There shouldn’t be another Linus. The model of a single maintainer holding so much importance is fundamentally flawed, especially for a project with the size and importance of Linux. Responsibilities and decision making should be distributed among stakeholders and volunteers. It will take time to rebuild around that sort of structure.
I’ve also heard tell that the linux-kernel mailing list has become extremely toxic, especially to newcomers. A professor that I have a lot of respect for has stopped teaching his kernel drivers course because one of his students received death threats related to her involvement. If a change in the tenor doesn’t happen, less and less of the fresh blood that Linux needs will join.
The role of Linus being a stubborn decision maker will be handed over to a competent close one to Linus. He is not letting any of the “sociopolitical” experts take over the tech role that Linux plays critical to servers, security users, militaries, governments and activists.
I have doubts you would see any performance increases, and if you change your hardware you’ll be in for a tough time but it would be a fun learning experience!
Thats a question I have. I have two laptops, a shitty amd ryzen thinkpad t495 and a fancy soon-to-be-corebooted Clevo NV41MZ with i7-11** cpu. Pretty crazy performance difference although the chassis and keyboard suck. But if I get the keyboard I want to simply swap drives, as there is nothing fancy, this should just work right?
Swapping CPU manufacturers entirely? I’d just start my kernel config fresh. Pull up the old one next to a new (default ) one and go down line by line. Odds are there are at most a few flags that would need to be changed, but it’s a good chance to reevaluate your previous decisions too.
This used to be the norm, not a weird thing that noone has thought of before. If you do this your kernel will be a lot smaller, boot faster, and be a bit more secure. Once you’re booted it won’t make any meaningful speed difference though.
It makes a HUGE difference in compile time. Which only matters if you’re building your own kernel anyway. It’s a solution for its own problem.
I think it’s a good learning experience though. There is genuinely a lot of stuff in there that you can easily, safely remove, and reading up on all the less obvious flags is fun.
The far future: A man sits at a table, staring at a floating hologram display. He watches as an indecipherable block of alphanumeric characters wiggles and splits into two segments. He nods slowly.
He takes a breath and closes his eyes, broadcasting a message to everyone on duty that day.
“Merge the request. Tell Linus#3418 that Wayland is now the default display manager.”
Nothing. Linus doesn’t personally do coding on the kernel, he has a team who do that and he oversees it and makes the hard decisions.
There are others who will take his place and the work will continue.
If somehow the entire kernel team shut down, Google, Samsung or some other large corporation would take it over and continue development because at this point many, many, many servers, phones, smart devices, iot, and other appliances rely on the Linux kernel to function.
“Today here at Microsoft we are celebrating the legacy of the late Linus Torvalds by releasing a new kernel, re-written entirely in Golang using Copilot. No GPL code was touched, merely re-written, and we will offer ISOs to the coding community for free! Stay tuned for more updates, as we will be exclusively developing on this kernel going forward! This is a great day for open source!”
Nothing. Linus doesn’t personally do coding on the kernel, he has a team who do that and he oversees it and makes the hard decisions.
Even that is not really the truth. There are dozens and dozens of teams that actually do the development, then there are people who coordinate and maintain certain parts of the kernel, merge in patches and make decisions. And then there’s Linus who does coordinate these people.
There are others who will take his place and the work will continue.
And most likely Greg K-H will take over the position that Linus has right now. He has been one of the most active maintainers and is probably “the number 2” behind Linus.
A number of candidates will create their own forks and there will be a long Game of Thrones style war between different factions. After couple of weeks each distro will choose the fork they will make the default one and people will split into warring factions. After that we will enter a nuclear winter style period lasting couple of years during which 90% of post on Lemmy will be just shitposting the rival forks. After a decade or two of backstabbing, dirty politics and other drama new dictator will be selected and all will be back to normal.
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