Torvalds switches to Apple - Sorta! ;)

Well, the only thing I can hope is that his use of Linux/ppc will help accelerate Linux/ppc development. Once he sees how far behind Linux/ppc is, maybe he can really push people to make this Linux platform viable. Not just for Power Macs, but various other PPC machines available.
 
I think it proves to the x86 linux guys that Macs are serious hardware, regardless of the OS.
 
Funny you mention the serious hardward thing.

I was having a discussion at work with a guy yesterday. He saw my iBook on my desk (personal unit I bring in to the office some times) and commented how he loved OSx (because it's Unix) but hated Mac hardware.

"Why?"

"You can't upgrade them."

"??"

"Well, your laptop - the only thing you can do to it is add memory."

"uh huh, true. but... how many other laptops out there are you swapping out video cards, upgrade the DSP, or doing CPU swaps on?"

"well, yeah, but the desktops..."

"... wait. they use PCI video cards, the have perfectly viable upgrade paths for memory and frankly, what other tweaks will you do? If you don't think the DSP in a Mac is good enough, you've got issues. CPUs are swappable in several units. Hard drives are industry standard."

"yeah, but the CPUs are slower."

"You're comparing apples (pun) and oranges. Clock speed doesn't matter when you look at how the architectures are different and the instruction sets on the CPUs are so drastically different. Apples and oranges."

"Still, they suck."

(sigh) Whatever.
 
chornbe, first clue that you were dealing with a "genius" was that he went from notebooks straight over to desktops. Not saying anything crude, but I'd walked away as soon as he stated "You can't upgrade that notebook."

Duh.

Anyway, if Torvaldes is on the PPC environment, like said above, I hope that means that Linux will be better across the boards for 2.6.x and higher. Hell, I'll be looking at better programs being available for PowerPC Linux here soon...

(please, oh god please)
 
Linus has been using G5s for some time now. Still, he's more interested in the kernel and what's really lacking on PPC Linux right now isn't so much kernel stuff (that's coming along nicely) but userspace apps. There are loads of things missing, like a workable flash plugin, java plugin, codecs for different audio and video formats, etc. But it's good to have him coding on PPC :). Hopefully that will mean more altivec optimizations in the kernel.
 
gerbick said:
chornbe, first clue that you were dealing with a "genius" was that he went from notebooks straight over to desktops. Not saying anything crude, but I'd walked away as soon as he stated "You can't upgrade that notebook."

Duh.
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Yep... Oh, be as crude as you like. He's a tard.
 
kind of a dumb question, but if Linux is open source, how does Linus get paid? Is he ceo of Red Hat? what brings in the bread for that guy?
 
Open Source Development Labs in June 2003, after taking a leave from his position at Transmeta, where he was working on several research projects. He became the first fellow of OSDL, which is a nonprofit, global consortium of technology companies dedicated to accelerating the adoption of Linux.

At OSDL, Torvalds works exclusively on leading the development of Linux, as well as guiding a team of Linux developers around the world.
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RedHat is a public company..
 
Yea, he has a day job like most of us
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Wrong, last time I heard about it he was employed by the Free Software Foundtaion (FSF) to write the linux 2.6 series kernel full time
 
DJ Rep said:
Wrong, last time I heard about it he was employed by the Free Software Foundtaion (FSF) to write the linux 2.6 series kernel full time
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Which is technically still a day job! ;)
 
You guys know... that guy that said about speed? Last time I checked, no x86 boxes out there ran 2 64-bit 2.5 GHz Processors. Thats pretty fast, last time i checked.

Also, now that *nus (hahah) is running PPC, maybe we'll FINALLY see a live distro for us!! Yay :)
 
enforce1 said:
You guys know... that guy that said about speed? Last time I checked, no x86 boxes out there ran 2 64-bit 2.5 GHz Processors. Thats pretty fast, last time i checked.
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I guess you've never seen or heard about those new-fangled Opteron 852 dual, or quad CPU, rendering server that's running 2.6ghz per 64-bit enabled chip.
 
Quote from the article... "My main machine these days is a dual 2GHz G5 (aka PowerPC 970)--it's physically a regular Apple Mac, although it obviously only runs Linux, so I don't think you can call it a Mac any more ;)"

Sure it's still a Mac - but Linus should've kept a partition on the HD with OS X installed - just to play with it from time to time and to see why linux ain't ready for the desktop. Then again, he _isn't_ exactly a regular desktop user, nor's that his field of development...
 
gerbick said:
I guess you've never seen or heard about those new-fangled Opteron 852 dual, or quad CPU, rendering server that's running 2.6ghz per 64-bit enabled chip.
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or even oct processors. Now that will be oh so cool. 8x 2.6 Ghz chips running at full speed.
 
gerbick said:
I guess you've never seen or heard about those new-fangled Opteron 852 dual, or quad CPU, rendering server that's running 2.6ghz per 64-bit enabled chip.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but have you seen the prices on them? Much higher than a G5. Sure, most of them come with 1 or 2GB of RAM, but they sell for $4000 - $8000!
 
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