This will be of interest to anyone who is curious about playing with Linux. I must admit that too much of this rings true, and presents what is, in my opinion, the Achilles' Heel of the Linux development process. The first page is a lot of background, but the second page is where the political aspects of the Linux kernel development start to get laid out in gory detail:

Are developer egos a problem in the open source development model in general?

I think any problem with any development model has multiple factors, and ultimately, it is humans that make decisions. I won't comment on the humans themselves.

If there is any one big problem with kernel development and Linux it is the complete disconnection of the development process from normal users. You know, the ones who constitute 99.9% of the Linux user base.

The Linux kernel mailing list is the way to communicate with the kernel developers. To put it mildly, the Linux kernel mailing list (lkml) is about as scary a communication forum as they come. Most people are absolutely terrified of mailing the list lest they get flamed for their inexperience, an inappropriate bug report, being stupid or whatever. And for the most part they're absolutely right. There is no friendly way to communicate normal users' issues that are kernel related. Yes of course the kernel developers are fun loving, happy-go-lucky friendly people. Just look at any interview with Linus and see how he views himself.

I think the kernel developers at large haven't got the faintest idea just how big the problems in userspace are. It is a very small brave minority that are happy to post to lkml, and I keep getting users telling me on IRC, in person, and via my own mailing list, what their problems are. And they've even become fearful of me, even though I've never viewed myself as a real kernel developer.

Just trawl the normal support forums (which I did for Gentoo users as a way of finding bug reports often because the users were afraid to tell me) and see how many obvious kernel related issues there are. I'd love to tell them all to suddenly flood lkml with their reports of failed boots with various kernels, hardware disappearing, stopping working suddenly, memory disappearing, trying to use software suspend and having your balls blown off by your laptop, and so on.

And there are all the obvious bug reports. They're afraid to mention these. How scary do you think it is to say 'my Firefox tabs open slowly since the last CPU scheduler upgrade'? To top it all off, the enterprise users are the opposite. Just watch each kernel release and see how quickly some $bullshit_benchmark degraded by .1% with patch $Y gets reported. See also how quickly it gets attended to.

I can't even imagine Microsoft or Apple treating their customers like that. This is one of those things that will ultimately cause much of the open source movement to fail spectacularly. Once you enter the big software engineering arena, you lose the right to dismissively say, "I'm just a hobbyist." It's put up or shut up time, and Linux developers will end up driving their platform into the ground if they refuse to face the fact that they must meet the needs of their users in general, not a particular class such as "enterprise users." That is something that they clearly are not particularly good at doing.

I've had the resource and scheduling issues pop up in a bad way on my laptop too. I hate to say it, but Windows XP really is faster than Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04) on it, unless I am running a stripped down desktop with Xfce... which is a little too spartan compared to KDE or GNOME. What's worse is that I can run resource hogs like iTunes and Folding@Home (which is designed to use 100% of your CPU!) while running Firefox and Eclipse on Windows with no problem. I like the way that Desktop Linux is shaping up in many respects, but it needs a whole hell of a lot of work to get it to the point where it can compete on performance.