R
Ruel Smith
It has more of a development strategy than you think. Those contributing
developers are actually paid through their companies they work for to
commit time to developing Linux. True, there are projects that are
completely volunteer, but projects like Gnome, KDE, the kernel, Samba,
Apache, etc. all have developers from Sun, IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and others
who have a vested interest in them. Those are very experienced software
engineers.
However, it's true that KDE's priorities are not the kernels or Gnome's or
whatever. Therefore, they could be going in different directions. Such is
the case where the 2.6 kernel wreaked all kinds of havoc on ATi and nVidia
drivers.
Linux's Achilles heel is driver support. Companies like Via and nVidia have
Linux support, but it varies. There are still Via SATA RAID chips that
aren't supported, and nVidia chipsets don't have complete Linux support.
The Creative SoundBlaster was one of the best supported sound cards on the
market, yet Creative never developed anything to support it, and more
elaborate SoundBlaster cards, such as the Audigy Platinum, have only basic
support. Also, there remains many bugs in Linux. In Knode, as I'm writing
this, it informs me of misspelled words, and I can right-click on those
highlighted words and get suggestions in a menu. However, if I choose one
of those suggestions, it doesn't change the misspelled word. It does
nothing. This bug has existed in a number of Knode releases and has yet to
be fixed. So, there's a long way to go.
As for a new OS, it isn't going to happen. It takes hundreds of millions of
lines of code to write a complete operating system from scratch, which is a
monumental task. This is why Apple chose to use the FreeBSD Unix operating
system as a base to build OS X.
Besides, the Linux kernel, which is what makes Linux...Linux, has few bugs
at all. It's the other stuff, such as KDE applications, that are buggy. KDE
is used in other operating systems too, such as various Unix OS's, and
those same bugs exist.