On 20 Jun 1999, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> Linux started out as 10k lines of code. Was that good? It's not 1.5M
> lines of code. Is that bad?
>
I think that the fact that you're getting the OS into 1.5 million lines of
code is great; look at Windows. Microsoft stated at one point that they
had up to 11 million lines of code in Windows 95-A. Ouch... try that one
on for size. I'd hate to see how many gigabytes their source tree takes
up.
The thing about Linux is that it works, dammit. I have been using it for
two years now. I've had 2 crashes in that entire time: One fatal crash
with 2.0.36 when I used a buggy SCSI card, and one when I was using
2.2.something that happened with something to do with the networking code
(PPP or some other Internet code). But the thing is that that's *2*
crashes in *2* years. That's pretty damn good... considering I used to
get 2 crashes a *DAY* in Windows.
What matters is not the fact that Linux's source is large. A compiled,
compressed kernel is nearly always under 600k. In fact, I even built a
completely static kernel once and it was under 600k compressed. The fact
of the matter is, though, that it works, and despite it's size, it's damn
fast. My 486, running 2.2.9, is a lot faster than my parent's Pentium II
200MHz running Windows 98. I can do work with it. And, X is even faster
in some cases on this computer than their PII. Granted -- I don't use X
much. I won't until I get a good, kick ass computer that I'm comfortable
with using X in. But I'll still use my favorite programs - pine, aumix,
lynx. What can I say? They're efficient :).
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael B. Trausch
President of Linux Operations, ADK Computers http://adk.hypermart.net/
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
PGP Public Key is available at hkp://keys.pgp.com/mtrausch@wcnet.org, or at:
http://wcnet.org/~mtrausch/pubkey.txt, or finger://mtrausch@wcnet.org
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ADK Computers, Walbridge Office E-Mail: mtrausch@wcnet.org
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Customer: I'm running Windows '98 Tech: Yes. Customer: My computer isn't
working now. Tech: Yes, you said that.
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