Torvalds – About Leopard And Vista

I know that some people may say "Who is Linus Torvalds, after all?", trying to minimize the impact and importance of its declarations, but I must say they are going to be completely wrong. First of all, about 2% of the current Linux kernel code is written by himself, and considering the fact that hundreds, maybe even thousands of people are working on this, he's the most prolific kernel programmer at this time, and second, back in 2006, about 17% of the smartphones available worldwide were using Linux, and in 2008, there are more, for sure. Now, let's get to the topic and see what opinion has Linus about Leopard and Vista...

We all know that Leopard offers the highest customer satisfaction rate in the OS market at this time, but that doesn't mean Apple's operating system is perfect. In fact, just like Vista, Leopard uses an older file system, and that's not such an inspired option, according to Torvalds. "I don’t think they’re equally flawed—I think Leopard is a much better system, but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.", said the man that laid the foundation of the Linux OS as we know it today.

Well, it's interesting to notice that the declaration above was made from the programmer's point of view, but that's not all. To me, is a mistery how Linus Torvalds, the man who doesn't enjoy being a public person and saying anything about the competition, got to bash Microsoft and Apple to the wall. Here's what he said about the way Apple and Microsoft use new versions and updates as reasons to celebrate and do start some new marketing campaigns: "An operating system should be completely invisible. To Microsoft and Apple (it is) a way to control the whole environment … to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware."

These being said, we should wait and see if the big updates expected in this period are going to really improve Mac OS X and Vista as users expect, apart from being "causes for celebration and marketing"...