Some in this thread have confused OrangeBox with the author of the article he linked.

Skim reading can be as counterproductive as trolling...

sorry, getting sick now, love this phone but it keeps slowing down now, media player, inertnet, blutetooth, everything now keeps slowing down or crashing now. Tried reseting, takeing battery out but no improvemetnt, pleas help me, 2 hours ago no display on media files now they display but wont play, whats going on?

I'm not being rude here.....but this highlights what I was talking about when I mentioned not grasping "the linux landscape too well".

That's not your fault - as you correctly note, linux hasn't had the focused marketing budget thrown at it that MS or Apple have put behind their products. It is this expensive effort that has bought them the 'consumer mindspace' I refer to - people know that PC == Microsoft and Mac == Apple. Mention linux and they'll look at you like you grew an extra arm.

That's the problem linux has. It isn't a centralized corporate product.

Linux is the kernel. It has not fragmented at all. There is one linux. One. Linus Torvald is its official guardian.....OK, there's a lot of serious people involved, but Linus wields the ultimate boom stick.

What you are refering to, when you talk of 'fragmentation', are the various *distributions* of linux - they all take the same linux kernel (some variation in version, but all from the same source - that's not fragmentation btw) and package it up in whatever way they think useful to their target audience...and even add their own apps to help configure/maintain the system (value add stuff - think RedHat)

It makes no more sense to refer to this as 'fragmentation' than it would to refer to "x86 fragmentation" because many different PC manufacturers build different systems using the same CPU. The situation is analogous.

For linux (lower-case "l" btw) to gain consumer mindspace, it needs some new PR strategy involving a concert of the best distributors....

This is incorrect (rather, not entirely correct?). The kernels running under Red Hat, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware, Mandriva, etc... are not the same kernels. There is the mainstream kernel, (known as vanilla), then there is everyone else's customized ones.

They all have custom patches (this is the key), custom modules, and custom flags run at compile time. This is why for drivers such as Nvidia, you have to find a driver built not only for your Linux Distribution, but for your exact kernel, and if you don't - then the package builder compiles itself against your kernel.

If all linux ran the same kernel (assuming same kernel version, of course) then all drivers would work across all without modification. You could just download the module itself, drop it into /lib/modules/`uname-r`/ and go. Linux (<-capped for beginning of sentence ) does not work this way. Very often you must compile drivers specifically for your distribution or system.

(You are correct about the lower-case l. I apologize.)

To add:

To use your analogy about x86 this isn't quite right. As you said, everyone uses exactly the same processor in every similar system. If it were like linux, they would have started with the same processor, and then changed little hardware pieces on it to be specific to their system. If I open a Dell, and then open a HP, and then open my own custom built PC - all running the exact same Core 2 quad processor.. I can swap them around between the three all day and be fine.

If I take a Red hat, and then a debian, both running version 2.6.31 versions of their kernel - I can not swap their drivers back and forth all day and be fine.

This is a little bit off topic, but...

If the US cryptography level is so great, it's pretty amazing that terrorists in Pakistan (under some circumstances that I don't understand) have been able to watch drone feeds to see what US drones are looking at, and it is said to be years away before they can be adequately protected.

People here often take the cheap shortcuts. They want to be refined, but don´t want to pay for it or make the effort. Maybe the "elistist" "socialism" of Europe is really about being honest and frank and doing less but doing it well, instead of doing it quick and dirty, the american way.

- They want healthcare that works but don´t want to pay the taxes for it.
- They want wood siding on the sides of their houses, but don´t want to pay for it so they have fake ones made out of vinyl.
- They want leather goods but don´t want to pay for them so they have faux leather copies made which they buy.
- They like hardwood flooring, but don´t want to pay for it so they make and sell plastic immitation stuff.
- They want to make nice cars but don´t feel like making the effort so you get the domestic brands you deserve.
- They want unmanned drones that securely and effectively aid the military forces, but don´t want to pay for it so they skip on the encryption.
- They want nice wood furniture but don´t want to pay for it so you have cheaply made wood veneer furniture everywhere.

I totally skip US domestic brands and manufacturers, because the quality is so haphazard that I usually feel like I´ve been cheated if I buy some of that stuff. I´d rather pay more and get something lasting. There are exceptions, but rare.

Here it is always about cost today, the concept life-cycle-costing doesn´t compute in this country. Insulation for example, I´m appaled at the lack of insulation in houses, but I guess they´d rather pay monthly for releasing all that waste heating oil and coal out into nature as hot air.

Another example of this is the Iphone owners who think they´re "only" paying $299 for their 32gb Iphones, but are too mentally lazy to compute the additional cost of having a Iphone on AT&T for 2 years, versus something else.

I constantly feel that I´m being pulled a fast one here in pricing, one price advertised and then when it comes to the checkout miscellaneous surcharges and fees appear, which were not advertised. I also feel rather annoyed by the lack of quality in auto mechanics, plumbers, electricians and carpenters here. There´s not much can-do attitude there, nor is there what I´d call "professional pride". It´s all quick and dirty.

And this is a mentality in the whole society. It´s taken me 4 years to get my wife to think about the long term costs of owning things versus just the quick costs, and realizing that sometimes its smarter to pay 2x the initial purchase amount, if you think a year forward. Buy less stuff, but buy better stuff.

