Q&A: Linux founder Linus Torvalds talks about open-source identity

I use Fedora for historical reasons. I have one of the Eee PC laptops and I reinstalled my own distribution, so I am the wrong the person to ask. However, most users don't want to do the installation and configuration.

We are in the first phase of netbooks, and there are some teething problems. The dumbed-down interface was a teething problem, and the first netbooks were underpowered.

I'm hoping the next generation will be more powerful and offer a better user experience. I was doing kernel development on a netbook and it was not at all horrible. The screen was too small, but we are getting to a stage where you can get a cheap good laptop.

A few years ago, you could get a small netbook but it would be twice the cost. The netbook market changed the game -- they are not seen as an executive toy, but a low-end laptop, which is much healthier.

With netbooks, a lot of the desktops have trouble going to smaller screens. All of sudden, you can't press the OK button because it's outside the screen. As screens go as small as phones, Google's Android could be a contender for netbooks, so you may see Android growing up instead of desktops growing down.

Linux on phones is hard, as there are so many regulations, but I was really happy about Nokia's decision to release Qt as LGPL.

What do you think of Windows 7 and Microsoft's operating system development cycle? Windows 7 being better than Vista is saying a lot. Microsoft may have a huge PR advantage, as people will compare it to Vista and think it is good so "angels will sing again" like they did with Windows 95 compared to Windows 3.1. So maybe Microsoft did this on purpose.

I think Microsoft has realized the Vista development cycle is way too long and it would be insane to do that again. They might aim for a two-year development cycle, and I think that is too long. They should decouple the operating system from the applications and release sooner.

For Linux, six months is quite tight. All the pieces you put together, you hope they are stable, but there will be surprises, and six months is a short cycle when you put together so many packages. An annual release cycle is a reasonable cycle for doing a whole distribution.

In the Linux space, once a year is reasonable, but then you have the incremental releases. It's hard for a commercial company like Microsoft that wants people to pay for releases, to do a yearly upgrade. Apple has done faster upgrades, but it has charged less for the releases. This is not a problem for open source, as it's free software, but this is one of the things Microsoft has to balance. They want people to rent the software, but users don't want to. If you do development over five years and make so many changes, it is more painful for the user. The cost of the pain is likely to be higher than the cost of the operating system, which is why people are slow to upgrade.