When hackers abandon the KISS method, you know shiat is starting to hit the fan

This is a monolithic problem.

Much like the average Linux user.

I think there may need to come a time for a general reaping of features in the kernel. Linux shouldn't have two different sound frameworks, five different schedulers, three different ways of stacking filesystems, two different cryptography frameworks, three different ways of managing /dev, two ways of doing file change notification, and so on...

Throughout the history of Linux, people have come in and added new major features. Take sound frameworks - the kernel has support for both ALSA and OSS, as well as some old one-off stuff from the mid-90s. Why? When ALSA came along, they should have (IMHO) deprecated OSS, and ripped it out completely after a year or so. So much of the complexity of Linux is because there's sometimes five or six different features serving the exact same purpose but doing it differently.

I get having different process scheduling algorithms - the scheduling needs of a server are different than that of a desktop. I don't get why there's six different ways of managing /dev.

Early User Space is another good example - inirtd and initramfs. Everyone is switching to initramfs, but initrd will be supported until the heat death of the universe. It shouldn't be. They serve the same purpose, and initrd, AFAIK, doesn't offer any advantages over initramfs, so drop the older one after a release cycle.

Keeping features around forever, especially when essentially everyone has picked exactly one to be the standard, results in massive problems for the size of the kernel. In the modern kernel's history (say, since 2.2.0 or 2.4.0), has a major feature that is older ever been removed? Or even deprecated?

(There's also a lot of things implemented in the kernel that should be in user space, but I digress.)

"Now there's lih-nux or lie-nux,
I don't know how you say it,
or how you install it, or use it, or play it,
or where you download it, or what programs run,
but lih-nux, or lie-nux, don't look like much fun.

However you say it, it's getting great press,
though how it survives is anyone's guess,
If you ask me, it's a great big mess,
for elitist, nerdy shmucks.

"It's free!" they say, if you can get it to run,
the Geeks say, "Hey, that's half the fun!"
Yeah, but I got a girlfriend, and things to get done,
the Linux OS SUCKS.
(I'm sorry to say it, but it does.)"

~Every OS Sucks

/some less than others
//just having fun

Two more general points about Linux on the desktop:

* Everyone seems to hate GNOME 3. I think that it's about time the Free Software movement stopped emulating Windows and started actually innovating. Once I got the hang of it, I have to say GNOME 3 is the best desktop experience I've ever had. Yeah, it's different from everything else - it's not mimicking systems that came out in 1984 and 1995; it's actually trying to do the right thing.

* People who write open source software really need to get better and naming things. The most popular image manipulation program is called The GIMP. Anyone who's seen Pulp Fiction or, I don't know speaks English, motherfarker would think that's a stupid and potentially offensive name for a piece of software. What's worse is Gigolo, installed by default on several Linux distributions. It automounts filesystems. It's also named after male prostitutes. Anyone who installs a Linux-based operating system and starts looking at the installed software and sees "GIMP" and "Gigolo" and "Brain fark Scheduler" there...they're not going to take that system seriously, regardless of their technical merits.

(Okay, not technically about the Linux kernel, except for the Brain fark Scheduler part. Sorry.)

ProfessorOhki: Lord Dimwit: * People who write open source software really need to get better and naming things. The most popular image manipulation program is called The GIMP. Anyone who's seen Pulp Fiction or, I don't know speaks English, motherfarker would think that's a stupid and potentially offensive name for a piece of software. What's worse is Gigolo, installed by default on several Linux distributions. It automounts filesystems. It's also named after male prostitutes. Anyone who installs a Linux-based operating system and starts looking at the installed software and sees "GIMP" and "Gigolo" and "Brain fark Scheduler" there...they're not going to take that system seriously, regardless of their technical merits.

I don't know. Slightly unprofessional nomenclature isn't completely uncommon in the programming world. Though, some just overdo it: https://love2d.org/wiki/Category:Libraries

/no hyperlink because Fark is being a jerk.

