Linus Torvalds is a Finnish software engineer best known for starting the development of the Linux kernel. He generally hates phones, but he just blogged that he purchased a Nexus One and is a happy camper so far. He loves the concept of having a phone that runs Linux and thinks the N1 is a winner. Linus admits he was hesitant about purchasing the phone online, but made the jump after reading about the recent pinch-zoom upgrade.
The chief architect of the Linux kernel also addressed the recent removal of Android from the Linux tree as of the 2.6.33 kernel release.
I don’t worry about out-of-tree development for odd devices too much. I wish we could merge Android, but I also accept it likely being a few years away. We had similar out-of-tree issues with the SGI extreme scalability stuff, and it took quite a while before the standard kernel merged all of that.Linus Torvalds
Linus also purchased the G1 when it came out, but he hardly ever used it. He confesses to prefer the N1 because it is thin-and-light. When addressing the lack of a keyboard he said, “I did like having a physical keyboard on the G1, but voice search for the navigation actually seems to work pretty well.”
[Thank you Ian for the tip]
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Taylor Wimberly
Taylor is the founder of Android and Me. He loves playing with all kinds of gadgets, but most importantly cell phones. His other hobbies include cooking (BBQ hero!), politics, football, and watching every MMA event possible.
13 Comments
If Android is good enough for the father of Linux it’s good enough for me.
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Yes, indeed N900 might be more compatible with linux existing apps (or easier to port apps to), the problem is the thickness of N900 is somewhere near the G1 witch he didn’t use, and after all he might want just a slim phone instead of a pocket computer.
I wish Nokia had launched a Maemo phone way before, but previous version were just internet tablets.
Anyway, I wish both Maemo and Android go forward, and if I were rich I would buy an N900 just to support it.
Reading the blog post it looks like he wanted some kind of multitouch capability, which is sadly unavailable on the N900 as far as I know.
Why would you suppose that Linus would prefer the more typical userspace environment of Maemo to that of Android? I don’t personally get the impression that he has a lot invested in this. His concerns are at the kernel level.
I’m not sure why you say that Android is “crippled” Linux either. It’s different, that doesn’t make it crippled. Look at the Android Scripting Environment for a good example of cool stuff on Android. You can’t do that on the iPhone, but no problem on my G1.
Another win for Android and nexus one!
Man, Android is growing, spreading and expanding so fast its amazing.
It’s like a Tsunami of devices coming out now, and really nice ones at that..
Future devices will have much better memory capacity and then the floodgates for development will be open, especially considering flash availability.
This is fun to watch- its kinda like the beginning of the internet all over again.
And I will be able to say I was in the original Android Pre-Order Group.
I was there when the internet first started growing and now this.. my generation turned out to be witness to alot of great groundbreaking stuff..
Im sure he could put a complete version of linux with a gnome gui on it if he got bored one weekend…….. why does he care if it is crippled you think he couldn’t call google and say hey I think you should consider this and they wouldn’t listen if he likes it then I think I should start saving some $$ so I can upgrade outside of my contract
Linus says he prefers KDE to GNOME, just to put that on the record, but on a 3.7″ touch screen, either would be nightmarish. To the extent that Android is Linux, it is not crippled in any sense. Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. The only places where it even differs within the kernel are those where the generic kernel doesn’t support the hardware well (see the wakelocks debate).
Yer the N1 helps sys admin a lot
Nice to see Linus likes the Nexus One. His stamp of approval puts my mind at ease over some of the kernel deviations that so many are having holy wars over on the mailing list.