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Operating Systems Upgrades Linux

Linux 3.11-rc7 Release Celebrates 22 Years of Linux 151

Posted by timothy from the now-that-is-an-elaborate-prank dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It was on this day 22 years ago when Linus Torvalds humbly announced Linux and today he played on that in announcing the Linux 3.11-rc7 kernel release. The final Linux 3.11 kernel release is expected in about one week."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Linux 3.11-rc7 Release Celebrates 22 Years of Linux More

Linux 3.11-rc7 Release Celebrates 22 Years of Linux

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  • The year of the linux desktop (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This year is the year!

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      3.11? How many years after Microsoft reached that milestone!

      And Linux 2015 doesn't seem like it'll be timely.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by donaldm ( 919619 )

        3.11? How many years after Microsoft reached that milestone!

        Microsoft never did reach that milestone although they did get to 3.1.1 (Windows for Workgroups) before they dumped it for a VMS wannabe. :)

        • Final WfW was Windows 3.11 [wikipedia.org]. Probably they thought that 3.1.1 would confuse people. Ironically, you are now confused.

      • and still most people would prefer windows 3.11 to linux.

    • The year Linux takes over the desktop is the year that they will stop selling desktops, which will be next year.

      • Oh, come on! By this year a low-power device running on mobile chips will get glued to your flat panel display and that will be running Linux and displace your desktop, or it will have the same form factor as your smartphone but dock on your desktop peripherals hub and do everything your desktop did. The desktop isn't going anywhere it is just going to shrink. That is what an iMac is really, only it will cost about $100 and replace your desktop box. This stuff is here now, it just has to grow in capacity a
    • Yes. Yes it is. It is also the year we are going to send a rocket to the moon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bmo ( 77928 )

      It's been "The Year of the Linux Desktop" for me since February 1998.

      What's your excuse?

      --
      BMO

  • Whoah whoah (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25, 2013 @11:40PM (#44674103)
    Linus was humble once?

    • Doesn't take much when you compare Linus to Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer, but he's always been a bit more down to earth than the rest of them.

      • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

        by lkernan ( 561783 )
        Nvidia probably disagree with you.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by kthreadd ( 1558445 )

          Compared to the way Jobs and Ballmer treat customers I much prefer Linus, even if he is a bit rude sometimes.

          • Re:Whoah whoah (Score:5, Funny)

            by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday August 26, 2013 @12:58AM (#44674389)

            He's just terse. Want him a bit more verbose, shoot a few "-v" his way.

            • What? He's already used up all the words in the English language, he's had to resort to Finnish to fill the gaps already: http://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/13/132

              • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

                by Opportunist ( 166417 )

                Gah, you geeks can't be satisfied, can you? First you complain about Linux being beta forever, now you complain that Linus Finnishes it...

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by RMingin ( 985478 )

                Awesome. My new thing I learned for today is "f***ing motherf***er" in Finnish! perkeleen vittupää!

                I'm going to memorize that for a while and then take a long nap, because my day has peaked before 12AM.

            • Re:Whoah whoah (Score:4, Funny)

              by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Monday August 26, 2013 @05:01AM (#44675123) Homepage Journal

              He's just terse. Want him a bit more verbose, shoot a few "-v" his way.

              Well, the Finnish equivalent of the F word would be the V word...

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by i ( 8254 )

                Vittu?

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by bmo ( 77928 )

                I thought the Finnish F-word was the P word. Perkele.

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=op68Gh3BVEc [youtube.com]

                --
                BMO

                • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

                  by You're All Wrong ( 573825 )
                  Fuck ~= vittu, literally cunt, from Swedish fitta

                  Perkele's harder to translate into English, being the name of an pagan god. So you'd probably want it to be something that offends Church of England sensibilities through blasphemy. I can't think of anything apart from "Hell!" that fits that description at the moment, but that's not really any good as the Finns have "Helvetti" for precisely that meaning. I'm not sure how much the Finns distinguish "perkele" from "saatana" = "satan". It's worth asking a Finn.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by bmo ( 77928 )

                    Fuck ~= vittu, literally cunt, from Swedish fitta

                    This ignores the versatility of the word "fuck" in English, which can be a verb, noun, adjective, and adverb all at the same time in the same sentence.

