Re: [tlug] Just curious... how much impact does a kernel update make?

[Dave M G <dave@example.com>]

Stephen,

Thanks for responding.
> Adobe does exactly the same thing: they decide what
> would have value and work toward it.
>   
I completely agree if you mean value for shareholders, not value for end 
users.

It was their decision to align all their products into the "Creative 
Suite" that actually finalized my commitment to use free and open source 
software. The implication of the Creative Suite is that they will be 
obligated, for example, to offer an upgrade of Illustrator at the same 
time they offer an upgrade of Photoshop, only because the two are to be 
synchronized. Having done my share of working in companies that do 
software development, I can only laugh at the notion that one division 
responsible for one product would be guaranteed to come up with new and 
useful developments just because another division did.

Adding to that, Adobe also announced that they would release every 18 
months, hell or high water. So not only am I to believe that all their 
software is somehow going to be developed at the same pace, but that 
pace will be timed perfectly.

In an ideal world, the theory is that users demands and technological 
developments are always advancing, so there's always room for growth. 
That's not quite true, and even if it was, it's definitely not true that 
advancement happens at a particular pace, or related to other developments.

From my practical experience of having made most of my working living 
using Adobe products, and knowing people who work within Adobe, I can 
say with confidence that a lot of their upgrades were completely 
arbitrary. There is no change that justifies an upgrade of Photoshop 
from versions 7 through 9, for example. The Creative Suite related 
interface change that came between 7 and 8 notwithstanding. Other Adobe 
titles have similarly uneven development curves spanning their version 
numbers. But regardless of the scale of change, the pricing remained 
consistent.

On the other end, I can also speak with experience in that if you decide 
to not upgrade, you can forget about support for your product. Never 
mind the fact that Adobe support is pretty byzantine on a good day, if 
you manage to get someone for assistance and you have a version that is 
in the past, you get a recommendation to upgrade and not much more.

They are motivated to keep you paying. That drives version numbers, not 
any specific milestones. All adobe has offered since version 8 of 
Photoshop are essentially nifty new filters, that could have been 
released as plug in modules for the basic platform established with the 
Creative Suite.

I realized that this was a train ride I didn't want to be on. Adobe is 
expensive, and their decision to release more rapidly than they had ever 
done before looked like a way to keep me poor. Or rely on piracy. I 
figured that even though graphics aren't as sophisticated on Linux, I'd 
rather be an early adopter suffering growing pains for free than a cash 
strapped consumer paying for nothing.

Anyway, contrast Adobe with, say, Ubuntu. Ubuntu releases every six 
months, which is just as arguably arbitrary and maybe some upgrades 
aren't that much different. But since I'm not paying for it, no big 
deal. Mark Shuttleworth could announce that the next upgrade involves 
one USB driver and some new desktop wallpapers, and I'd be fine with 
that. If he was charging me Adobe prices, though...

All of which is to say that companies like Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and 
others, are unavoidably pressured by market forces to develop based on 
shareholder value, which makes the practical evaluation of their reasons 
for new versions highly suspect.

> The big difference between Linux and Adobe software, as far as I can
> see, is that Linux generally asks more of those who make the decision
> to use a new kernel (I mean the distros and the vendors, as well as
> those of us who upgrade kernels on our own schedule which may be
> faster or slower than our distro), and therefore has a more
> sophisticated user base.
I think this is changing. Linux is going more and more mainstream. I 
believe I saw (don't remember where, though, so I will readily admit I 
might be in error) that Linux had a 4% home desktop install base. That's 
what Apple had only a couple of years ago (they are at 8% now).

The changing (emphasis on the present progressive tense - all is in 
flux) user expectation is reflected, I think, in the kind of upgrading 
that one sees in Ubuntu. I upgrade as they release to me, not based on 
any real decision about whether or not I *need* that upgrade. Because 
I'm not running anything like a server that needs constant uptime or 
specific software support, I'm happy to just go with what comes along, 
and I trust that people smarter than me are making it work better all 
the time. And that's how I want it to be.

However, you are probably right in the sense that Linux developers are 
still developing on the *assumption* that Linux users are a more 
"sophisticated" user base.

> Also, I offer some hearsay for your consideration (I can't confirm it
> and don't have a cite).  That is, the current way the kernel is stuck
> on 2.6 is partly due to vendor politics.  In the 2.4->2.6 transition
> they had a lot of trouble getting customers to upgrade because a minor
> version bump was considered too risky.
Very interesting.

> I would disagree.  In upgrading from 2.6.20.7 to 2.6.27.1, I saw about
> two dozen new kernel, not driver, features.  Mostly they were small,
> such as variations on how NUMA architectures are handled, but others
> offered changes in how scheduling etc is done.  As Ian Wells said,
> this kind of complexity-increasing change carries risk of regressions.
> They're not minor maintenance.
Well, I wasn't so much proposing it as a fact as asking the question.

Which comes back to my original question, how much end-result impact do 
these new kernel features have for an end-user such as myself? Are they 
making changes that don't affect me at all if I don't happen to have 
relevant hardware? Or are they incrementally improving my system in some 
way I might understand if I knew what to look for?


--
Dave M G
http://tlug.jp/mediawiki/index.php?title=User:Dave_M_G