A Stable Linux Kernel API/ABI? "The Most Insane Proposal" For Linux Development

[rabcor]

I don't see how this would solve anything, I mean I don't particularly have anything against it but... like... not worth the trouble.

What Linux needs, and needs the most is binary compatibility across all general purpose distros and a unified packaging format that takes into account the possibilty of differences between distros (such as the init system, e.g. systemd or rc.d or something else, grub or syslinux or something else, and other things that may be important to the way a program behaves) and gives all developers who want to develop for this format guidelines to support everything and do it right, and distro devs a method to support it.

The biggest problem with linux is that a program you can install on ubuntu from the package tree, you might need to manually compile on fedora or arch or whatever the hell else you're using.

There will always be specialized exception distros (like gentoo where you compile everything automatically) or specific purpose distros (like firewalls and server distros and whatnot) that may not support the common package format, but all general purpose distros need this, and this would also open up for the possibility for developers to uploada package file the same way they would a setup file for other operating systems online that most users will be able to download and install without problems no matter what distro they are on. Yes I know the problems associated with this method of installation (including viruses, viruses and viruses) but it's time for us linux motherfuckers to face the truth; the average end user wants to have this option. And lets also look into our own hearts and see that we want this option too (unless we have compiled stuff from git by hand so many times on so many distros that it will never slow you down or pose a problem to your general use, but then you're an expert, not everyone is an expert; but even if you have, what if somebody is using SVN or Sourceforge or something else entirely? Oops? Sit for a few hours to install one program and dig up all it's dependencies? No thanks...)

Linux needs this, and without it nobody will ever take the linux desktop seriously, including myself (even if I do use it already as a desktop OS, I'm just honestly after about 4 years of use, not impressed at all by what I see.)

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

I'm just honestly after about 4 years of use, not impressed at all by what I see.)

Whereas I wholeheartedly agree with your point that Linux needs some consistency, I cannot possibly fathom why you would not be impressed. Personally, I made the switch and suddenly, everything was just... faster. More responsive. Heck, my own password manager (which I coded in C# .NET, so, it's actually technically Windows-native) is by now, with recent Mono updates, about 300% faster in Linux than it is in Windows. Which actually is no joke. Immediately after I made the switch, it was about 25% faster but then some Mono updates came along... and boom, it went into hyperdrive.

[Rubble Monkey]

Yes, but one is moving it out of kernel-space the other is moving it out of the kernel sources.

Ohh! I thought that he meant COMPLETELY out of the kernel! Sorry 'bout that.

[rabcor]

Whereas I wholeheartedly agree with your point that Linux needs some consistency, I cannot possibly fathom why you would not be impressed. Personally, I made the switch and suddenly, everything was just... faster. More responsive. Heck, my own password manager (which I coded in C# .NET, so, it's actually technically Windows-native) is by now, with recent Mono updates, about 300% faster in Linux than it is in Windows. Which actually is no joke. Immediately after I made the switch, it was about 25% faster but then some Mono updates came along... and boom, it went into hyperdrive.

To each their own on that I guess, but when did you switch, and from what to what? (e.g. windows xp to ubuntu or windows 7 to fedora or what?) also you sound like you're chiefly a developer, I'm just as much developer as I am consumer (or prosumer even).

As a developer I was neither impressed nor unimpressed, I'd used Visual Studio and liked it, I didn't particularly miss it when I went to Linux either, but the learning curve for developing on linux has been uncomfortably steep. I 'm okay with that but I imagine many are not.

As a consumer I was just genuinely unimpressed. By everything, my KDE experiences were slower than my Windows 7 experiences, (and I mean Aero is locked to 30FPS while kdes compositor is not... I guess it's the simpler and lighter effects that count) they were also far buggier, and on everything that wasn't KDE while they might have been slightly faster or slightly slower than on windows 7 (never noticably faster, but file managers have ALWAYS been slower and less feature complete than the Windows 7 explorer, all the ones I've tried. This is how I perceive them it might not be how you percieve them but I think they are unreasonably slow at opening folders with large collections of files, slow at thumbnail generation and slow at searches in general compared to the windows 7 explorer... And people often mock the Windows 7 explorer, I know... But whenever I go outside it I tend to be disappointed) but all had one thing in common; they were more buggy or less feature complete than the windows 7 desktop shell/explorer combo, no matter what I turned to (I didn't turn to GNOME or Unity though, but I just genuinely hate their user interfaces and they are definitely not as feature complete as the windows desktop shell, as can be seen by their appalling lack of buttons, appalling to me, nice to someone I bet, such is the beauty of choice...)

