Desktop Linux cannot be taken seriously

A KEY DEVELOPER of the Linux kernel quit because he thought the operating system had been hijacked by corporate developers.

Con Kolivas has gotten around to telling his story to APCMag.com. He was one of the few developers who wanted to improve the kernel for desktop performance.

He worked on the basis that the desktop PC wa so bloated and slowed down in all the things that matter. He thought that if he had complete control over all the software on a Linux desktop PC he could speed things up. But what he found was that all the Linux kernel hackers were working "stuffing the kernel with enterprise crap" that a desktop does not care about.

Kolivas said that the corporate developers were killing performance on the desktop so that Linux could run 1024 CPUs and 1000 hard drives.

Faults were being found in desktop machines which could not be duplicated on these huge Linux arrays.

Kolivas started writing some code which helped and people did pay attention, at first. However little of the actual code itself ended up in the mainline kernel. However he felt that the emerging challenges for the Linux kernel on the desktop never seem to get whole-heartedly tackled by any full time developer.

Kolivas quit because it stopped being fun and he fell out with some of the key players in the Linux game.

He thinks that the result is desktop users are complaining that their machines are going slower while corporate problems are patched really fast.

There is more of this, and it is here. µ