Q&A: Linux founder Linus Torvalds talks about open-source identity

I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster, I switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do. But the whole "break everything" model is painful for users, and they can choose to use something else.

I realize the reason for the 4.0 release, but I think they did it badly. They did so may changes, it was a half-baked release. It may turn out to be the right decision in the end, and I will retry KDE, but I suspect I'm not the only person they lost.

I got the update through Fedora, and there was a mismatch from KDE 3 to KDE 4.0. The desktop was not as functional, and it was just a bad experience for me. I'll revisit it when I reinstall the next machine, which tends to be every six to eight months.

The GNOME people are talking about doing major surgery, so it could also go the other way.

Windows 7 being better than Vista is saying a lot. Microsoft may have a huge PR advantage, as people will compare it to Vista and think it is good so "angels will sing again" like they did with Windows 95 compared to Windows 3.1. So maybe Microsoft did this on purpose.

I think Microsoft has realized the Vista development cycle is way too long and it would be insane to do that again. They might aim for a two-year development cycle, and I think that is too long. They should decouple the operating system from the applications and release sooner.

For Linux, six months is quite tight. All the pieces you put together, you hope they are stable, but there will be surprises, and six months is a short cycle when you put together so many packages. An annual release cycle is a reasonable cycle for doing a whole distribution.

In the Linux space, once a year is reasonable, but then you have the incremental releases. It's hard for a commercial company like Microsoft that wants people to pay for releases, to do a yearly upgrade. Apple has done faster upgrades, but it has charged less for the releases. This is not a problem for open source, as it's free software, but this is one of the things Microsoft has to balance. They want people to rent the software, but users don't want to. If you do development over five years and make so many changes, it is more painful for the user. The cost of the pain is likely to be higher than the cost of the operating system, which is why people are slow to upgrade.

粗體的是  Rodney Gedda 問的，正常的是 Linus 的回答。他還對 Windows 7 頗有好感，幹脆去用 Windows 7 好了。:p