LWN's guide to 2024

Posted Jan 3, 2024 13:22 UTC (Wed) by elenril (subscriber, #165899)
In reply to: LWN's guide to 2024 by Wol
Parent article: LWN's guide to 2024

>But isn't that exactly the attitude that produced Linux?
No, Linus set out to write an OS kernel. He did not also write his own compiler, text editor, or libc as a part of it.

LWN's guide to 2024

Posted Jan 3, 2024 14:47 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

To quote Linus (from memory, not verbatim)

THIS IS A TOY, NOT MEANT TO BE ANYTHING BIG.

Cheers,
Wol

LWN's guide to 2024

Posted Jan 3, 2024 16:19 UTC (Wed) by elenril (subscriber, #165899) [Link] (1 responses)

That is entirely orthogonal to my point, which is that trying to do too many things at once usually results in not doing any of them particularly well.

LWN's guide to 2024

Posted Jan 3, 2024 21:20 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> trying to do too many things at once usually results in not doing any of them particularly well.

(a) Who cares? and

(b) People who do this "Just for Fun" are usually clever enough to be "Jack of all trades, MASTER OF MOST".

If they weren't clever, they wouldn't *want* to do it.

Cheers,
Wol

LWN's guide to 2024

Posted Jan 4, 2024 1:22 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Yes, Linux succeeded because GNU, BSD, and X had already done the work of building a free Unix-compatible userland and development tools. The kernel was the last piece (and an extremely important one). But without all of that work, it would not have been immediately useful.