This is how I've been unimpressed, mostly. The desktop environments were ALL letdowns, except maybe Enlightenment 17+ but the thing about that one is that it's unstable, alpha, buggy and it's file manager is also just as much of a letdown as all the others. But the shell itself is awesome, light, fast and beautiful, everything I ever wanted really.... Basically the only thing in Linux that has impressed me as a consumer was the E17 desktop shell... Not many things. Alsa is ok, like... no comment, pulseaudio makes me want to throw up (and I can't fathom why it is in such widespread use when you can get everything it provides with much better quality through alsa with just a few plugins... everything that matters to the average user anyways, Pulseaudio I only see as valuable for streaming sound over network, although I've never actually used it for that purpose myself), the best video player I've found is bomi and it's only almost on-par with what I use on windows (mpc with k-lite codecs), and it's not in devleopment anymore (hell, it only ever had one active developer too, one active developer could do better than teams of developers on other players... I am disappoint!) I still use it though because it's the ONLY one with a proper upscaling algorithm option (Lanzcos in this case) and that matters to me a lot.

I'm unimpressed by the music players, all the big fat popular ones I've tried like banshee or amarok have been sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo w and also usually not to my liking anyways since I'm one of these weirdos that sorts their music library manually via folders rather than through some software library bullshit. I use Audacious and this is the one I like most, simple and clean, but not really a better or worse experience than on Windows, not that I expected it.

Steam performance is shit and it's buggy, ew...

The best digital painting application I've found is Krita. Again like just about everything else that isn't small and lightweight, it is S.L.O.W. (luckily this is being worked on in more ways than one, and I have a lot of faith in the Krita dev team but... I am indeed waiting) to it's credit though the ones on Windows while faster for most basic tasks aren't much faster for high resolution work including corel painter and photoshop (photoshop scores highest out of the popular ones in this area I guess...)

I haven't found any web browser that's faster than google chrome (as much as I desire such a thing) this isn't on windows either so... either way.

Networking has been hell (especially wireless, oh the horror!!!)
File sharing has been hell
Printer support has been a total disgrace, cups sucks ass
Sound Card support has been hell (except for integrated ones)

Need I go on about the disappointments I've had on Linux?

But I live with them, because it's the least of 3 evils (other two being OS X and Windows; OS X is just a piece of crap operating system from head to toe and Windows while not a bad operating system was created by our evil corporate overlords; Microsoft which are now without any shred of doubt selling all data of all users on Windows 10 to anyone who comes knocking on their door, which probably mostly includes the NSA and FBI, and this I wouldn't care about if I lived in the USA probably, but I don't, and I don't want some fucking stupid US agencies knowing anything they don't need to about me, even if I may not have a single thing to hide from them... It just doesn't feel right! Which leaves us with Linux, better user experience for me than OS X, lesser than on Windows, but at least I don't feel compromised like I do on Windows thus... Linux is my choice, I don't have any perfect OS to choose, there does not exist an operating system I am satisfied with, I'm hoping that one day soon Linux will become that, but today it is very far from it and expecting that to change is foolish, yet very many people since the early 90s are still waiting...)

I will admit though that as a developer, I've been impressed by the customizability of linux, as a consumer completely unimpressed by it, why? Because the customization levels achievable by your regular every day end user are not much higher than on Windows. But for developers the options are only limited to the time they are ready to invest in it... Which is why I'm seriously considering just writing my own damn environment to my own damn standards so I can at least be happy with something!! And my biggest disappointment is that I actually have to go so far to be even remotely happy with Linux.

Don't get me wrong, Linux is the first OS I recommend to anyone and everyone, but I can never recommend it without warning. Just as I can never recommend Windows without warning, and never in good conscience recommend OS X to any living organism... Turtles and snails would lament OS X's slow performance on basically everything it can do. And of course it's inability to do all the things it can't that Linux and Windows can. Every phoronix reader should know how I can say such bad things about OS X... I mean you've seen the benchmarks.

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

To each their own on that I guess, but when did you switch, and from what to what? (e.g. windows xp to ubuntu or windows 7 to fedora or what?) also you sound like you're chiefly a developer, I'm just as much developer as I am consumer (or prosumer even).

Actually, I'm primarily a gamer with the intent to start streaming soon. The software development is essentially just a hobby that I put to effective personal use.

