Hate to break it to you Linus but Linux has always been bloatware compared to every other OS, how many closed source OS do you know that have 4 or 6 cds/dvds??

If you think in lines of Slackware or even Ubuntu you know for a fact you can't simply use the system without downloading the proper software from the repositories.

This is not meant to bash Linux but fact is Linus has it the other way around!

1. Closed source = we as in for example microsoft tell you how to use you computer and you don't have any say at all + we take lots of money for it
2. Without any challenge to the big companies you be stuck with something like dos / win 3.1 today
3. Flash on linux sucks a bit, but thats because it's closed source. Non flash video on linux is almost flawless, much better than windows(default), heard about VLC for example, really popular on windows also, how can that be?

About kernel bloat, compared to linux windows is so bloated that I have no words. Example: Fresh Ubuntu after login 230mb ram used, fresh win7 without antivirus etc 1gb. Hell who is bloated?

My new Ubuntu 10.04 boots so fast that it leaves windows in the dust, 15-20sec (ready to use), thats a fantastic feature for a laptop!

The Linux/Windows skiff could go on, forever, without anybody changing anyone's mind. The truth is simple. Windows is a propriety operating system, written by a company that has used illegal practices to ensure that they are the majority operating system. However, Windows is programmed by a team with a single vision in mind. Linux is pieced together by a world-wide network of programmers of varying degrees of know how. The result is Windows being an operating system that flows smoothly, offering a work flow that is mostly stable. Linux is an increasingly unstable platform that offers alternatives to Windows-based programs - none of them as robust and as stable as those written for Windows. My point was well proven just now. As I write this on a Windows-based computer (without issue), my daughter (running Ubuntu) just called for my attention, because her Linux computer just froze up on her, while she was attempting to play a Flash game. Linux is a cute, hobbiest operating system that has great potential in the server room. Windows, however, is a polished OS that allows me to get my work done. I'd love to see Linux get to the point to where it is stable, but with the obvious regressions in the programming, I think it has a way to go...

Switch to Linux today !!

This is what is so great and different about FLOSS.

Instead of having this lying phony balony "boy genius" doing all these b.s. marketing things about how great his product is just to pump and dump his stock, the leader of Linux comes out and speaks his mind.

And guess what -- it's just an opinion -- because Linux is the product of many people. And guess what -- its open source, so if you think it's bloated, strip it down...if you think its too spare...pump it up.

Get used to total honesty.
Get used to the 21st Century
Welcome Linux.

Sure, the Linux kernel tree source is bloated, out of necessity - there are numerous architectures, platforms and devices which didn't exist in 1991. But you know what? The size of a kernel image hasn't grown much in the last decade or so. That's the beauty of a modular kernel, as well as a compile-time configurable kernel. I use 2.6.31 on two notebooks, and it's the fastest kernel, with the most responsive GUI desktop experience that I've ever seen since I began using 1.0.9 in ~1994.

A typical fresh Ubuntu or Fedora install doesn't take more than about 25 minutes, and everything just works first shot. This is never the case with Windows, which often needs to install drivers when you plug in a new USB key, for f**ks sake.

What you're referring to as Freedom, is in fact, GNU/Socialism, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Socialism. GNU is not freedom unto itself, but rather a full socialist agenda built on abuse of contract law. As a rule it's biggest advocates are stoners, dirty hippies, communists, career educators, career lecturers and students still having life paid for by mommy and daddy and living in their parent's cellars.

Many computer users express their freedom every day, including the freedom to run any software they want open source or not, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, some people on the fringe of society with little in the way of common sense have come to believe that freedom can be achieved through imposing limitations on how software can be redistributed, widely campaigning against the idea of there even being closed source software and attempting to limit people's choice to use it or not - regardless of the limitated capabilities of much of the software they call free - such as that developed by the GNU Project.

