this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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I have a feeling there will be a critical threshold crossed that will explode Linux's popularity and install numbers and I think we're getting close to that point now.
Just in time for the Rust debate to kill its momentum development wise! (/s, likely)
I'm unfamiliar with the "Rust" situation, has something gotten crusty or something?
Long time "old-school" kernel maintainers don't know Rust and don't want to learn Rust (completely fair and reasonable). But some of them don't want to work with the Rust guys for lots'o'technical reasons.
It's by far not an easy situation technically. Like this is a huge challenge.
But some of those old-school C guys are being vocal about their dislike of Rust in the kernel and gatekeeping the process. This came to a head at a recent conference (Linux Plumbers Conference?) and now one of the Rust maintainers has quit.
The big technical challenge is being confounded by professional opinions.
Yea, so mainly one situation that isn't explained here. Is that the moment you introduce a different language besides C, you now need to talk between C and this other language. This is called language bindings.
The problem with this, is the moment something is changing in C, and this method or interface is used by some Rust code, the Rust binding to C or C to Rust binding is failing, cause all kinds of issues.
Long story short, is that by introducing this additional language you created this technical issue of language bindings. And people who just want to work with C code, now suddenly also need to think about Rust bindings, while they previously didn't need to think about that. As if the Linux kernel isn't complicated enough, introducing this language binding issue is cause more (unwanted) work for some people.
In the end the "C" people are blaming Rust if something fails. And the "Rust" people are trying to explain and help the "C" people to introduce those bindings. waaaahhhh
It's not about the bindings. It's, as always with kernel devs, about gatekeeping and unprofessional if not outwardly hostile behavior.
Maintaining bindings is a hard problem for sure, but no hard problems have ever been solved by the key stakeholders refusing to partake in honest discussions. Asahi Lina's breakdown of her rejected contributions to the fundamentally flawed
drm_sched, which do not involve a single byte of Rust, demonstrates an unwillingness to collaborate that goes much further than the sealioning about muh bindings.The un along with other governments are requiring all software including open source to be validated by a 3rd party security audit, C is notorious for its memory leaks and so switching to Rust is almost legally mandated but C is the foundation of modern society and switching will literally require rewriting linux from the ground up since Rust didn’t exist when it was made needles to say developers are not happy having to essentially learn a new language and start from scratch only harder because they can’t change anything they just need to rewrite it in another language and get nothing in return but happy bureaucrats as happy as bureaucrats can be anyway.
Is that one sentence?
Yea that whole Rust drama is a pain. Linus unfortunately brought this upon himself. I believe he is also the guy that can fix it be either: Let's remove Rust from the kernel again or... Saying: Just deal with it, we also support Rust, but Rust isn't mandatory.
And in the latter, he also need to think about Rust FFI bindings to C.. But I digress now. I don't want to discuss this here.
He can focus on solving the technical problems. Like have a list of things that has to be done in order for people to be happy with it. Missing feature? Starting guide? Limit what features can be used? C to Rust converter? He does not have to solve it alone, like he did with git. He just need to decide the direction.
I think that point either was steam deck or will be steam os 2.0
The current steam OS version is 3.6
I think that's wishful thinking. The vast majority of people simply don't give a shit. While the enshittification of Windows continues, Linux numbers will slowly go up. But I'll be quite surprised if I see it go over some significant margin like, say, 25% during my lifetime.
Back when it was creeping up to 3% i said its probably 5% and i still hope its that because we are getting really close to global 5%. The other thing is it should probably overtake unknown because then you can really call it the third most popular option without some old windows versions getting in the way.
I don't think so. At this point Linux isn't really held back by software availability - 90% of things are web based now and games apparently work pretty well (certainly better than on Mac).
The main issue is hardware support and driver quality. Especially on laptops, if you install Linux you're really rolling the dice on whether or not you'll get something that works.
Someone always replies to comments like these with "it works for me!" which is not really relevant when it has to work for everyone.
For a while at work I was in the Linux slack channel even when I was using a Mac, just to follow the amusing problems people had (and they had a lot!).
Then I moved jobs and have a Linux laptop... I get to experience it first hand. Hard reboot when it runs out of RAM, or 20% or the time when you undock it. Doesn't work at 60Hz/4K on some work monitors but only if you are using HDMI. The exact same laptop model & OS works for other people. Battery life is hilarious. I don't think I've ever got over 2 hours.
I have a lot of experience with Windows and some with Linux.
The driver problems with Laptops are not only on Linux, though it is a lot more common, depending on the manufacturer Windows also has a ton of problems if you don't want to use the 8 year old pre-installed driver that was never updated.
And Linux is held back by (proprietary) software availability as well. Most of the time it would be Microsoft Office (a lot of people I know complain about alternatives like Google Docs or Libre Office not being up to par by a long shot). Another big thing is Games. Sure, most of them work quite well out of the box, but if they do not it would be beyond most of my friend groups skills to fix it. Not to mention the massive library of competitive games that some people play exclusively that just don't work at all.
even touchpad support on Linux is hit or miss, but steadily seems to improve.
Next year will likely explode.
There are those of us who think windows 10 is passable, have used it for many years, and were never planning on switching to Linux because we're normies.
Windows 11 changes that, and when security updates for Win10 end in 2025, I'm switching to Linux.