Comment by naturalmovement

4 hours ago

Definitely not a symptom of Linux being a hodgepodge of code thrown together from a thousand different sources and no one person could tell you how it all fits.

11 comments

naturalmovement

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cevn  3 hours ago

Bugs happen in all code. The difference is, anyone can fix stuff in open source. Closed source bugs are out of control and must be worked around. Usually by switching to OSS

stackghost  3 hours ago

Of course it's (indirectly) a symptom of that.

What's the alternative? Proprietary closed-source operating systems owned by corps who can be compelled to insert covert backdoors?

If BSD was as popular as Linux it would have the exact same problems.

steve918  3 hours ago

I wonder if you think other OSes are any different?

TempleOS is the only thing that comes to mind that doesn't fit your description and it's not practically useful.

Any sufficiently large codebase is a mix of ideas and concepts implemented by different people with different priorities over a large timespan and if you can fit the entire thing in your head it's not very interesting or complex.

  • naturalmovement  3 hours ago

    The *BSDs, Mac, and Windows all keep critical code in the same tree as the OS.

    Something like disk encryption would be immediately visible.

    So you don't have this mess of 80 different distros with 60 different versions of systemd, 20 that don't use it, a million kernel versions and it's all thrown together in a Costco-sized trash bag and we call the output "Linux".

    • yaris  3 hours ago

      In my experience any software system (not just operating system) after crossing a certain limit on complexity and age looks exactly as hodgepodge of code pieces thrown together, sometimes from different sources even if developed by one org. All major OSs have long crossed those limits, I believe.

    • brainwad  3 hours ago

      Windows for ages did not really keep all the code in one repo. There were like a dozen parallel repos for e.g. the shell, kernel, IE, etc. Also every feature was developed on team-level branches; integrating all those branches often caused unexpected bugs.