> The bulk of the ABI compatibility is not in the kernel So this means the Linux...

bonzini · on Dec 13, 2019

Most of the 100.000.000 lines of code in Linux are drivers, or support for architectures that you have never seen.

Yes, the core is bigger than OpenBSD's. It's also more scalable and generally has higher performance. It's got nothing to do with backwards compatibility.

Reelin · on Dec 13, 2019

I too would like to know more about this.

* The essay appeared to continually interchange the terms API and ABI, which to my mind are very different things.

* The examples provided weren't as concrete and concise as I would have liked.

* The author failed to convince me that layers of emulation and abstraction (ie what Windows currently does) are somehow fundamentally flawed. Actually there's an argument in favor of this at the end; is the author under the mistaken impression that Windows doesn't already do this? Perhaps I've misunderstood the intended point?

> Computers are becoming less secure

That is not my impression _at all_.

> It isn't the case that after years of development Microsoft has ended up with a bad operating system because people at Microsoft are idiots, rather it's the case that they're in the enterprise software business.

I found it hard to take the essay seriously due to statements such as the above. The author would do well to call out explicit problems with Windows rather than generally smearing it.

The author's point seems to boil down to an argument to shift resource expenditure off of OS developers and on to user space developers. That's difficult to take seriously, because in the real world resources are limited. The OS is the underlying infrastructure that everything is built on top of - if it changes too quickly, it's no longer particularly useful as an OS. Preventing breakage is (to my mind) one of the core aspects of an OS developer's job. Linus "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!" Torvalds is one of the primary reasons I'm comfortable using a Linux OS as a daily driver instead of Windows or macOS (the Debian maintainers are the other reason).

(I should note that I choose to use Linux due to development tooling and open source ideals, but at their core Windows and macOS both seem like perfectly reasonable OSes to me.)