To answer your question, I switched from Windows (8.1 at that time) to Ubuntu first and then to Xubuntu. Base Ubuntu wasn't impressive by any means indeed but Xubuntu I'm liking a lot. It's fast, snappy, easy on the eyes.

Pulseaudio

Pulseaudio isn't brilliant but, well, it does offer something ALSA does not offer by itself -- software mixing. I don't mind Pulseaudio too much myself but I can see what people have against it and I do acknowledge their points, all mostly valid.

video player
music players

Video: VLC, as I had been using on Windows for years and simply ended up continuing to use.
Audacious with its tray plugin and, it's almost all I could ask for really.

Steam performance is shit and it's buggy, ew...

Yeah, roll on Wine there indeed. I never use the Linux-native version of Steam, only ever the Windows-native version via Wine.

The best digital painting application I've found is Krita

GIMP actually can be quite powerful but its interface is a monstrosity. Painting/Photo editing definitely is one area where Windows still has Linux beat by a wide margin. Luckily for me, I was shit with Photoshop so, I don't mind much. Not everyone has those skills.

Networking has been hell (especially wireless, oh the horror!!!)

Odd. Personally, I'm going to have to go with the opposite; everything's working better and faster for me in Linux, on that front. On this particular PC I am using now, well, good luck trying to get it online with a Windows version older than 8. It's not happening. And it's not even all that modern or all that exotic. In Linux, I'm actually able to fully use the 200/200 Mbit connection I have. In Windows, there was always some overhead of Windows itself, of the obligatory AV (best thing about moving to Linux, who the f- needs an AV?), etc.

File sharing has been hell

Can't really comment nor do I want to other than stating I'm not all that much into home networks. Anything that is network can be accessed, I'd rather limit access as much as possible.

Printer support has been a total disgrace, cups sucks ass

Hooked up my HP Laserjet 1022 and, done, working. But, well, I can see how people dislike cups.

Sound Card support has been hell (except for integrated ones)

Even though I can't really comment on the soundcards, I will say this with regards to hardware -- fan control. Fan control is the one thing beyond all others that I dislike about Linux. In my other PC I have a discrete GPU (so, not an integrated one) and indeed, it performs worse than I'd have expected. FPS-wise it's fine but, damned, that f-ed up fan control. It used to be that even just booting that PC into Linux would end up with that fan soaring to 100%. That improved with recent kernels but still, any kind of load and, baam, the noise! Yeah, that needs to be worked on indeed.

But I live with them, because it's the least of 3 evils

Windows -- Was a great fan of it for years. In the 90s it wasn't all that great but, well, it was basically the only viable thing available to us. Windows XP? Almost the best OS ever made. Windows 7? Possibly the best OS ever made. But then Microsoft went bi-polar on us. "Let's remove the Start Menu... let's put it back in... let's remove... some of it... let's... let's... let's force this new version of Windows on everyone so they'll love us even more!". Sorry, Microsoft, no can do. My wife's bi-polar, that is more than enough for this household.

I do respect their tendency of late to start embracing the open source concept and community. Much respect there even.

[anda_skoa]

Yeah, sorry if we don't settle with poor hardware and want to use bleeding-edge, hidg-end hardware. It's MY FAULT. This is the exact mentality why Linux will never succeed on the desktop.

I doubt that has any impact.
OSX supports way fewer hardware, yet seems to have no problem to succeed on the desktop.

Cheers,
_

[rabcor]

To answer your question, I switched from Windows (8.1 at that time) to Ubuntu first and then to Xubuntu. Base Ubuntu wasn't impressive by any means indeed but Xubuntu I'm liking a lot. It's fast, snappy, easy on the eyes.

Video: VLC, as I had been using on Windows for years and simply ended up continuing to use.
Audacious with its tray plugin and, it's almost all I could ask for really.

Yeah, roll on Wine there indeed. I never use the Linux-native version of Steam, only ever the Windows-native version via Wine.

GIMP actually can be quite powerful but its interface is a monstrosity. Painting/Photo editing definitely is one area where Windows still has Linux beat by a wide margin. Luckily for me, I was shit with Photoshop so, I don't mind much. Not everyone has those skills.

Can't really comment nor do I want to other than stating I'm not all that much into home networks. Anything that is network can be accessed, I'd rather limit access as much as possible.

