Tech giants offer stable systems as Linux loses focus

WIRED:Linux is becoming more unruly, but Apple and Microsoft's systems appear to be prioritising stability and speed, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

I REMEMBER the first time that I took Linux seriously as an alternative to the mainstream operating systems of the time. It was in January 1999, and the latest version of the free OS, Linux 2.2.0, had been released. I upgraded from the version I was using. The new version operating system used less memory; applications I was using got faster, and ran more smoothly.

This was a revelation. I’d never suffered an operating system upgrade – neither on Microsoft’s Windows nor the Apple Macintosh platform – which actually ran better on the same machine. Usually, OS upgrades were associated with, at the very least, purchases of extra RAM memory.

Often, to use the new software (and the third-party applications that rapidly demanded it), I had to discard my old machine and buy a new one outright. New editions of old operating systems were about hot features, not optimising old systems or making them work better. As Bill Gates himself said in an interview in 1995: “The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It’s absolutely not. It’s the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots of new things that people are asking for. And so, in no sense is stability a reason to move to a new version. It’s never a reason.”

Is it a reason now? This year, we have two new major operating system upgrades.

Windows 7 will be available in October. This week, it was the turn of Apple, who shipped MacOS X 10.6, or Snow Leopard, to its fans.

Both have a smattering of marketing suggesting they have exciting new features. But behind the simple headlines, both Microsoft and Windows have been pushing rather more careful language. Apple has been the boldest about it. When previewing the new OS to its developers earlier this year, the company took its slogan for Snow Leopard’s predecessor, “300 New Features!” and turned it on its head. Instead, Snow Leopard was presented as having “0 New Features!”

Of course, Apple meant that partly as a sly joke to its core coders. The company had already reeled off dozens of “features” for their delectation, all aimed at the programming market rather than users. But the joke only works if you assume that new features inevitably means unstable bugs.

What Apple was saying to its third-party developers was “we’re not going to concentrate on marketing, we’re going to concentrate on stabilising the features we already have”.

“Creeping Featuritis” is what the geeks call it – the slow transition of stable software to flaky, crashing dinosaurs, simply by the enforced slathering on of new capabilities.

The effect is similar to piling on new storeys to a building originally designed as a bungalow. Eventually you have to return to the foundations, or risk the whole system collapsing on itself.

Both Apple and Microsoft have faced these crumbling edifices. One of the first acts of returning chief executive Steve Jobs in 1997 was the discarding of the Mac’s backwards-compatible operating system and its replacement with a different codebase, developed at his previous company, NeXT.

Microsoft Windows, whose early floors date back to the 1980s, had a similar reboot. Windows Vista was supposed to be the final step in moving Bill Gates’s flagship product to a more solid footing.

In both cases, rebuilding from scratch provided the worst of both worlds: no resources for new features and potentially more bugs as the fresh code settled and was seriously tested in the real world for the first time. In the late 1990s, Apple had little to lose, with a tiny market share, and having been written off by many analysts. Vista was more publicly criticised, with a poor critical reception and a slower uptake than previous Windows versions.

Now, though, both companies appear to be settling on pushing stability, speed and bug fixes. Snow Leopard is priced and targeted as an improvement on the last major MacOS update (which was called Leopard). Windows 7 is billed as a “performance driven” improvement. Which leaves me wondering about Linux.

Unlike the single vision that drives Microsoft and Apple, the Linux world is an unruly herd of developers, pulling in many different directions at once. Projecting a direction on them all is a little like trying to predict the future motions of a swarm of bees.

One thing is notably different from the 1990s. Linux, both the central core as developed by Linus Torvalds and his colleagues, and the complete versions packaged by companies and communities like Red Hat, Ubuntu and Debian, aren’t settling for stability. One of the key components of the Linux ecosystem, the GNOME Desktop, has recently decided to push for a radical new set of features for its new version. Its competitor in this space, KDE, has recently finished a similar transition. KDE’s rewrite prompted a great deal of upset in its user base – the new KDE was viewed as slower, had bugs and was overly concerned with flashy new features. GNOME’s plans may face a similar backlash.

Could it be that, after a decade, it is Windows and Apple that have got the speed and stability gospel, and Linux that has lost it?