Linux Kernel Grows Past 15 Million Lines of Code
The Linux kernel source code has grown by more than 50-percent in size over the past 39 months, and will cross a total of 15 million lines with the upcoming version 3.3 release.
According to a post by The H, about three quarters of the Linux kernel code are drivers, file systems and architecture-specific code, while there are plenty of comments and blank lines as well.
The first release of Linux had just 10,000 lines of code, while version 1.0.0 had grown to 176,250 lines by March 1994. In 2001 or about a decade ago, the Linux kernel (2.4) had about 2.4 million lines of code.
In an interview with German newspaper Zeit Online, Torvalds recently stated that Linux has become "too complex" and he was concerned that developers would not be able to find their way through the software anymore. He complained that even subsystems have become very complex and he told the publication that he is "afraid of the day" when there will be an error that "cannot be evaluated anymore."
I came to joke about this. ::Shakes fist::
Keep in mind you are comparing a kernel to a full-blown OS.
I came to joke about this. ::Shakes fist::
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/22/linus_torvalds_linux_bloated_huge/
Give it time and it will be like Windows (which isn't slow really, my Windows 7 clean install boots in almost the same amount of time as my Ubuntu clean install). But that will be the fate of Linux, or any OS, if they wish to be easier to use and more widely adopted, they must make installs easier and to do that as many systems must work on first install as possible and that means bloated code. Make fun of Windows all you want, but MS already knew that to make things simple the software had to get bigger.
Keep in mind you are comparing a kernel to a full-blown OS.
Anyway, if you don't need support for your Sony Memory Stick or HP printer and any other specific modules, simply build your own kernel without them. Using a customized kernel really isn't as difficult as it sounds.
To increase the amount of market share, you need an idiot-friendly software because not everyone are computer experts...
Well, not really.
It's just Linux, which is the kernel compared to Windows, which has all the windows systems and all the rest.
A Linux distro has the GNU system, X-kernels, file explorers and so on.
If you compare the whole Windows 98 which had 18 million lines of code it is really bad that just the kernel for Linux has 15 million lines, which is in the same ballpark.
I do think that the Linux project should be split into separate projects for a scheduler / memory manager, VFS, device manager, and system interface. Each of them could be like what X windowing is right now - an unofficial but almost always used piece of the puzzle.
Windows on the other side is still less than useless, and I the new Windows 8 will make matters even worse, bringing new and exciting ways to kill Windows.