[Info-vax] RMS intro

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Tue, 2 Jan 2024 23:21:23 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:

> Take, for instance, the lack of internal kernel interfaces and gregkh's
> insistence that, not only are they unnecessary, they are _bad_: this can
> make things very hard to work with, with multiple generations of partial
> interfaces all coresident at the same time, and little incentive to
> clean up the resulting complexity or mess.

Could be worse. You could be required to carry all that baggage around 
forever.

GregKH made this point some years back, about the state of respective USB 
support in Windows versus Linux. At that point, Microsoft had rewritten 
its USB stack three times, and so it was carrying around three different 
driver APIs, and as long as there were third-party drivers using the 
obsolete interfaces, would have to continue doing that essentially 
forever.

At the same time, Linux had also rewritten its USB stack three times. But 
it had the luxury of starting pretty much from scratch each time, without 
having to carry around a lot of legacy baggage, because all the drivers 
included in the Linux kernel source tree could be updated at the same 
time.

Just one of many reasons why Linux is a much trimmer and more efficient OS 
than Windows.