There really is freedom, and many people exercise it though the systems they use in terms of both entertainment and work. Freedom is the ability to choose something on both it's merits and failings, and involves informing people and making rational decisions based on what you need or want. Freedom is not useless if left to tend itself, and is an essential part of any society be it capitalist or socialist. Freedom is not the imposition of restrictions upon distribution of one's own work or derivative works. All the so-called freedom advocated by the FSF are really little more than naive idealism devaluing the work of programmers worldwide in an attempt to promote a socialist agenda.

Many people has said this for a long time, but was called a Troll. Now Linus Torvalds confirms it, let me ask you: who is the Troll? The ones that were correct all the time, or the ones who falsely accuse others?

Regarding Linux on Super computers. Look, Supercomputers are basically a bunch of computers on a network. A large cluster. They run a stripped down Linux kernel that does only one thing: computes thing. To do a specialized kernel is easy. The difficult part is to do a general kernel handling lots of users logging in and doing work. That is difficult and Linux can not handle that. Linux is good on number crunching but not else.

Linux kernel is of today 11 millions line of code. That is sick. Entire Windows NT was 10 millions line of code, including GUI, etc. Everything. Compare that to a single kernel with 11 M LoC. It is obvious that more code has more bugs.

The ideal is to have a lean and mean kernel, which Linus admits "it is far from the slim hyper effective kernel he envisioned". Now it is bloated. Linux is also 12% slower than 10 releases earlier:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/22/linus_torvalds_linux_bloated_huge/

The guru hacker Theo explains:
http://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616theo.html
"[Linux] It's terrible," De Raadt says. "Everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.'"

http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/ols_2006_keynote.html
"Last year Linux kernel hacker Dave Jones told everyone that the kernel was going to pieces, with loads of bugs being found and no end in sight."

Linux kernel hacker Andrew:
http://lwn.net/Articles/285088/
"Q: Is it your opinion that the quality of the kernel is in decline? Most developers seem to be pretty sanguine about the overall quality problem...
A: I used to think it was in decline, and I think that I might think that it still is. I see so many regressions which we never fix."

"Desktop Windows users, by and large, don't know thing 1 about computers and tend to come out with nonsensical statements and bullshit about why they're right to not use desktop Linux. (The "I just don't have that much spare time" being one of the classic bullshit arguments.")

Wrong, Dave. Not even close, either.

*goes back to configuring a new LDAP server*

"over 40GB of applications"

OK so you use MS Office! Thats typewriter code that is!

I think Torvalds finally have got some feeling of what to do in 2.7.x ;-)
Be prepared

Desktop Linux users "get" Windows, which is why they use desktop Linux.
Desktop Windows users, by and large, don't know thing 1 about computers and tend to come out with nonsensical statements and bullshit about why they're right to not use desktop Linux. (The "I just don't have that much spare time" being one of the classic bullshit arguments. You either know nothing, or have never really learned how to set Linux up properly. Working on CLI based Linux servers is NOT the same as using it on the desktop and if you were really experienced you'd know that Windows takes much longer to set up and is wobbly and insecure whilst being set up).
As to the kernel, most of the drivers are modular so it loads what it needs and doesn't load what it doesn't need. Imagine Windows providing a kernel that contained as many drivers as they could think of? It'd be about 800MB in size and wouldn't stay up for longer than a minute.

"My god, how many times have I heard this and Linux still can't take the place of a Windows machine."

And yet a Windows machine is no better at taking the place of a Linux machine.

-
Paul (With holding a further rant)

Zii said what I was about to say, so I'll elaborate for those who seem not to understand.

About 50% of the comments above are referring to the software packaged with their kernel by their chosen distribution.

The Linux Kernel is modular, and as such is easy to slim down, but this must be done at compile time either manually or by your distribution.

Given Linux's modular system, I see no reason to remove any legacy support as all drivers can either be kept modularised or completely left out at compile time.

I suspect that Linus must talking about some non modular parts of the kernel (what they might be is beyond me). Maybe further modularisation is going to need to take place.

I could be wrong, perhaps he is just referring to old obsolete and unmaintained modules that should be trimmed away from the Source.

If this was the case however - it shouldn't effect performance as your distro (or yourself) should recognise that said obsolete module is not needed and can safely be remove from compilation.

