware, and it still does now.
Basic engineering tenet, known to all old engineers (but obviously not taught to young ones): if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:3, Insightful)
I certainly use it all the time. I'm at university, and the ability to pull up Emacs running on my box in my room from any of the Linux workstations around the university (or in my friends' rooms) is really useful.
Here's an example of how it saved my arse once. I'd been writing a report using LyX, and was at my department to hand it in. Just as I was about to, I noticed that the caption of one of the figures was totally wrong. I logged onto one of the department's workstations, fired up SSH, launched LyX, made the change, generated a PDF, SCP'd it to the local machine and printed it. Without remote X, that would have been an enormous hassle -- I'd have had to set up a VNC server or something (which might have involved installing packages). With remote X, it's a simple matter of ssh -X.
tl;dr version: you can tear remote X from my bleeding broken dead hands.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:3, Insightful)
You paid for Windows. You have a contractual relationship with the people who wrote it.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:4, Insightful)
That has to be the most absurd thing I've read in a long time. Either you're not a software developer, or you're an incredibly bad one. Either way, it's clear your opinions regarding X can probably be safely ignored.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why should we care whether you use Linux or not? Hint: Steve Jobs makes a lot of money if MacOS becomes popular. He's in it for the money and he's making lots of it. Good for him! Linus Torvalds makes a reasonable salary if Linux becomes popular, but he's a talented guy and he'd make a reasonable salary anyway. He's not in it for the money, he's in it for the fun.
When you buy a Mac, Steve Jobs gets more money. When you use Linux, Linus doesn't have more fun (if anything, with all your moaning and whinging, he'll have less).
Understand now? There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and Linus isn't obligated to make you one.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:2, Insightful)
Uhh, we already have. Actually something a lot more powerful and stable. That's precisely what this thread's about.
Apple? OSX? 3d acceleration??? (Score:3, Insightful)
If Apple cared about 3d acceleration in OS X, they'd put decent graphics cards into their computers.
They don't.
In fact they sell you graphics cards which are crap for 3d applications, compared to what is available.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are imho two problems with how X works:
First there is the ICCCM window manager design. This makes it absolutely impossible to have clean updates and resizes of windows because two asyncrhonous processes are updating different parts of the window. Programs that bypass the window manager, such as media players that do it to make windows without borders, work obviously faster and more smoothly, despite the fact that X is otherwise not changed. The real solution to this is to have the toolkits/libraries draw the window borders. Of course then you will run into the luddites who will scream that the user will be "confused" because all their window borders are not exactly the same color. But that is the correct solution, and users don't seem "confused" that buttons are being drawn by local libraies. If this is politically unacceptable, then solutions involving synchronization between the processess, primarily by letting the application call some code to redraw the borders and also having messages to indicate the desired size/position so the app can resize the window and immediately draw, may work. But that is much messier.
The second problem is synchronous calls to the xlib where the program has to wait for an answer (which the program often then throws away, but xlib had no idea it did not need to wait). The result is that latency gets turned into bandwidth. In fact we are fairly lucky that ipc was used because it's latency discouraged this design far more than the Win32 kernel api does, but not enough... I think a lot of this is being addressed with xcb replacing xlib.
Re:Wonderful. More Stable. ... So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also if you have done any work with talking to window managers or toolkits, you will probably notice that such api's have the annoying tendency to balloon into requiring far more code to talk to the interface than you would require to implement the widgets yourself. You don't want this mess locked into the basic design of your system, you want to be able to replace it when it gets too baroque to use.
Graphics are also a huge mess, but Cairo seems to be addressing this.