Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.
No More Worlds to Conquer?
An interesting aspect of open source software is that pretty much everything is public. When Linux first arrived in the early 1990s, a common debate was how to deal with Microsoft inevitably bringing the hammer down. But the debate had to happen entirely in public, with Microsoft fully aware of the Linux community's entire strategy. Imagine getting into a street fight where the big bully knows with certainty everything you're going to do before you do it. You'd better pick the right moves, right? Thirty years later, voila! The Linux community picked the right moves and won the world (except the pesky desktop, but that's a different story).
But when everything you say is public, you don't always have the luxury of appearing to everyone as the infallible deity of operating system development and world domination. Sometimes you're just wrong about something, and sometimes you yourself are the one who discovers that you were wrong. And sometimes … you discover you were wrong about the thing you thought you were wrong about. And everyone gets to see.
Recently, Linus Torvalds responded to a patch from Masahiro Yamada. These were a bunch of updates to the Kconfig build system. So, not necessarily anything regular distro users would encounter, but definitely something that every single kernel developer would use over and over again.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
AerynOS Alpha Release Available
With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
-
AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.
-
RingReaper Malware Poses Danger to Linux Systems
A new kind of malware exploits modern Linux kernels for I/O operations.
-
Happy Birthday, Linux
On August 25, Linux officially turns 34.
-
VirtualBox 7.2 Has Arrived
With early support for Linux kernel 6.17 and other new additions, VirtualBox 7.2 is a must-update for users.
-
Linux Mint 22.2 Beta Available for Testing
Some interesting new additions and improvements are coming to Linux Mint. Check out the Linux Mint 22.2 Beta to give it a test run.
-
Debian 13.0 Officially Released
After two years of development, the latest iteration of Debian is now available with plenty of under-the-hood improvements.
-
Upcoming Changes for MXLinux
MXLinux 25 has plenty in store to please all types of users.
-
A New Linux AI Assistant in Town
Newelle, a Linux AI assistant, works with different LLMs and includes document parsing and profiles.
-
Linux Kernel 6.16 Released with Minor Fixes
The latest Linux kernel doesn't really include any big-ticket features, just a lot of lines of code.