                    Perkele, I am told, is just as versatile.

                    --
                    BMO

                    • Fuck ~= vittu, literally cunt, from Swedish fitta

                      This ignores the versatility of the word "fuck" in English, which can be a verb, noun, adjective, and adverb all at the same time in the same sentence.

                      Perkele, I am told, is just as versatile.

                      vittuilla -- to fuck with someone
                      vituttaa -- to feel fucked up (originally meaning to crave for a fuck)
                      vittumainen -- a negative adjective, literally cunt-like

                      I can't think of verbifying perkele in any way. It's stronger than vittu, but far less versatile verbally.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by bmo ( 77928 )

                      Thank you for edifying me.

                      --
                      BMO

        • Re:Whoah whoah (Score:4, Interesting)

          by epyT-R ( 613989 ) on Monday August 26, 2013 @12:53AM (#44674375)

          Nothing wrong with direct, blunt communication.. It's refreshing compared with the passive aggressive kittycat games of typical government and corporate interaction. I think his blunt style is part of what keeps the kernel dev team clear of that passive aggression. It keeps the emos who can't handle blunt truth away.

          Nvidia got what they deserved, and it is clear to all other manufacturers what the kernel team thinks of closed drivers making debugging a royal pain.

          • Re:Whoah whoah (Score:4, Insightful)

            by kthreadd ( 1558445 ) on Monday August 26, 2013 @01:06AM (#44674437)

            Nothing wrong except that it may keep new contributors away. There's no fun in contributing to a project where the boss is an asshole.

            • Re:Whoah whoah (Score:4, Insightful)

              by epyT-R ( 613989 ) on Monday August 26, 2013 @01:42AM (#44674549)

              Except that it doesn't. It keeps thin skinned people away, who otherwise create needless drama.

              • That might very well be the case. All I can say is that the shortage of new contributors is a recurring topic. I don't know exactly why new people are more interested in contributing to other projects, but I have my theories.

                • Re:Whoah whoah (Score:5, Interesting)

                  by epyT-R ( 613989 ) on Monday August 26, 2013 @02:06AM (#44674621)

                  some possibilities:
                  1. kernel programming isn't something most people can do. not just linux, but in general.
                  2. the project is mostly stable at this point. 90% of the work is drivers anyway, and those are submitted by hw manufacturers for the most part.

                  It's not like he's constantly flying off the handle as claimed.. It happens occasionally, and for good reason. Broken code from senior people and/or closed drivers make a ton of extra work for the rest of them, so he's justified. Look at what happened to android. If he yields to political correctness, he then has to clean up the mess left behind by people who need a grilling they now won't receive. Choosing between not hurting feelings and/or keeping these people away, and getting the job done right isn't hard.

                  • "Damn the P.C.. Four Tweets ahead! Let the Fecal Matter hit the Rotary Impeller and where's my Clue Gun?"

                  • Choosing between not hurting feelings and/or keeping these people away, and getting the job done right isn't hard.

                    False dichotomy. You can get you point across without hurling chairs. It's called not being an asshole.

            • Re:Whoah whoah (Score:5, Informative)

              by higuita ( 129722 ) on Monday August 26, 2013 @05:48AM (#44675257) Homepage

              would you prefer to be ignored, with all your work and the patchs never getting merged and you didn't even knew why?

              That is the "correct and polite" way... but totally useless.

              And no, being polite and slowly trying to explain the errors will not work, too much people around, any manager will get tired of repeating the same thing over and over, and so getting more rude as time goes by.

              Please note that Linus is usually not rude for newbies, only for people that are around for sometime, specially for maintainers. Those should already know what is allowed or what is not and if maintainers, Linus already have some trust on then... if they fail that trust, Linus will be very direct.

              If you work with other top kernel developers (check the *BSD) you will see the same problem, with ones being more rude than others (ie: Theo de Raadt)

              If you are comparing with enterprise development, think again. Those can also be rude... but even if they are not, they are probably playing the ignore card, the faking/lying card or simple the "i can get you fired" card. And don't forget the "i'm the boss" card, where you don't even try to be a smartass and always do what you are being told.

