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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Thoughts on this? (futurology.today)

submitted 10 months ago by dd56 to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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[–] dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

TL;DR: the author needs to do a better job of citing sources and building an argument.

The author's argument from self-appointed authority tone aside, I dug into the only two verifiable pieces of evidence cited. These are almost impenetrable to the outsider, and even with plenty of coding experience behind me, I'm having to go deep to make sense of any of it. After all, sometimes, bugs and design decisions are the result of a best effort in the situation at hand and not necessarily evidence of negligence, incompetence, or bad architecture. There's also something to be said for organizing labor, focusing effort on what matters, and triaging the backlog.

The original author really needs to pony up a deeper digest of the project, with many more verifiable links to back up the various quality claims. If anyone is going to take this seriously, a proper postmortem is a better way to go. Cite the version reviewed, link to every flaw you can find, suggest ways to improve things, and keep it blameless. Instead, this reads like cherry picking two whole things on the public bug tracker and then making unsubstantiated claims that's a part of a bigger pattern.

My personal take on what was cited:

I'm grossly unqualified to assess this codebase as a Wayland or GUI programmer, but work plenty in the Linux space as a cloud practitioner and shell coder.
The first article smells like inadequate QA for cases like placing Wayland programs in the background, which is not typically done for GUI apps under normal usage (IMO).
The second article is a two-line change that I suppose highlights how ill-suited C is for this kind of software. Developer chatter on the MR suggests that the internal API could use some safeguards and sanity checks.
162 open issues, 259 closed, oldest still open is five years old. Not great, but not terrible.
None of this is particularly egregious, considering the age of the project and the use it enjoys today.

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