At any-rate remember that winXP 32bit allocates 1GB of addressable memory (out of a total of 4GB) purely for the Kernel - can you say WTF?!?

-
Og
Written from Windows 7
(linux box in the corner)

Note to the author, Linus talks about kernel being bloated, not distroes. Bloated kernel can easily be fixed. Try that with Windows. LOL.

Good example of a slim distro is Zenwalk.

I was heartily amazed at the performance boost I gained by setting "sticky" priorities using CachemanXP. Running everything at "normal" makes most any hardware a nominal trifling.

My god, how many times have I heard this and Linux still can't take the place of a Windows machine.

very true... the result of the very thing you try to fix... leads you to a new solution (not the solution that you wanted but new...).

new solutions are omnipresent and mandatory they are.... :)

I see you failed to notice the main difference between Linux and Windos...

Linus stood up and said that Linux is full of bloat

Gates said...

Linus says things should be fixed...

Gate (and crew) says these are enhancements...

Linux users have open communications with developers and each other...

Windows users say, thank you sir, hit me again...

I find it refreshing that Linus stays true to his old self.
Bloated is an adjective, so you compare it like you want.
The comparison to Windows is amusing, I hope.
When 90% of the top500 supercomputers run Windows (without the help of Linux) I am getting worried.
Essentially Linux is and will always be more bloated than it could or should be.
And the only way to mend that (if possible) is to admit it.

In fact, Linux is the WORST alternative to Windows. Hell, it's worse than Windoss it self.

Windows has been blamed for having too much useless legacy support in it. But when those Linux devs incorporate things like firewire support in the kernel, and lots of other stuff that should be done externally, everyone turns a blind eye on that.

And don't get me started on the APIs. When MS published a new API and XP software broke under Vista, everyone got mad at them. But when Linux has 5 different all-broken sound APIs at the same time and the horrible Xorg with it's 2 seperate GUI environments, it's just fine.

--- But the worst bloat of Linux is something else. It has munched and consumed precious community resources that should have gone towards FreeBSD, or the development of something to replace the Xorg, or even driver support. For the FreeBSD, not Linux of course. But noooo, if something has sinister proprietary beginnings, like BSD, it is not to be preferred towards free-starting alternatives, no matter which is better (usual FOSS philosophy). The precious Linux deserves more care and attention than the much better BSD, because BSD was evil and proprietary once.

Anyway, I think Linux was usefull back in the time when all OSes where closed source, so the public would have access to the internals of an OS (no matter how horrible that OS was) and learn about it. But now it's a useless platform that is kept alive ONLY because the idealists at FOSS will be pretty butthurt if they see their "open" OS replaced by BSD or somethig else.

Much like Ogg Theora gets support, despite the Matroska does everything better. It's because those egomaniacs at Theora don't want to quit it and go work on something else. The same goes for Epiphany and Firefox.

I think the author was right on. You can't expect to do everything windows does with all the same hardware support etc, and not end up looking and working alot like windows, bloat and all.

I'm another guy who works on linux all day but for uses windows at home. Same reasons, I can't be bothered to mess with stuff at home when I should be with my family. And truth told, windows xp is a plenty fast desktop with better drivers and multimedia support, and it can run outlook and office. So I might argue Linux is not the new windows, it's bloated and still doesn't run everything I want on the desktop :-).

One thing that always frustrates me about Linux - it is supposed to support old hardware, it includes modules for old ISA cards, even the kernel might be with 586 limited instruction set.
However, it will NOT run on an old hardware. I've tried it. It won't run on K5, K6 or Pentium Standard. Why - because most probably you'll be missing chipset drivers for your old Tomato board or SiS' BIOS won't be compatible. So WHY the heck it is bloated with all these archaic modules and limited to 586 instruction set? ANY ideas?
Even if it does actually manage to boot on an old PC - who is going to use it for a desktop when nowdays office PC's are cheap as cakes? This is so ridiculous - let's make the distribution 686 limited just because some crazy folks might decide to actually run it on an ancient PCs...

