Talk:Linux - Misplaced Pages

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This page is not a forum for general discussion about Linux. Any such comments may be removed or refactored. Please limit discussion to improvement of this article. You may wish to ask factual questions about Linux at the Reference desk.

This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

Linux was one of the Engineering and technology good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
January 19, 2005	Featured article candidate	Not promoted
July 21, 2005	Peer review	Reviewed
December 14, 2005	Featured article candidate	Not promoted
October 23, 2006	Good article nominee	Not listed
March 14, 2007	Peer review	Reviewed
July 12, 2007	Good article nominee	Listed
May 29, 2008	Peer review	Reviewed
December 7, 2010	Good article reassessment	Delisted
October 21, 2021	Good article nominee	Not listed
Current status: Delisted good article

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To-do list for Linux: edit · history · watch · refresh · Updated 2009-11-18

update references for adoption to match recent events
talk more about international usage
finish translating missing content from French page: servers, embedded devices, and security
talk about X and possibly TeX in the history section
add better references
reference for all the different pronunciations
expand comparisons section, mention device drivers here
move the remaining stuff near the end about uptake/adoption/migration/usage to Linux adoption and summarize in History
improve the criticism section. Criticism of Linux has mysteriously disappeared over time. (Compare the current article to the "article milestones" listed on this page. Also see the revision history of Criticism of Linux.)
~~Verify the "Copyright and naming" section states "A 2001 study of Red Hat Linux 7.1" and I am pretty sure were only at Red Hat 5 to date.~~ Confirmed. BTW, we are at Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4, today. RHEL and Red Hat Linux are different. --W4otn (talk) 19:12, 18 November 2009 (UTC)

Useful info from archives

Can we rename this page to GNU/Linux? No, the vast majority of people and companies call it Linux, and we already mention the alternate name in the lead and its own subsection. (See Talk:Linux/Name and Talk:Linux/Archive 41 § Page move: GNU/Linux).
Do we need the GNU history? Yes, GNU played an important role in the development of Linux as we know it today. (See Talk:Linux/Archive 5 § GNU-NPOV-History and Talk:Linux/Archive 16 § History).
For previously discussed criticism of Linux, see Archive 2, Archive 6, Archive 7, Archive 10, Archive 17, and Archive 20.

This article was nominated for merging with Linux distribution on 24 July 2011. The result of the discussion was not to merge, but rather to revert the cloning edit.

Linux desktop environments was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 14 November 2013 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Linux. The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here.

Text and/or other creative content from this version of Linux was copied or moved into Linux range of use with this edit on December 14, 2021. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists.

Archives

Index 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30
31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40
41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50
51, 52, 53, 54

/Name and Talk:Linux/Archive 41 § Page move: GNU/Linux: discussions of "Linux" versus "GNU/Linux"
/Referring to this article: Terminology used in other articles to refer to this subject

This page has archives. Sections older than 60 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 4 sections are present.

Odd changes

@Dan100 Regrding this ] edit, could you explain why you changed GUI to 'graphical some interface' which is a broken link, and changed the last sentence to 'More recently the Linux community has moved to using Wayland as the display server protocol, replacing X11.'; which isn't true, as many distributions still use X11. 𝙏𝙚𝙧𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙢𝙖𝙣地形人 (talk) 19:13, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

could you explain why you changed GUI to 'graphical some interface' which is a broken link I undid that change, as:

a Google search for "graphical some interface", to quote Google, "did not match any documents";
there's no Misplaced Pages page for "graphical some interfaces";
it's not clear why this is an improvement, as graphical interfaces are generally for users, not for other machines.

So, yes, that change needs to be justified. We entered the "discuss" phase of "BOLD, revert, discuss" after your reversion of the change, before Dan100's reversion of your reversion. Guy Harris (talk) 20:41, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! I'm sure it was good faith, however the User doesn't seem to respond to any talk page messages judging from the two years of un-replied messages on their talk page. I also altered the latter sentence I mentioned to not indicate Wayland is universally used, and added sources. 𝙏𝙚𝙧𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙢𝙖𝙣地形人 (talk) 20:51, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

"Wii Nunchak" in diagram under Hardware Support

Hello.

In the diagram under Hardware Support, on the first green oval on the left titled Keyboard & Mouse, there is a list of input devices. Under the input devices, there are 3D Mouse and the Wii Nunchuk. Both should be removed and/or replaced with other more common input devices. If a 3D mouse is common and I am mistaken about its rarity, then at least Wii Nunchak should be changed by either

Removing it,
Spelling it "Nunchuk" instead of "Nunchak", or
Replacing it with Wiimote

While I would do it myself, and I have an edited version of the SVG ready to use, I am unsure about uploading it. I do not edit wikipedia articles very often, and I do not own the diagram. Eggbladder (talk) 18:23, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

Unix Shell and Unix Inspiration

I've personally removed the Unix shell information as it's unfounded, and want to have a bigger public weigh in on the suggestion that Linux uses the "Unix" shell.

