Well, this settles it for me

Posted Sep 7, 2009 16:06 UTC (Mon) by einstein (subscriber, #2052)
In reply to: Well, this settles it for me by bvdm
Parent article: BFS vs. mainline scheduler benchmarks and measurements

> Firstly, Linux has a very small desktop presence,

I don't think that we desktop linux users are entirely happy with smug little comments like that. For us, linux is the only desktop presence and it looms large.

> so not entirely optimizing for the desktop is a rational design decision, though "totally disconnected" is very hard to swallow.

I think Con may have a valid point in questioning the one-size fits all paradigm. While it's an admirable goal to create a single kernel which runs optimally on everything from PDAs to supercomputing clusters, there may be too much of a divergence in performance profiles for that to be entirely practical.

As Linus has said, a desktop linux presence is vital to its viability, so optimizing desktop interactivity ought to be a very high priority.