[deleted]
No need to stretch thin resources just to appease Google. They make more than enough money to take care of their home-made problems themselves.
[deleted]
Submitted 1 year ago by nave@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Treczoks@lemmy.world 1 year ago
whitecapstromgard@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I find it that being on the latest kernel is more stable than using an ancient one.
dezmd@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do you run a desktop environment as opposed to servers with server class hardware?
whitecapstromgard@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
If you use a LTS sofware, then you have to live with problems that were fixed years ago.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The other big problem is the burnout from maintainers, which are often unpaid and could use a lot more support from the billion-dollar companies that benefit from using Linux.
The problem was that on PCs, two years only represents the time between kernel updates, so that’s a fine timeline.
Embedded devices tend not to update the kernel, though, so those “two years” represent most of the development cycle and the entire consumer support window, and that’s not long enough.
The original picture Google painted in 2017 was that phones take two years to be developed and that the kernel is locked in near the beginning of the engineering process.
That’s going to start a new window of support, remember, so even with a paltry two years of ownership, that’s a six-year-old kernel.
Rumor has it that the Pixel 8 will have a longer support window, so maybe we’ll see major kernel updates launch with that phone.
The original article contains 842 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Illuminostro@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Oh no… anyway…
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Does this matter in a meaningful way? I mean, isn’t the kernel itself extremely stable and compatible anyway? Upgrading to a new version every two years doesn’t seem that onerous, but then again I’m not ruining specialty hardware, so I don’t know.
serratur@lemmy.wtf 1 year ago
Matters for servers, but if companies doesn’t want to transistion they can just pay for extended support from some other company I guess.
ryannathans@aussie.zone 1 year ago
Based and true
CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Good. Either big tech chip in and start helping maintain the LTS kernels or pay a respectable salary to those who maintain it.
devil_d0c@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Big tech won’t chip in is my bet. My company maintains its own version of Linux that has some specific certifications. Updating that box requires an act of god. My bet is that the companies that can afford to will create their own “LTS” versions that just get older and older, and more broken and exploited as time goes on…
Sorry, long night at work =/
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 year ago
So more like a “Long Term Unsupported” LTU?
GigglyBobble@kbin.social 1 year ago
Big tech won't suffer. They will just fork and maintain (and probably enshittify) their own kernel.
Small and mid tech will suffer, however. The article just mentions Android as the prime example for embedded systems and forgets to mention that 80-90% of industrial embedded systems run on Linux.
Those will either be driven to Microsoft's shitty half-done, hardly documented embedded OS versions or some company rises as the white knight offering and maintaining LTS Linux kernels. Both scenarios will increase cost of course that will eventually come out of us consumers' pockets. The former, worse scenario will make industrial applications less secure on top.
Takios@feddit.de 1 year ago
Do Redhat and SUSE not maintain their own LTS kernels for their enterprise distributions?
dingleberry@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Pretty sure all big tech companies already have engineers on payroll for this specific reason. Intel, Microsoft, Google, Amazon have SWEs working on the kernel, networking, even DEs for their own needs and integrations.
CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 1 year ago
And yet still the maintainers don’t want to maintain 6 yo kernels because it’s cumbersome and an unpaid position.
tastysnacks@programming.dev 1 year ago
Does big tech run 6 yo kernels? This seems like a corporation problem not wanting to spend the money properly maintaining their systems. If big tech isn’t dogfooding a 6yo kernel, it doesn’t make sense to do it.
CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes, according to the article, while this doesn’t affect the PC/server as much because the distributions take care of security for the most part, where this will have problems is the phone/IoT space (which is why Linux initially started maintaining 6 yo kernels, to cater to that market).
anlumo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Think printers, factory machines and so on. If they run Linux and not Windows CE, it’s always ancient.
betz24@lemmynsfw.com 1 year ago
Big tech chipping in is how we get Amazon spyware/Microsoft apps built into OS. I agree with respectable salary for developers. I think if Linux org ran the same campaign as Wikipedia it would gather a lot more donations. The whole world runs on some form of the Linux kernel.
CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s not how the Linux kernel works…
The final decision on what is merged into the kernel is Linus’ decision and that’s how it’s been the last 30 years.
Microsoft bakes spyware into the operating system because they own the NT kernel and the Windows OS.
Amazon clones the Linux kernel, modifies it and adds it’s own garbage software, then builds it.
The main Linux kernel is free of any spy shit and that’s how it’s likely going to remain.