Linux as both a kernel and an operating system doesn't require a shell, nor is there one specific shell in use. There's no founding for the suggestion that there's a shell at all.

While historically many Linux distributions opted to use sh / bash to run sysv as their init system, it wasn't strictly necessary. /bin/init / /sbin/init can be any binary that acts as an init system reaping processes, children, and zombies.

However, my biggest issue is to suggest the idea that the default is a Unix shell when there is no default. Powershell is available on Linux, so we could easily put Windows Powershell as the shell. So I've removed it as being irrelevant and unfounded.

Also I've added that Linux is inspired by Unix, and this is cited in multiple sources on the history of Linux page. , And redhead has a great article stating similar facts about Unix being one of the inspirations of Linux

Even in the Linux article there's this line "It was with this course that Torvalds first became exposed to Unix. In 1991, he became curious about operating systems.".

Or in simpler terms, is it wrong to say Linux was influenced by Unix? I simply want some public weigh in on this edit in the event it does prove to be controversial.

If someone has a source that says that Linux relies on a Unix like shell and can't work with any other type of shell, I'd be more than happy to backtrack on that edit.

TotallyNotSkyNet (talk) 12:36, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

I'll probably weigh in on this discussion later, but for now I just wanted to thank you for—as a new user—not getting into an edit war and instead following WP:BRD. I think your perspective might have some weight, and I would've hated to see it lost due to WP:3RR. Cheers, /home/gracen/ (they/them) 15:54, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

References

Security researcher criticisms...?

The edit made here has some valid points, but 3 of the citations aren't good, the other two are from 2020. The Youtube video from the Linux Foundation is a great discussion, though the writing added didn't really touch on issues raised by the security experts there.

The monolithic kernel is definitely a valid security concern. But, there is now *some* Rust in the Linux kernel, so that's blatantly inaccurate (and odd, when you ask yourself "What other kernel or OS uses Rust in any capacity?")

Sandboxing and permission improvements also seem like they've been a major focus for Wayland and Flatpack the last few years.

Creating this section to spur discussion on this subject, and maybe have a more accurate version added.

(I'm new to editing and don't really know if it's acceptable to tweak and re-add an undone edit.)

(I also wonder why the user decided to add this in the first place, especially with a solo blogger with a tepid reputation as the first source (this is where the bulk of the addition seems to be sourced from.) Botahto (talk) 19:09, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Just noting that the edit was immediately undone by user:Bhairava7 (just two minutes after it was made by user:Silent tiger85). Meters (talk) 22:05, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

@Meters: Hi there, If If I've maked any mistake then please revert my edits but I've was revert Silent tiger85's edit from Linux due to he was trying to aading Youtube link that are not reliable source and I also thought github is not vaild source, so, I've was reverted their, but you feel free to revert my edit on the article page. Happy editing! --- Bhairava7 • (@píng mє-tαlk mє) 11:56, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

I have no objection to your undo. Meters (talk) 21:26, 9 January 2025 (UTC)

I was just trying to make sure people are aware that Linux, like any other operating system, has security flaws. I thought the security researcher made some good comments. Silent tiger85 (talk) 05:10, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm also new to editing Misplaced Pages. Maybe my edit could be revised to include more accurate and up-to-date information. I don't know that much about Linux security. Silent tiger85 (talk) 05:29, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

Maybe a "security" section could be created. Positives and negatives of the Linux security model. There could be a link to the Linux malware Misplaced Pages page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/Linux_malware Silent tiger85 (talk) 05:55, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

I think a "Security" section would be a good idea.

If I am not mistaken, Linux was the first operating system to implement Address Space Layout Randomization, to protect against memory security flaw attacks.

Windows has Defender malware protection software integrated into Windows. MacOS has integrated malware protection software XProtect. ClamAV and Linux Malware Detect are in distribution repositories, no malware detection software is preinstalled in Linux distributions. There is no warning that a script or executable, downloaded from the internet could be infected with malicious code. Most distributions have AppArmor preinstalled. I don't know that much about AppArmor or SELinux. I think it protects against software security flaw exploits.

The advantage of Linux's open source model is that anyone can find and fix security flaws and verify there is not any code that would violate a user's privacy. Users don't have the same control with closed source operating systems. The disadvantage of an open source operating system is that it makes it easier for attackers to find security flaws more easily. Silent tiger85 (talk) 06:10, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

Wasn't Linux the #1 kernel much earlier?

I'm pretty sure Linux became the #1 kernel years earlier. Linux adoption says 2010, which used to be written elsewhere on Misplaced Pages such as maybe a computer (science) history timeline. Android became popular in the '0s to 2010s, and the only major competitor was Apple/iOS which its kernel never was as widespread. Can anyone dig up records when Linux actually became the #1 kernel? dchmelik☀️🦉🐝🐍(talk|contrib) 03:10, 12 January 2025 (UTC)

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