Hundreds of companies and professional software projects are dependent on Linux. I’m not sure I could call it a “hobby project”, no matter what its origins were.

Hundreds? safer to say hundreds of thousands at this point.

and millions of phones.

I think we 've reached the threshold of billions of phones by now.

How many supercomputers run windows or OS X compared to Linux ?

The Top 500 run Linux, if I'm not mistaken?

Yes, all of them.

If you're not depressed about some of the code you've written, it might be time to take bigger risks.

What is your definition of "hobby operating system"?

Be fair, the kernel is actually alright, it's just everything on top of it that is depressing.

Currently writing code targeting the perf_event_open system call. It's the nastiest thing I've ever had the displeasure of working with. clone() is similarly "interesting".

Glibc really does a lot of good work to hide the mess underneath.

Have you ever had the (dis)pleasure of porting to Windows? It’s a pile of hot garbage that keeps on accumulating because of so precious backwards compatibility; every single idiosyncrasy from thirty years ago lives on for ever.

Yea, I wrote windows code for 10 years and while it has its warts I will say the ETW subsystem is much more thought out. The ntdll way of abstracting syscalls is also a lot nicer and something Linux should consider.

The biggest problem with Linux is it doesn't have a coherent design philosophy. So some subsystems are nice and others are horrendous. Knowledge of one subsystem may lead to misleading assumptions about another part of the kernel.

An example is the kernel supposedly doesn't have threads, they are just processes that share address space. But of course other parts do in fact need to understand that there is one coherent bundle of threads that compose this abstract idea of a process. So some places differentiate between thread id and process ids and others mix them. Windows has its inconsistencies, but not with something so fundamental as a process.

You’ve obviously never tried to write performant I/O logic.

To see what I mean, try using epoll to manage a set of network connections. They apparently didn’t consider the case where you have more than one CPU and also want to handle more than one network connection. Also, if you do get it to work without crashing on stale fd’s, you’ll find it bottlenecks on a spin lock.

If you want to save some time and jump to the current state of the art, use DPDK or some other user space network driver + IP stack to completely bypass the kernel. :-(

What do you think of https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-use-the-linux-kernels-tcp... ?

No matter what we think Linux is or has become it is still better than windows. I was a windows guy for many years and have no desire to return to the winblows world

Linux is so close to convincing me to move (especially once I moved to Pop_os!, but there are a few things that it is simply bad at. This is especially true for laptops.

My laptop is always hot enough to burn my balls off. This is after disabling my dedicated GPU, disabling turbo boost and underclocking the cpu.

Consequently the battery life is abysmal as well.

Lastly, trackpads seem to worse on linux across the board.

Those things are major sticking points in almost all linux laptops.

I have been able to find near-perfect replacements for everything else. (apart from some MS office and enterprise software, but can't blame linux for that)

Run “sudo powertop” and probably “man synaptics” (depends on the hardware) to find out how to fix power consumption and the trackpad, respectively.

In particular, in Ubuntu 18.04 (and maybe all of gnome) they removed mouse / trackpad acceleration, so using pointing devices feels like drinking a pot of coffee and working with you hand immersed in thick mud. There’s a config file option / cli to fix that somewhere. Same with the non-existent palm rejection.

And this right here is the problem.

I want a system that JUST WORKS. I don't have enough time in my day, with all of my other responsibilities, to figure out why something is slightly broken.

Corporate VPN's are the other one.

That's why I really don't mind running MacOS at work - it works well, and the defaults are sane.

An application consuming too much power for your tastes is something that could (and does) happen on any OS.

Power consumption is not a matter of taste, no one wants their applications to consume more power than necessary.

Laptops contain a lot of proprietary tech, not all is well supported. It's not all bad though: Chromebooks run some version of modified Linux just fine (and the trackpad of the original Pixel works great). My Dell M6800 (Ubuntu 'certified') is well supported and runs cool. It's an age-old, but often ignored advise to first consider one's needs and then chose fitting soft- and hardware. Instead people just go out and buy cheap or shiny and then wonder what to do with it ;-}

FWIW my nvidia laptop also became a heater running Ubuntu (which Pop!_OS is based on) but has been running like a cool dream since I installed Manjaro (Xfce, out-of-the-box non-free driver setup).

also, linux is NOT an operating system.