[ncolug] Minix3
- From: Henry Keultjes <hbkeultjes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: NCOLUG <ncolug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 20:43:38 -0500
nor thern wrote:
what is the smallest debian replacement for minix?
That's like asking which apple is the best to replace a specific type of orange
like a Jaffa.
If you are a kernel hacker you can cut Linux down significantly,
probably close to the size of Minix3, but you would probably have to
remove about 95% of the drivers to do so and that would severely limit
its use to the specific drivers that were left. A regular use would not
be able to add or remove drivers.
As all of you know, I am *not* a hacker and I have used loadable device
drivers, possible with a micro-kernel architecture like Minix3, for
fifteen years. So *as a user* I am used to having a very small core
system and being able to customize it for my own needs.
Is it fair to say that the average user cannot do that with Linux?
Therein lies Linux' biggest problem. The fact that hackers, as most of
you are, are capapble of doing with Linux whatever you need to get done
and all of you love that. The average user, however, has absolutely no
interest in going there. They just want to run their applications.
They just want to drive a car without having to know how to engineer and
build one.
To that you may give the argument that learning Linux is no more
difficult than learning windoze. That may be true. All I know is that
both of them are way more complex than they should be, way more complex
than I am willing to comprehend so I keep looking for seemingly better
solutions . . . like Minix3.
If Open Source is going to gain serious market share on windoze, the
offering has to be greatly simplified. You can do that by feeling sorry
for dumb asses like me and figuring out how to do what needs to be done
far simpler. As a sort of proof of that, look at Linux' huge server
market share, and the fact that servers are the domain of the experts,
versus Linux' puny desktop market share which is the domain of average
Joe's like me.
That also works against Linux from a perception standpoint. Things like
Google run almost exclusively on Linux but that never enters the mind of
the average Joe. All they see is all those desktops running windoze.
Henry
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