              Finally, even if that attitude might scare some developers, at least have manage to keep the linux development together, there is no forks, so it isn't that much a problem.

            • The "contributors" that keep away from projects where they are expected to be competent and write code that is robust and works are exactly the kind of "contributors" we don't want. So, no. There is nothing wrong with it. If you want someone who will be nice to you when you write horrible code, go work at Micros ... oh wait.!

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Nothing wrong with direct, blunt communication..

            Fuck you.

  • Meanwhile (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by aliquis ( 678370 )

    Meanwhile Windows has gone from Windows 3.11 to 95, 98, __, 2K, XP, 2K3, _______, Windows 7 and finally Windows 8 and each and every time made huge progress!

    Linux? Same old login prompt!

    JK. At least my comment is better than the two first ones.

    • ME? Vista? do I get a prize? also, if linus had moved his ass a bit, he could have had an official release on the 22nd anniversary. that's what jobs would have done. maybe linus should have used some of that legendary whip-cracking management skill of his.

    • Meanwhile Windows has gone from Windows 3.11 to 95, 98, __, 2K, XP, 2K3, _______, Windows 7 and finally Windows 8 and each and every time made huge progress!

      Linux? Same old login prompt!

      JK. At least my comment is better than the two first ones.

      I think the picture will be slightly different if you only look at the NT kernel.
      Comparing kernels with kernels and so on.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by donaldm ( 919619 )

      Linux? Same old login prompt!

      Actually Unix from 1980 just called and would like it's FUD back.

  • I'm a believer. (Score:4, Funny)

    by tpstigers ( 1075021 ) on Monday August 26, 2013 @12:07AM (#44674207)
    Linux is the operating system of the people. This alone justifies its existence.

  • Where is the Workgroups support (Score:4, Funny)

    by jrumney ( 197329 ) on Monday August 26, 2013 @12:33AM (#44674305)

    I think its about time that Linux was adapted for Workgroups. How anyone could justify releasing version 3.11 without them this late in the game is something I just cannot fathom.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Hmm. Last time someone released a "For Workgroups" OS, IBM released OS/2 for Workgroups a month or two later and then killed the OS not too long after that. If we see an "AIX For Workgroups" anytime soon, the AIX team should start getting nervous.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      long done deal. just set "workgroup = workgroup" in your smb.conf and restart samba

    • Erm...
      http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/07/15/1530233/linux-311-officially-named-linux-for-workgroups

      See with your own eyes:
      https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Makefile

  • Humility (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26, 2013 @03:02AM (#44674801)

    It was 22 years ago today that Linus Torvalds last humbly announced anything.

  • Linus doesn't humbly announce anything (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Nor does he do anything else humbly. He's too busy trying to be the biggest asshole he can be to do anything humbly.

    • people who accomplish great things don't have to be humble.

      you're just jealous, you can't start nor manage such a hugely successful project for decades

  • Sometimes a version number is a version number and not an association of a long defunct product.

  • When I type uname -r on my Ubuntu install here it says kernel version 3.5.... what gives?

    • instead of going 3.09, 3.10, 3.11, the Linus chose to go 3.9, 3.10, 3.11

    • This is what "gives" [catb.org]. At least it gives you an idea how to ask a question so that we might possibly be able to answer it. Your question, as written, is a useless waste of everyone's time.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tom229 ( 1640685 )
        Come on Zero__Kelvin, don't be another angry guy. The world has enough of those.
        • It has nothing to do with being an angry guy. I gave you an opportunity to learn. You should take it. Seriously. Now I have spent even more of my time trying to answer your question, and you have continued to waste it. If you don't ask a question that makes sense, how do you ever expect to learn anything?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tom229 ( 1640685 )
            For a guy so concerned about his time, you seem rather eager to waste it :).

            Your link to a pedantic article on "how to ask a question" was not help. At best, it was an immature attempt at condescension. You are angry. Someone needs to give you a hug.