Well, to answer these in a row: Your first impression was XFCE, mine was KDE; e.g. yours was fast and not too buggy, mine was slow and way too buggy. Shortly after I did switch to XFCE, but I wasn't impressed by it's speed or anything, it's speed was something I had always taken for granted on windows, I didn't notice the margin (I don't doubt) it's faster than windows by, I would if I had weaker hardware though (which is why I'm probably using it on my next setup since I only have a fucking pentium CPU in it even if the rest of my hardware is pretty decent) but the worst thing about it's xfce is it's lack of features compared to windows, the thing I missed the most was the start menu search, and (in thunar) explorer-like file search. Both are basically the same thing but the start menu search I only expect to show me programs, and many other environments have this (like cinnamon and uh kde) I have also found Thunar to be one of the only few file managers with acceptable speed (still slower than windows explorer though in my test cases, but faster at some things like opening itself up and whatnot)

Right now I think Cinnamon is probably the nicest DE for ex windows users (And Mint's popularity is a testament to others thinking the same) but I found it to be a tad bit too buggy and sometims noticed slowdowns, however it was all within a tolerable range (unlike KDE) thus I've been using it on fedora with the greatest amount of success I've had as a linux end user since I began, but I acknowledge that this was mostly because I was making things harder for myself by using gentoo and arch (which don't come with complete environments and there is a lot of room for user error) when I switched to fedora, I just wanted to for once get a complete out of the box OS experience, and I got it. But I'm probably going back to arch either way because I like it's rolling release model sooooo much.

But yeah, that's one of our differences I guess.

Wine; I've used it, I don't like it, I think the learning curve for using it is too steep and I think it's way way way waaay too unpredictable, like on someones computer a program may have worked perfectly, on yours your experience may be complete garbage, you can never know. And when this situation does crop up, the way to fix it is usually Wine configuration, which is nothing but a pain in the neck through and through! I hate that about Wine, so I avoid it almost like the plague, but I'm finding that I probably can't keep doing that by much longer.

GIMP I don't like because of it's terrible user interface which is the major reason why I don't use it, I think it's user interface is an act of terrorism, and so is it's default keybind scheme (their keybind scheme should have conformed with what everybody else is used to e.g. corel painter and photoshop, I mean the first thing everyone will notice is that deselect in photoshop is ctrl+d but in gimp it was something like ctrl+shift+a, I mean what the fuck?) Krita which is based on gimp has the same keybind problem but luckily that's the one that can be fixed by the end user, interface can't, but Krita has a sweet interface even if it might not be as good in the end for image editing, it is better for painting which is what I dominantly do in these kinds of programs (even if I also do image editing). As you can see I feel very strongly about GIMPs UI, if it gets fixed I will probably start using it in conjunction with Krita, but I just don't see it happening, and I'm not gonna learn to use the seemingly deliberately most unintuitive image editing application interface I have ever laid eyes upon. It's like they literally on purpose made the UI as different from everybody else as possible down to the bloody naming trends of functions. GIMP was one of the things that I was unimpressed with, Krita though did impress, but this was way after I started using Linux. I still don't know about an application that is focused on being an image editor that I like. Also I was extremely let down by Inkscape mostly because it's performance is the worst I've ever seen in any program ever... And I mean that including benchmarks that ran at 3fps... Inkscape might not have run so slow, it was just slowest application starting itself up I have ever seen and it was also slow at a bunch of things like loading and saving files and well... drawing.... and everything basically. I really wanted to like that one too I wanted to create icons and stuff with it.

As for networks, I just recently got into home networking, but what I was referring to is mostely the very basics of all basics about networking, which is connecting to a router in the first place (be that via wireless or wired) especially if you want to use static IP addresses. Now I won't deny that some distributions provide a gui frontend to make this a bit nicer, I haven't used many of these since I've mostly used arch (and btw I thought doing this via netctl actually worked out better than doing it via fedora's networking gui, I think it's just the same network manager ubuntu uses though, might be wrong, but it was S.H.I.T.... WPA_Supplicant is shit, cli or not, and all of it's front ends and yes I am including wicd are S.H.I.T...)

