Ubuntu aims at healing Linux's 'paper cuts'

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a bit of perspective...

I put the hurt on LD because his post was flame bait; there has never, ever been, in computer history a case of an UNIX-like or a VMS-like OS that didn't require patching at one point or another.

Thing is, due to its UNIX roots, rewriting and patching the Linux kernel is easier to do than patching the NT kernel: due to the way Windows is written, where any application expects to be able to 'speak' with the kernel directly, changing anything in the kernel is very hard to do: Application Binary Interfaces have to be kept intact over the OS' life , so adding a new interface is often the only solution to improve some form of hardware support: modifying an ABI is tricky at best. So, most Windows versions have to support two, and up to half a dozen, concurrent ways to support a single hardware piece.

On the other hand, since Linux comes with its own drivers built-in and demands drivers to be re-built with any modification done, and at the same time doesn't allow applications to 'speak' to it directly, then improving some kind of hardware support can be done this way: tear out the old code, put a new one in place. Over the life of the 2.6 major kernel version, it was done twice for USB, once for Firewire, once for mass storage devices, once for x86 processors, twice for wi-fi support, four times for memory management, once for sound support...

And, barring very special cases, you can still run a decade old piece of software on a brand new kernel, or a very recent piece of software on a decade-old kernel version (the worst you may encounter would be a need to modify your init scripts to deal with some missing autodetection in older kernel version, or to deal with unknown device classes in more recent ones).

To make things short, while Windows requires its kernel to be constantly patched, adding layers upon layers of tricks, bypasses, hacks etc., Linux can be rewritten over the course of a couple years, and no user would be the wiser - apart that wi-fi would start working better, USB would detect and install devices faster, etc.

On the other hand, ever since it came out, Vista can't support DirectSound acceleration any more (sound acceleration requires a card-specific OpenAL driver) and wi-fi connections would drop unexpectedly and come back only when they're not moody any longer.

Posted by: Mitch 74   Posted on: 06/18/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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