            Regardless, I did discover the source of the confusion. Not being a programmer I didn't realize that the decimal simply separated major and minor versions. Like all normal human beings would, I assumed it had some sort of correlation to fractions of real n
            • It isn't a pedantic article. It was written by an extremely well known Open Source developer named Eric Raymond. You clould learn a great deal from it. You seem to think you are quite privileged, and should never have to learn anything. "What gives" is a ridiculously stupid question. I can't even call it poorly thought out, since it wasn't thought out at all. Your ignorance isn't something the whole world should cater too, even if it made sense. e.g.:

              ". To avoid this ambuiguity I would suggest they sta

  • Linux will never reach year of the desktop! (Score:3)

    by xQuarkDS9x ( 646166 ) on Monday August 26, 2013 @02:22PM (#44679255)

    Linux will never reach year of the desktop even with this kernel release coming up. In a lot of ways Linux right now in various distro's such as Ubuntu and variants like it kind of remind me of the Windows 3.x and 95 days. You might have decent driver support for most hardware but come time to upgrading the kernel more often then not you break the official closed source nvidia drivers along with your nice GUI boot screen that usually hides all the normal boot messages from the kernel as it's loaded up until you see your fancy login screen. Same goes with the god awful support of AMD video support in Linux both with official and open source drivers and more often then not your network and ow wi-fi settings might be hosed or you may not even have the WI-FI driver needed and then it's a mad dash off to the official Ubuntu forums for help.

    And applications need to be improved too in some area's. There's really only one half assed decent CD/DVD/BR burning program and thats K3B that actually won't produce messed up unreadable discs. Wheras in Windows you have the excellent free CDBurnerXP or if you like bloatware "one does it all" package the commercial Nero Burning rom. Video players in Linux suck too when you don't have much choice been mplayer and it's front ends and VLC. Gnome Mplayer as a front-end example can't even jump to a specific point in hours, minutes, or seconds in a video if you want and won't allow you to save bookmarks.

    VLC on the other hand DOES allow you to jump to a specific time, but it sure as hell can't save bookmarks at any point in a video until you use a workaround of saving a bookmark into a playlist file, and not too mention that when playing audio files VLC will absolutely ignore embedded artwork in say Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files and by default will try and download cover art that's garbage in quality or completly wrong.

    When in comparison to windows xp/7/8 you have K-lite media codec pack and the great Media Player Classic HC (MPC-HC) that not only has more modern video renderers such as Haala and MadVR but can also use newer LAV audio/video decoders for much better picture and sound quality compared to VLC, and if you don't want to use LAV decoders you can use ffmpeg included with k-lite instead and STILL get better picture quality. Oh and also no problems playing DVD's either when even with restricted-extra's packages in Ubuntu and variants and some other stuff installed to play dvd's you still find the occasional DVD that will not play because of it's copy protection garbage.

    Image viewers and editors aren't much better. Irfanview and Xnview are great to use but all you have with Ubuntu is the newer XnviewMP (Multi-Platform) which is really the only decent image viewer on Linux these day's that isn't retarded. For editors sure you have GIMP on Windows, Linux ETC but Adobe Photoshop still has a fair amount of features that GIMP doesn't have. Audio players in Ubuntu suffer too when the only decent audio player is Audacious but in comparison to Foobar2000 on windows which does so much freaking more it's like night and day.

    Overall in a lot of ways windows has better apps in some areas or has more development in some area's towards audio and video quality in playback. It's just that for the most part a lot of people are dumbasses and don't take precautions of running ONLY Firefox as a browser with Adblock Plus, Noscript, Cookie Controller, Ghostery (or DoNotTrackMe if you prefer) and Socialfixer (to fix whats annoying as hell on facebook) and don't actually read each popup from an installer asking if you'd like to install "X toolbar" or "X program" and automatically default to YES until you click no or refuse to avoid getting malware and viruses and browser hijackers simply because people are too stupid to read and in a hurry to always click through every screen. That and people who still to this day launch attachments from emails.

    Linux is no better either these days with some newer malware packages showing up and with all those so called wonderful Linux help

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