And for file sharing, SAMBA is a nightmare. However since the other day I decided to set up an actual NAS because I wanted all the benefits of Ext4 and none of NTFS on a windows machine which there is no way to effectively use the EXT4 filesystem on and NTFS is basically a broken FS unless you are on an SSD which sort of duct tapes it's broken pieces together, not very tightly but well at least it doesn't fragment anymore... And I found out that there were two options, BSD (freenas) but I am not exactly impressed by ZFS and openmediavault (Debian based) which allows me to use ext4. I looked these things up, saw someone was able to squeeze 700mbps out of openmediavault but only 500mbps on the same setup on freenas, so I was sold since performance is for me the #1 choice. Openmediavault setup was rather painless as long as you can figure out what to do post-installation which is not as painless but not complicated either (it's a matter of navigating through the web-ui and doing just the right things, like enabling smb and mounting the drives you want to share and whatnot; it wasn't hard just had to find where everything was and had to know that this was needed) and this time I was impressed that the default openmediavault samba configuration is indeed blazing fast and I am able to fully utilize the speed of my HDD it looks like, averaging on 105 M/s but I peaked at 125 M/s (which is the full speed of a gigabit connection...) my minimum requirement speed was 70 M/s and it passed that speed with flying colors when I was testing this out yesterday. This was my time to actually be impressed, but what bugs me is that when I tried to set up samba myself, I was getting like 3 M/s speeds over 100mbps connection (on openmediavault I got the full 12 M/s speed that this connector offers to begin with out of the box). So if you know what you're doing as an administrator, Linux can be great for networking, the best even, but for novices and beginners well... Networking (beyond the basic connection and router configuration) is a nightmare everywhere, not just linux. Just to be fair.

[abu_shawarib]

The problem won't stop at the kernel, the suffer continues through distributions shitty package api. Making binary anything for linux is major FPITA.

[nanonyme]

Actually, I'm primarily a gamer with the intent to start streaming soon. The software development is essentially just a hobby that I put to effective personal use.

To answer your question, I switched from Windows (8.1 at that time) to Ubuntu first and then to Xubuntu. Base Ubuntu wasn't impressive by any means indeed but Xubuntu I'm liking a lot. It's fast, snappy, easy on the eyes.

Pulseaudio isn't brilliant but, well, it does offer something ALSA does not offer by itself -- software mixing. I don't mind Pulseaudio too much myself but I can see what people have against it and I do acknowledge their points, all mostly valid.

Video: VLC, as I had been using on Windows for years and simply ended up continuing to use.
Audacious with its tray plugin and, it's almost all I could ask for really.

Yeah, roll on Wine there indeed. I never use the Linux-native version of Steam, only ever the Windows-native version via Wine.

GIMP actually can be quite powerful but its interface is a monstrosity. Painting/Photo editing definitely is one area where Windows still has Linux beat by a wide margin. Luckily for me, I was shit with Photoshop so, I don't mind much. Not everyone has those skills.

Odd. Personally, I'm going to have to go with the opposite; everything's working better and faster for me in Linux, on that front. On this particular PC I am using now, well, good luck trying to get it online with a Windows version older than 8. It's not happening. And it's not even all that modern or all that exotic. In Linux, I'm actually able to fully use the 200/200 Mbit connection I have. In Windows, there was always some overhead of Windows itself, of the obligatory AV (best thing about moving to Linux, who the f- needs an AV?), etc.

Can't really comment nor do I want to other than stating I'm not all that much into home networks. Anything that is network can be accessed, I'd rather limit access as much as possible.

Hooked up my HP Laserjet 1022 and, done, working. But, well, I can see how people dislike cups.

Even though I can't really comment on the soundcards, I will say this with regards to hardware -- fan control. Fan control is the one thing beyond all others that I dislike about Linux. In my other PC I have a discrete GPU (so, not an integrated one) and indeed, it performs worse than I'd have expected. FPS-wise it's fine but, damned, that f-ed up fan control. It used to be that even just booting that PC into Linux would end up with that fan soaring to 100%. That improved with recent kernels but still, any kind of load and, baam, the noise! Yeah, that needs to be worked on indeed.


Windows -- Was a great fan of it for years. In the 90s it wasn't all that great but, well, it was basically the only viable thing available to us. Windows XP? Almost the best OS ever made. Windows 7? Possibly the best OS ever made. But then Microsoft went bi-polar on us. "Let's remove the Start Menu... let's put it back in... let's remove... some of it... let's... let's... let's force this new version of Windows on everyone so they'll love us even more!". Sorry, Microsoft, no can do. My wife's bi-polar, that is more than enough for this household.

I do respect their tendency of late to start embracing the open source concept and community. Much respect there even.

Well, ALSA did have dmix...

[duby229]

The problem won't stop at the kernel, the suffer continues through distributions shitty package api. Making binary anything for linux is major FPITA.

That's a joke... Considering there must be at least 100 distributions that do it every single day, it isn't very funny either.