A example of this "low price every day" fallacy is that I now import fasteners and construction material for myself from Europe, because the crud I get at hardware stores here is just completely inferior in quality. I hardly strip screws and bolts I buy in Europe, but the US quality ones (even if having the same quality markings) I strip 1/3 or more of. I think that´s a sad state of affairs having to do my own imports of that stuff.

Unfortunately genevan I am unable to get into an actual debate about that. There is so many ways that that information became compromised its not funny, most of them having nothing to do with the communications being "cracked".

In any case I am illequipped to get into that lengthy debate. I will say this... in the time I spent as a United States Navy I learned one thing with absolute certainty. All news is biased - and more often than not.. completely incorrect or misrepresented. Its a shame that's all the civilians have as a source of informtion... and have that source be so awful.

I think you're straining the analogy a bit there...it was only intended as a conceptual abstraction In fact, they use varying CPU hardware - Core2, Xeon, AMDs blah blah....but they can all be abstractly referred to as x86 or x64 (frex), and a generalized kernel install, regardless of distro, can be used to build a system. Of course, we all know that you can build your own kernel to precisely match your hardware, but that ain't Joe Shmoe territory If you want to get your hands dirty, sure, linux supports that kind of customization, but it isn't necessary. I can't recall the last time I did it....probably the last time I installed Gentoo

For starters, the variations in modules between distributions is not generally relevant to the kernel itself. This was the whole point of getting away from the monolithic kernel architecture that plagued linux in the bad ol' days.

If I have an x86 binary, compiled against version X, Y & Z of libs A, B & C, you can be damned confident it will execute on any distribution that matches that spec. No distribution plays fast & loose with compiler settings that would shatter such compatibility. They compile and package the kernel, sure, but from the same source tree...to support such compatibility. Patches may serve to support whatever decisions have been made in that distro regarding peripheral modules or special drivers, but to break compatibility for any other unrelated code would be a gross violation of the linux philosophy (such as it is). Which isn't to say that it hasn't happened.....but spankings should ensue

About the most clear example of genuinely different kernels are those supporting SELinux (or not), or virtualization...and even these kernels are binary compatible for non-dependent code. However, these examples are special edge-cases, and are usually transparent to the general end-user (SELinux may be the default, with a sensible policy that the user doesn't notice, frex). Virtualization (installing a Xen kernel, frex) is a decision made by an experienced system admin, not Joe Shmoe.

The point here is, although each distro may literally compile their own kernel (ie. they don't grab a binary from kernel.org), they do so from a singular consistent source, with the primary intent of ensuring compatibility within hardware platforms.

I may package my software for different distros (eg. rpm vs deb vs portage etc), but I certainly don't recompile it for each of them to match their kernel! In general, only hardware platform is a critical cause of recompilation....and between x86 or x64, maybe not even then.

Strictly speaking, RedHat & Debian etc don't have 'drivers'....they're just a distro....but to take your NVidia example, if I compile it on RedHat with the same kernel (and headers) as Debian - yes, they are binary compatible....as mentioned above, however, their particular installation/packaging mechanism varies, but if I was a masochist, I could manually transfer the binaries and all would be well. Personally, I prefer NVidias painless and reliable auto-compile

Of course, being the freaky imperfect world that this is, there will always be edge-cases that require a recompile....but in general the whole point of the linux architecture is to support such compatibilty, and given the open-source nature of it, any peculiarities should be able to be overcome by an automated compile during install - transparent to the end-user.

I find a great deal of confusion is caused by misunderstanding what exactly constitutes the 'kernel' (ie. linux), as distinguished from peripheral modules. Drivers may operate at the kernel level, but they are not the kernel, per se. Also, the source vs binary differentiation becomes almost illusory in an open source world.

Ultimately, whatever tweaks may have been applied, the major distros go to great lengths to ensure the end-user never need fret about them...for the vast majority of use-cases, it's just point & click installation.

I'll have to reread this thread to remind myself how we got off on this tangent

EDIT: Oh yes, the whole "linux fragmentation" thing

I think suffice to say we both have quite an adequate understanding of the linux architecture, however as you yourself agreed the possibility is there and it does occur. So this is, in fact, a case of fragmentation. Your example of custom kernels I've personally had to deal with as I've done some work with firmware based linux systems designed to run on very specific hardware with very proprietary components.

However, I disagree with this point here. Drivers when compiled against a kernel match everything, including the name. If you tried to directly copy a binary from one system to the other and insmod it.. you'll normally get an error saying it was compiled with a different kernel version. Even tho you may be accurate that the driver would probably *work*.. it won't let itself because red hat tends to add -EL to their names, and all distro's add a -(patchnum) name... for example my current Karmic Ubuntu is 2.6.31-15-generic. This naming mismatch would prevent them from loading.

However, the main point is that - different distributions patch the actual source code of the original vanilla kernel. All things being considered, if this was not done - then I would agree with you completely, but because the source code is modified in distributions (and this has caused some problems in the past.. I can think of no recent examples however) - as well as the fact that some software only works when certain kernel extensions are enabled (which is not constant across distro's) - I personally consider linux to be fragmented. But as I said originally, I do not believe this is as much of a problem anymore, and that linux has pretty much moved past this.

Definitely gone somewhat off topic at this point I think . But since the blog post in the OP also deals with the strategies of Apple vs the World it is SOMEWHAT related .