I think "gimp" and "gigolo" are a bit worse than "LOVE" and "LUBE". :)

MrEricSir: Lord Dimwit: * People who write open source software really need to get better and naming things. The most popular image manipulation program is called The GIMP. Anyone who's seen Pulp Fiction or, I don't know speaks English, motherfarker would think that's a stupid and potentially offensive name for a piece of software. What's worse is Gigolo, installed by default on several Linux distributions. It automounts filesystems. It's also named after male prostitutes. Anyone who installs a Linux-based operating system and starts looking at the installed software and sees "GIMP" and "Gigolo" and "Brain fark Scheduler" there...they're not going to take that system seriously, regardless of their technical merits.

If you're dumb enough to judge a book by the cover, you're too dumb to run Linux in the first place. So there's no problem, really.

Also, people who write open source software need to get better about calling their users dumb.

jonny_q: No. Gnome 3 sucks. It may eventually have enough available extensions to be possibly configured to suck less, but it sucks. Unity is better than Gnome 3 and Unity sucks too.

It's about time the Free Software movement stop trying to be all "we're not Windows" and get over its fear of mimicking the features of Windows and Mac that work. If they want to innovate on top of that, then fine. But start with what is known to work and work well, and improve on that. Lately the only "innovation" I've seen can be summarized as "hey, let's remove as many useful options as possible" and "ooh, look, all the buttons are on the left now".

/my KDE taskbar looks almost identical to my windows 7 taskbar and it's awesome and it works.

Exactly. Add on top of the structure of the GUI that has worked for decades.

And then let people add/remove the non-standard features.

The first thing I do when installing Windows, it strip it down to the Windows classic theme. I don't want toolbars, app lists that look like a mobile phone, transparent windows. I don't like shiny things.

But then, sure, I'm all into some of the actually helpful new features. The Windows 7 "search everything" box in the Start menu is awesome.

Also, if you want to convert people... you need to mimic what they're used to. Out of muscle memory (using Windows since 1992)... I find it impossible to use a Mac or Linux. And if I can work very, very quickly... I get frustrated.

What more can you add? Serious question...

Why doesn't someone come out with a GUI that is almost exactly like Windows?

I'd almost certainly install Linux for my 70 year old father. All he does is email, surf the web, download music. I'd love the added security do I don't have to keep re-installing Windows every year because its riddled with viruses.

linuxpyro: downstairs: Why doesn't someone come out with a GUI that is almost exactly like Windows?

They did.

Wow, thanks. I'll check that out. I searched for something like this years ago and found nothing close.

Yaxe: Vista was 23 million lines of code iirc.

Linux has a looooooong way to go.

Vista includes a windowing system and a ton of applications; Linux is just a kernel. I bet when you add in X.org, a comparable desktop environment, all the userspace daemons that make things work (power management, logging, and so on), you're probably added another 1 or 2 million lines of code. And I bet if you took out drivers from both systems, they'd be really close.

linuxpyro: No problem, although personally I'm not sure I'd go for that myself. If you're going to introduce someone like that to a GNU/Linux distro, keep in mind that they're switching operating systems and that making things look more like XP won't magically make them all the same. Not that your dad will notice all that, but you might just check out a Gnome/KDE type distro (maybe Mint) first, and just go with the normal install of that. (Try it in a VM if you're curious.) That said, I haven't used XPde myself, and it might be pretty neat. At any rate it shouldn't be too hard to get it going on some distro (I don't know if anything includes it standard).

Yeah, I guess in the end as long as I can put shortcuts on the desktop... he's not really going to touch anything else.

downstairs: Why doesn't someone come out with a GUI that is almost exactly like Windows?

I'd almost certainly install Linux for my 70 year old father. All he does is email, surf the web, download music. I'd love the added security do I don't have to keep re-installing Windows every year because its riddled with viruses.

I already went that route with my folks, for the same reasons. No complaints so far.
Kubuntu works very well for them once I've set up shortcuts and whatnot. In fact I'm thinking about ditching my current distro for Kubuntu as well.
I also installed TeamViewer which makes dealing with any problems a breeze (mostly just stuff they can't find on their own).