Blog of Zeke Franco—Quasarkitten.net

“The One Laptop Per Child organization will use Linux on its inexpensive machines, but apparently the OS suffers the same code bloat as Windows, the project's leader said Tuesday.”

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This story obvious is just trying to be a bit “shocky” in order to get readers. (Which is fine by me.) The title of the story is only reflected in about 1 of 17 paragraphs, so the article doesn’t really talk much about why Linux is considered bloated by Mr. Negroponte. To say that Linux is bloated, and then compare it to Windows is quite false.

Linux in a strict sense is suppose to refer to the kernel of the OS. Which probably does have some bloat to it since it doesn’t have every 3rd party developer writing drivers for them, so they come supplied in the kernel.

Most people think of Linux as Distros, with a windowing system, utilities and basic apps. Linux is often and incorrectly thought of as Redhat, SuSE, Ubuntu, etc, but this are really distributions, that come with hundreds or thousand of other programs. If Windows came with most of every program that you used, you would have yourself a good handful of discs. With Linux & Linux distros you can rip out whatever you want or rewrite what ever part you want, it is open source, if the code is bloated then you can fine tune it. Can’t do that with Windows. I run Linux on a 400mhz PDA (Zaurus SL-5500), and it runs great. Linux has been made to run on watches, pdas (link 2), Phones, dance floors, beer kegs, plus tons of other interesting things. So I’m pretty sure it can handle a 500mhz machine with 128mb of memory. Yes, by spending time with the code (An unavailable option with Windows) you can make it run a lot faster, but I would guess that any advanced Linux user could get Linux running quite well on MITs 100 dollar laptop. So if Mr. Negroponte can’t get his engineers to, then I'm shocked.

Labels: linux, technology