But it's not the kernel, it's the distributions. A couple years ago if someone told you 192M wasn't enough to run apt-get they'd laugh. Do people even understand the ginormous amount of memory that 192M is?

Yes the linux kernal is much more bloated than the slackware linux kernal I was running on my 386, but that because it supports a whole new level of core features. Like having some drivers that you don't have to load yourself manually using modprobe. Support for more filesystems and so on. It's not nesesarrily bloated, things have just moved on. The only way you could "streamline" it now would be to remove support for older hardware and redundant features, but like that's going to happen, people like backwards compatability.

Oh and there are distrobutions that are not "bloated" I think slackware is a good example. Not something for the average user though.

"Windows is for people who want to have computers but not use them."

I'd agree with you, if I didn't have over 40GB of applications sitting in my "Program Files" directory. (None of these are games, by the way - those are on another partition.) Many of the apps I use at least once a week, and I can't think of any I don't use once per month.

Very few of these apps, I might add, are even available for Linux. And for those who bleat about W(h)ine, please refer to my earlier statement about users who cannot be bothered: I'm one of them. I deal with enough at work, so I don't tolerate Linux at home.

Linux bloat is, for me, pretty much a non-story. A monolithic OS means bloat, given the huge array of hardware that needs to be supported. Until someone figures out a future hardware standard that minimises this problem (or comes up with a decent microkernel-based OS that takes off), the problem will remain.

I guess some bloat is needed to support all the hardware. And Ubuntu comes with office and other apps not really necessary but I can install it on a 2gb flash drive.So compared to windows its not bloat to me. To me it has everything I need as low tech user. I dont and wont write code.I would like to see the day when I dont have to pay for windows on a new pc if I dont want it. A basic Linux kernel to start the computer without any apps would be nice.
why pay for an os I dont want?
I guess some of that bloat makes it more appealing to people like me.

OK so I can have bloated windows that remains bloated or I can have bloated Linux that I can recompile to slim and unencumbered.
I think, like most of the top 500 supercomputers, that I'd have Linux bloat over windows bloat anyday.
Windows is for people who want to have computers but not use them.

... is paved with good intentions.
And it seems this old saying does apply here!

And I do agree with mr. Oliver Jones: although I do not work with Linux (z/os is my daily bread), when I'm home I do not need to be bothered with more CUI or other geeky stuff. I used to have a small linux router (WL-500G), but when it decided to die I replaced it with a tiny XP box: good riddance! the only time I need to use CLI is when I add a new NAT rule!

Software bloat, in this day and age, is not in and of itself, a bad thing. Where it becomes bad is when it starts to adversely affect your work, and sometimes it's worth a little bit of "bloat" to have more utility all at once.

Resources are far more plentiful than when Linux was first born, or when Windows was first born for that matter. We can afford to keep a more "bloated" piece of software in memory if it means it is more robust in its capabilities. I certainly find Linux a lot more useful these days now that I don't need to do ridiculous things like compiling modules into the kernel just to obtain some functionality I'd rather have in the kernel in the first place. If bloating the kernel means I don't have to mess with it much, that's fine by me.

"It is fairly modular and can be stripped down during kernel compilation. Of course you have to be an operating system expert to do that yourself and most computer users are the sorts of people who think the DVD drive is a coffee cup holder."

That's not really the problem. There are plenty of people out there *with* the required skills, who simply CAN'T BE BOTHERED.

If, like me, you have spent most of your waking hours dealing with your employer's own computer problems, configuration issues and God knows what else, the last thing you need - when your girlfriend / fiancee / wife is beckoning you to come and join her at the dinner table, is yet more hassle (and almost certainly, dependency hell.)

Quite frankly, I use Windows at home. I know what Linux is capable of and what it does, but it is an unnecessary time sink when it comes to things I need a home computer for. That said, I use it at work every day - but if something goes wrong with a Linux box, I fix it on paid time (or get a support monkey to do it.)

As for efficiency and speed where it matters? Well, if we need THAT at work, we use FreeBSD. At the end of the day, you can't beat a Soekris BSD box for efficiency.