It’s been more than three decades since the Linux (opens in new tab) operating system first saw the light of day, yet creator Linus Torvalds is still continually “surprised and pleased” at the amount of innovation coming to the platform.
During the Open Source Summit, currently taking place both online and in Austin, Texas, Torvalds discussed the state of Linux with Chief Open Source Officer at the Cardano Foundation, Dirk Hohndel.
Speaking of Linux, Torvalds said the project has had the same process and the same release schedule for at least 15 years now, which made it “very calm and not exciting from a process standpoint”, but added that he believes that’s exactly what the users want.
Boring and predictable
“You want to have a stable process so that people don’t get upset about how all the infrastructure is changing,” said Torvalds.
Despite being “boring and predictable”, Linux is still very exciting on the innovation front, he added. “One of the things that I, personally, enjoy the most is that we’re not a dead project.”
For example, the programming language Rust is coming to Linux (opens in new tab), an announcement that made the crowd at the Open Source Summit cheer in satisfaction, VentureBeat reported. Unlike C, in which Linux is written, Rust is better at utilizing and protecting compute memory resources.
At first, Torvalds added, the new programming language will be introduced in a very limited capacity, probably due to the fact that the earlier introduction of C++ ended up being a failure.
“Technical people want to do something new and fun, and I think rest makes a lot of technical sense,” Torvalds said.
Despite Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS running the show, Linux has been holding steady since day one. Most of today’s Internet of Things (IoT) devices and many data center servers are powered by Linux, while Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, is based on Linux OS. There also remains a healthy market for Linux-based laptops.
